Hall gives her all directing drama that’s close to home
REBECCA HALL’S emotions are close to the surface as she recalls how her mother, the renowned opera singer Maria Ewing, insisted she receive an internet link so she could watch her daughter’s first film as a director.
The pandemic was at its height. ‘I kept saying to her: “Shall we wait until we can be in a cinema together?” And she said: “No, just send it to me. I can’t handle it any more.” ’
After Maria saw Passing — a delicate visual poem of a film, set in 1920s America, about two black women entwined in a tumultuous tale of racial identity — she rang her 39-year-old daughter. ‘She was crying an awful lot, so it was an emotional moment,’ Hall said of the conversation she had with her 71-year-old mum last year.
They weren’t just the tears of a proud parent, marvelling at her offspring’s progression from acclaimed stage and screen actress to debut filmmaker. The story of Passing is based on a 100-page novella by Nella Larsen, published in 1929 at the height of what’s known as the Harlem Renaissance, where the work of black artists first entered the public mainstream.
It details an encounter between two childhood friends — Irene Redfield, wife of a doctor, mother of two sons; and Clare Kendry, ‘the blonde beauty’ as the novel describes her: a light-skinned black woman who has been living as a white woman for years. She’s married to a racist, who is unaware of her true background.
Tessa Thompson as Irene, and Irish actress Ruth Negga as Clare, give devastating portraits of women trapped in their own cages of identity. It was a situation that Hall’s mother recognised all too well.
Rebecca, whose father was Peter Hall, a giant of theatre and film who died in 2017, told me her maternal grandfather Norman ‘was maybe African-American, maybe Native American... we don’t know’. But whatever his lineage, he passed for white — and so did Maria and her sisters.
HALL told me that growing up, she and her mother spoke about it only fleetingly. ‘The sad thing about the history of passing in a family is that the family closes around and protects itself, so everything gets hidden. So, in a sense you inherit all of the shame and none of the pride. And there is so much to be proud of in my family.’
She said she has gone through a long process of uncovering her bi-racial inheritance, noting her mother and aunts ‘felt that they had to honour their father by not talking about it’.
There had been conversations about race while Maria’s father was still alive. ‘It was gradual. Putting together a snatch of something my mother might reveal. And then me putting that against how she looks, frankly. I just always looked at her and thought: “Well, you look like a black woman to me.” ’
Hall said that while she felt compassion for her relatives, it was complicated. ‘This stuff is messy,’ she commented.
She noted her mum, who performed as a soprano and mezzo-soprano, had identified herself primarily as an artist, ‘like this is who I am, and this is what I care about’.
And the point of the book — and Hall’s movie — is ‘all these categories that we’re so obsessed with putting people in... none of us can be reduced to one aspect of our identity’.
Passing was shown at the London Film Festival last week at a screening packed with family members. ‘There were 25 Halls!’ she marvelled as we sat in a room at the Corinthia Hotel in Whitehall, discussing the picture which will open in cinemas next Friday before reaching Netflix on November 10.
It took 13 years to bring Passing to the screen. There were many roadblocks — the first being Hall’s own nerves.
It took her six years to pull her draft script from a drawer. She then spent seven years pitching it to financiers, who tried to bully her into bigging up the male roles, or shooting it in colour, instead of the black and white she wanted. ‘Black and white isn’t black and white, it’s grey!’ she exclaimed. ‘That’s the big joke that I’m utilising.’
Was it really that difficult? ‘Are you kidding!’ she cried. ‘It was a nightmare.’
But she would not back down. She shot the film ‘on a wing and a prayer’, with a budget of next to nothing.
Everyone told her she was wasting her time. ‘Then it went and sold to Netflix for a huge amount of money,’ she said smiling, tears banished. I predict it’s also going to be at the heart of award season action.
Hall has come a long way since I first met her, aged ten, at St Paul’s Cathedral while her father filmed a scene for his 1992 television adaptation of Mary Wesley’s bestseller The Camomile Lawn. It was her first screen role, unwittingly sowing the seeds for the film artist she has now become.