One night in LA that could change the movie landscape for women
OSCAR-winning actress Regina King (left) will be part of history in the making at the Golden Globes on Sunday. After years of being left out of the reckoning, three women, including King, will compete for the Best Director honour. Her big-screen directorial debut, One Night In Miami, about a meeting in 1964 between Muhammad Ali (when he was still known as Cassius Clay), Malcolm X, singer Sam Cooke and sports-star-turned-actor
Jim Brown, is really a love story, about the bond between the four men. The kind of love that emerges out of deep respect.
Eli Goree, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Leslie Odom Jr and Aldis Hodge portray the powerful foursome who have gathered in a Florida motel after Clay beat Sonny Liston to become world champion.
The meeting really happened. But the conversation that ensued in the picture (based on Kemp Powers’s stage play), when the quartet chew
over and argue about their views on what it means to be black in America, is imagined.
King has been acting on screen for three decades — appearing in everything from Jerry Maguire to Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk (her Academy Award-winning performance gave the film its heat).
She’s got comic chops, too (on display in Miss Congeniality 2 and Legally Blonde 2). And she’s done powerful work on television, in shows such as Watchmen and American Crime. All that work in front of the camera has helped her to understand what she needs from her actors when she’s behind it. She encouraged her cast to follow the ‘rhythm of the dialogue’; and reminded them that they had to embody the men they portrayed, because ‘they were not doing impersonations’.
London-based Ben-Adir (who gives one of the best screen performances of the year) took that advice to heart. ‘Kingsley was never not listening to Malcolm’s speeches,’ King recalled. ‘He was living with so much information that he became him.’
The transformation was physical, as well as mental. Ben-Adir (who ‘naturally has a more athletic body’, as King put it) shed several kilos to achieve the lean, lanky look of the civil rights activist.
The director shows off Ben-Adir’s new streamlined silhouette to good effect in one pivotal scene. When I mention it, she laughed and said: ‘If I had five dollars for every woman who said they appreciated that moment, I’d have a nice little vacation cheque to go and enjoy.’
At times, she added, directing her talented young stars felt like being ‘a sort of sports coach’.
As part of the record tally of women nominated in the Best Director category of this year’s Golden Globes, King will be up against Emerald Fennell, for her fabulous Promising Young Woman, and Chloe Zhao, for her incredible Nomadland.
King’s film has arrived at a time when black lives are being debated like never before — though she said those conversations are nothing new in the black community.
She said she likes to think her film explores the vulnerabilities of all men, of all shades. I, for one, am looking forward to more movies that carry the credit: A Regina King Film.
One night In Miami is available on Amazon Prime Video.