“Queen & Slim” a tale of outlaws, but also a love story and a meditation on racism and police brutality.
For “Queen & Slim,” screenwriter Lena Waithe’s meditation on race relations and police brutality, director Melina Matsoukas drew visual inspiration from sources as diverse as Alfonso Cuarón’s 2001 dramedy “Y Tu Mama Tambien” and Spike Lee’s 1989 classic “Do the Right Thing.” But the biggest influence came from YouTube.
“One of the key references for me has been real life, authentic struggles in the black community,” said Matsoukas, who makes her feature debut with the movie, in theaters on Thanksgiving. “I watched a lot of YouTube videos of black people being pulled over by the police or encountering law enforcement, and it not necessarily ending well. Unfortunately, there are so many of those videos, but they were a major influence in how I wanted to approach shooting the opening scene.”
Starring Daniel Kaluuya and newcomer Jodie Turner-Smith, our protagonists (known simply as Slim and Queen until the end) are forced on the run within the first 10 minutes of the movie. “A Million Little Pieces” author James Frey pitched the idea for the opening to Waithe at a party.
“He was like, ‘Yo, I have this idea for a movie that I can’t write,’ ” she remembered.
Frey described a scenario in which a black couple driving home from a first date are pulled over by a cop and forced to kill him in self-defense. “I was like, ‘You’re right, you shouldn’t write that,’ ” said Waithe. “But then we exchanged information. I think he thought he was never going to hear from or see me again, but it just stayed with me.”
She began drafting the story while working on a TV project, partly in protest of the way she said she was undermined by the series’ executives. “I was sort of dismissed and told, ‘You’re no longer needed, we’ll take it from here,’ ” said Waithe. “And during the course of my time on that show while my hands were tied, I wrote ‘Queen & Slim,’ so it’s really a sweet victory to me.”
Matsoukas and Waithe first worked together on the “Thanksgiving” episode of “Master of None,” for which Waithe shared an Emmy for comedy writing. When considering Matsoukas for “Queen & Slim,” Waithe didn’t realize it would be the director’s first feature film (despite an extensive resume of TV and music video work, including HBO’s “Insecure” and Beyonce’s “Formation”).
“It was everything I had been looking for for my first feature,” said Matsoukas. “It was provocative, it was political, it was an opportunity, I felt, to move the culture forward.”
After Kaluuya broke out with “Get Out” and continued to steal scenes in “Black Panther” and “Widows,” it’s hard to imagine the actor not being shortlisted for the role.
After finding their Slim, the pair also relished the chance to break a new voice by casting Turner-Smith as Queen.
“It’s an opportunity we obviously don’t get a lot and we really wanted somebody that was fresh and new,” said Matsoukas.
Early discussion has labeled the film the black “Bonnie and Clyde,” and a comparison of the characters to the real-life outlaws is made in the movie itself. Still, the filmmakers rankle at using the 1967 classic as cinematic shorthand.
“I think it’s a really simplistic and diminishing way to talk about our film,” said Matsoukas. “I don’t really agree with basing black films on any white archetype.”
Waithe describes the movie as “protest art,” calling it her contribution to “the culture,” in the same vein as works by James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry and Toni Morrison.