‘Passing’: Rebecca Hall Made One of the Year’s Best Debuts, but for Years Nobody Would Fund ItPosted in Articles, Arts, Interviews, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2021-10-29 02:26Z by Steven |
‘Passing’: Rebecca Hall Made One of the Year’s Best Debuts, but for Years Nobody Would Fund It
IndieWire
2021-10-28
Netflix
For nearly a decade, the actress-turned-filmmaker tried to get her ambitious Nella Larsen adaptation made. As she tells IndieWire, she knew there was only one way to make it happen.
Every word that first-time feature filmmaker Rebecca Hall uses to describe the genesis of her “Passing” vibrates with intensity. Her first experience reading the Nella Larsen novella she eventually adapted for the black-and-white period piece was like “being in a fever,” the pages flipping by as if she was “slightly possessed.”
More than 13 years after first reading Larsen’s book, Hall has kept up that same passion for the material, enough to propel her through years of denials from Hollywood brass and the distinct possibility that the film would never get made the way she saw it.
Much has been made of Hall’s personal connection to the material — the film, like Larsen’s seminal work, follows the fraught reunion of a pair of friends (Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga), both of whom are Black, though one of them has crossed the color line and lived her life “passing” as a white woman (Negga as Clare). Hall herself is of mixed racial heritage and her own maternal grandfather “passed” for the majority of his life. But for the long-time actress, Larsen’s slim book spoke even more deeply about much larger ideas…
Read the entire article here.