“You’re Either a Storyteller or a Liar”: Charles Burnett, in Conversation With Barry Jenkins

“I remember when we first met in Rotterdam, and I’ll never forget it,” recalled Barry Jenkins when he got on a call last month with the trailblazing filmmaker Charles Burnett. That day in the Netherlands, The Killer of Sheep director was on hand to observe one of Jenkins’ master classes, but cinephiles in the room briefly averted their attention to acknowledge Burnett’s presence. “Everybody rose to celebrate you, Mr. Burnett, because you certainly were and are the true master filmmaker.” Jenkins, who won the Academy Award in 2017 for directing Moonlight, would be the first to admit that he wouldn’t be where he is today without Mr. Burnett. Hailed as one of the great artists of modern cinema with seven films over a 30 year career and an honorary Academy Award under his belt, Burnett’s contributions to the documentation of the Black American experience is unquestionable. At 82 years old, you’d think he’d be content to start slowing down. But this year, with the help of the distributors Kino Lorber and Milestone Films, marks the arrival of 4K restorations of two of Burnett’s most beloved films: The Annihilation of Fish, starring Lynn Redgrave and James Earl Jones, and Killer of Sheep, Burnett’s 1978 directorial debut, which will be released with The Criterion Collection on May 27th. To mark the occasion, Jenkins sat down with his hero to pick his brain about Italian neo-realism, Los Angeles on screen, and the trials and tribulations of living through Jim Crow South.—ARY RUSSELL

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BARRY JENKINS: How are you, man?

CHARLES BURNETT: I’ve been okay. It’s a little chilly here and my heater isn’t working right, so I’m all bundled up. I have this jacket on and a hat and everything.

JENKINS: See, this is why I refer to you as Mr. Burnett and you can call me whatever you want, because I had a hoodie on because it’s cold here too. I think we’re both in L.A. right now, right?

BURNETT: Oh, yeah. I’m in L.A. Are you in L.A. as well?

JENKINS: I happen to be in L.A. I’m moving all over these days, but for something like this, I’d rather do it over Zoom anyway because that way I can have my notes next to me and whatnot. I had a hoodie on, but I took it off. I was like, “I can’t sit down with Charles Burnett in a hoodie.”

BURNETT: Oh, you can do anything. I was all bundled up.

JENKINS: Well, I’ve been bundled up with your work this week. I’m from Miami, which is a place people don’t consider the South, but I very much consider the South, at least the world I grew up in. It was so beautiful to go back into your work and realize, “Oh, this is why this felt so familiar to me.” There are just so many things I heard in Killer of Sheep, My Brother’s Wedding, To Sleep With Anger, all these things that I grew up listening to, my aunts, my uncles, my grandma, my grandfather, all these ways they spoke to one another—it’s all in your work. So I wanted to talk a little bit about your family’s history and how it manifested in your work, especially through the first 20 years of your filmmaking career.

BURNETT: Well, I grew up in a community where everyone was from the South—Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas—and it was rare that you found a Black person who was born in Los Angeles. There were a few, but every time we discovered that they were born here, it was a rarity, always a surprise and a shock. That culture followed that migration, and a lot of it had to do with the fact that the war had started and a lot of people in the war, they went through training in California. We didn’t really leave the South because the South followed us out here—and all the culture, the language and everything, we just adopted it. It was probably more segregated in many ways than it was in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and Jackson and all those other places. There were places you couldn’t even live. There were these Sundowner towns that you had to get out of the neighborhood by six o’clock. It was sort of brutal and oppressive. The police were perhaps just as worse, very violent, and it was always a question of freedom because a lot of the radical movement started here in the West. The Panthers, and there was Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and all the folks like that had a big influence on who we were as kids. Yeah, it was basically the South. Even though they had cotton, if you want to go up picking cotton, you go up to Bakersfield. The police chief, [William H.] Parker, instituted this policy of hiring white southerners to be policemen here because they figured that they knew how to handle Black people.

JENKINS: I know you’ve talked about this quite a bit, this idea of the work you were doing in the Italian neo-realist movement and how narrative fiction filmmaking is almost like these documentations of Black life. Coming back to this idea of the Great Migration, your works are these living, breathing examples of how that life was lived and of the direct connection from the lineage of our ancestors in places like Vicksburg or like Shreveport, all these very southern places, but then these are very California stories. Was that something you were intentional or intellectually aware that you were doing across those first five or six films, or was it just the world that you were living in?

BURNETT: It was both, I think, because one of the things I really admired about living in the community was that they had those southern values. Adults acted like adults and they were very responsible and they kept these values. The church was a big, big element in the community here. My cousin was a preacher in Mississippi, in Vicksburg. My parents just refused to go back. When they left Mississippi, they said, “That’s it.” He had all these stories that mystified the South and made it more attractive and interesting. It was this folklore element. One of the comments that people made about people from Vicksburg was that they were all either storytellers or liars. Everyone would tell these stories about the past and living in Vicksburg or Jackson, so they created these images and this life that was so different and in some ways attractive and in other ways very frightening, because there’s so much violence there. 

I remember we took the Sunset Limited train, which was an integrated train from L.A. to New Orleans, and from New Orleans we took the Jim Crow train to Jackson and then the Greyhound bus down to Vicksburg. My brother and I were in the train station in New Orleans, we had a layover to catch the Jim Crow train to go up to Jackson and we saw this game room and we didn’t realize that we weren’t supposed to be in there. We were the only Black people in there. Next thing we knew, the police had us surrounded until we had to get out of here. My grandmother had to come fetch us and warn us not to do that again. It was kind of embarrassing, and it took me years to get over that experience. I would go back to the South, if I took a train I would stop in New Orleans or be invited to speak at one of the schools in New Orleans or the South. I’ve always had problems with going back. When I drove cross country, I always took the short way across Texas because there were so many things that happened there that it was still this image of unfairness and racism and brutality. 

JENKINS: I love your quote: “You’re either a storyteller or a liar.” You turn towards images, towards telling these stories, towards translating this feeling through images, and I’m curious why you chose to express these feelings you had in that way.

BURNETT: Well, I had this very bad speech impediment. I had to go to speech class and all that stuff and I would avoid people because of my speech impediment. I was more of a listener than anything. Visually, when we were kids, we just went everywhere and did everything and I didn’t understand. 

JENKINS: When was the first time you remember picking up a camera?

BURNETT: Strangely, I always wanted to shoot something on a camera—it was just something I had this urge to do. When I was in high school, I wanted to take photography but didn’t have the means to do so and I was majoring in electronics and technical things. It wasn’t until I was working at a car wash—I used to go to Hollywood Park Racetrack and watch the horses in the morning practice coming around the track in the fog. It was very picturesque because you couldn’t see the horse on the track, but you could hear it galloping and coming out of the fog towards you. It was this really great image. I used to do that in the morning, and then I would go to work washing these cars, and this guy who I hitchhiked to work with had a camera and he let me film this airplane coming over. I lived right in line of LAX, the airport. The first thing I shot was this airplane flying over. 

JENKINS: Yes.

BURNETT: Anyway, that was the first time. I didn’t touch a camera after that, but I used to work at the library when I was going to school downtown. You would go into this place up on the third or fourth floor, the main library, and you’re enclosed with these books and nothing else. It was kind of scary up there. I had all this access to all these magazines, particularly photo journalism, Dorothea Lange and all those images. While I was waiting to deliver these magazines to these patrons, I would just look at all these photo journalist’s books that were up in the library and was really moved by those magazines. I wanted to be a documentary filmmaker, actually.

JENKINS: This is about you, not about me, but have you heard the story of how I got into filmmaking? 

BURNETT: No, no, no. I’d love to hear that.

JENKINS: I ended up on the campus at Florida State in what they called the Dirac Science Library, and in the basement of that library is where they stored all the art books and all the film books. This would’ve been about 1998, 1999. Just like you, I just kind of buried myself in the bottom. Yours was on the third floor, mine was in the basement of this library. Just through looking at the work of photographers and painters, I started to fall in love with the idea of visual storytelling. I took a photography class and then I applied to film school. So it’s just crazy to hear you tell that story.

I want to jump to your first film, at least the first film that grabbed me of yours, which is your ’73 short film The Horse. I know it’s not the first short you made, but I’m just curious how that short came about. I remember watching it and going, “My student films were not like this.”

BURNETT: When I was going to school, I really didn’t know what school was about. I was just there to have a place to go when my mom was working, babysitting in a certain sense. I used to raise pigeons, so when I visited the library, I just used to be in the section where they had these pigeon magazines. When I had a paper route, I spent all my money on buying pigeons and ordering show birds from these magazines and they would cost me $500 a pair. To have 30 birds, it was really expensive, and you come home and someone had stolen all your birds and it would be devastating. Anyway, I didn’t do much reading or anything like that, and for some reason when I read all the pigeon magazines, the only thing that was left was regular books in this little small library, so I just picked up anything that had this nice name to it. But it wasn’t until I took this really wonderful teaching that Isabelle Ziegler taught, creative writing, and I just happened to get in her class and she introduced me to all these artists and writers. [William] Faulkner was very big at the time, [John] Steinbeck and [Ernest] Hemingway, Richard Wright and all those folks. I read The Bear and it took place in the South of Mississippi. When I was doing Killer of Sheep, I had time to do another film, so I did this one when I went up to Shandon in California, halfway between L.A. and San Francisco, where it looks like West Texas, not Mississippi. I said, “Let me do a film based on The Bear,” so I did. The bear was a horse, and it was a sort of well-to-do family in well-to-do in Mississippi that owned plantations and stuff like that. It was about this last bear hunt. Anyway, it was far different from the short story that Faulkner did.

JENKINS: It is far different, and it’s interesting. I meant to jump in earlier because when you were talking about your traumatic experience in New Orleans and Mississippi. It made me realize that whiteness is almost completely absent from your feature film work until you get to The Glass Shield. It’s just a completely Black world and it’s really wonderful. I think in Killer of Sheep, there’s maybe the white supervisor at the meat processing plant—but they’re not characters, they’re just there. The Horse is this place where you are dealing directly with this collision, this tension between Black and white in the world that your ancestors grew up in. I want to read you something because whenever I’ve encountered you, I always wonder if you understand how deeply felt and appreciated your work is. Do you know what Letterboxd is?

BURNETT: I think I do.

JENKINS: There’s a review of The Horse on here that I read this morning that I just have to read. I want you to hear this. “I’ve been wondering if there existed an established American filmmaker with the appropriate style, language and personal commitment to the subject to do justice to Faulkner’s work. Faulkner found the language for the fraught ugliness of coming into racial self-understanding for whites as well as for Blacks. He explored the ugliness inherent in the Southern Gothic’s beautiful mythic lyricism, and this short makes it clear that Faulkner has a cinematic match and that artist’s name is Charles Burnett. Here’s a filmmaker attuned to the material undercurrents of everything his camera captures, whose compositions and sound design seem to peel back the plane of surfaces of everyday life in order to get at the gristle of it all, be it the unimpeachable rhythmic joy of simply living despite to appearances, barely getting by, or as in the case of The Horse, in which so much of what we see is rot to get beneath those warped floorboards to expose the inner life of their decay. It’s a film about growing up, specifically, growing up Black and experiencing the shock of initiation into Black adulthood. I’ve never been convinced of the claim that what’s at stake for Burnett is Black neorealism, but it doesn’t seem useful to save a filmmaker so devoted to turning the poetry of his vision in on itself so constantly as to make any form of realism seem not only false, but naive and dangerous. There’s the shock of his vision and then there’s the lyrical beauty.”

I mean, man. I know we shouldn’t read reviews, we should just make the work and kind of keep it moving, but I read that this morning and I was like, “Yes, yes, yes.” You’re 30 years old when you make this, and you just said you made this film as a way to release some steam while you’re trying to make Killer of Sheep, basically. I believe it was a multi-year process of making Killer of Sheep, correct?

BURNETT: It wasn’t that long. First it was a student film, my thesis film, so we had to help with other students in the film. That was a part of the whole idea of being in the film department. You had your film, but other folks’ films as well.

JENKINS: At UCLA?

BURNETT: Yeah, UCLA. It was very diverse. When I started, I had a mixed crew, but they didn’t really appreciate the fact that I was using real people, and then I encroached upon their time, my neighbors and things, and they would show up when they wanted to show up. The only thing I had to do was have a can of beer so they would be satisfied. They were sports fans. I was taking away the time that they would have on the weekends, and I appreciated that. So I just used the kids in the neighborhood and kids worked on the film and did virtually everything. I wanted to do a film that reflected not my particular values necessarily, but how to do a film with people and to tell their stories without me imposing my ideas and things. I don’t have to comment on it because I realized at a certain point, when I used to get my hair cut in this neighborhood in Watts where these older gentlemen who were from the South used to cut hair, it was like a watering hole where everyone who had an opinion would show up. When I came in there, they would get in this argument because I was more sort of leftist-leaning, you might say, and radical, and I thought because they were from Watts and that a riot had happened that they would be primed for revolution. Watts was basically all Black.

When I went to college, I was sort of integrated with white people. That was the first time, basically. Except for the police passing by and store owners and things like that, that was the only interaction you had, basically. It was all Hispanic and Black in the neighborhood, so when I got to college, it was kind of a strange thing for me to be in a complex situation where you had that diversity with people. UCLA is basically all white, but there were some people, Dutch, German, and that was one of the great things about being in film school, having that diversity and different opinions and ideas. You had white people in the neighborhood, or the police were the most predominant and they had a negative attitude. I walked down the street at night, we were going to a show, and they’ll stop you and call you all kinds of names and search you for drugs. If you have some, they want to see you off to jail—that’s all there is to it. You could imagine how adults felt to be harassed like that.

JENKINS: When I think back on Killer of Sheep, and just having watched it a few times over the last couple of weeks, it’s really amazing. The children are completely free. Every edit, the juxtaposition scene to scene, is so thoughtful that it almost feels like it was written that way. You kind of had to just be open to what folks were willing to share and be a part of. I always love the moment when the gentlemen get the engine block on the back of the truck, they move two feet, the truck falls off, boom. I think he’s like, “Ain’t no good now, it just busted.” These men are weighted down by the weight of the world, this thing they cannot control. Now the children are floating through the air. This is one of the best cuts in the history of cinema. Then you tilt down and you go back from this weightlessness and here they come, walking back into the housing project once again, grounded in the Sisyphean effort just to put food on the table. You accomplish all that without having Bull Connor walking through the frame every five minutes.

BURNETT: I wanted to reflect how I saw the community. The whole idea about the film was the first thing that comes on screen. This adult is telling this kid, “Even if he’s right or wrong, it doesn’t matter, he’s your brother so you overlook that.” Then they see how they become adults, and the conflict they have is just being in an adult world. It’s very violent, and you learn how to protect yourself at a very early age, and to be violent. Every time I’d go outside, I had to be challenged by some other person about my size or age or something. I had to always be prepared to box or fight. In fact, that’s one of the first things I wanted to do when I was growing up. I wanted to be a boxer. I was always watching boxing. And in fact, my neighbor, one of the kids I went to school with, he went on to be a boxer. His name was Thurman Denton. He was left-handed so people avoided him. He was really a good boxer, but didn’t ever have the opportunities. Anyway, there was a guy that we used to go to junior high school with. I forget his name now. He would always be wanting to grab you, always wanted to be a bully and jump on someone. Anyway, those are his choices.

JENKINS: The idea of you as a boxer is intoxicating, but I’m glad that we have your cinema to put on rather than tapes of your old fights.

BURNETT: Either you’re going to be a musician, play the trumpet, be another Miles Davis or Louis Armstrong, or you’re going to be Archie Moore or Sugar Ray Robinson. That was one way of becoming successful and making it.

JENKINS: I want to talk about To Sleep With Anger just for a little bit, especially because I’m hearing so much in the conversation we’re having. The fact that your son is playing the trumpet in that film, we’re talking about the children of the community, how much they mean to you in your work.

BURNETT: Well, I wanted to do a film that really captures the contradictions and the diversity in different communities. My uncle would talk about this knife that was called a crabapple switch. The name always fascinated me, how they used it and talked about it, the myths that they would talk about, the fact that they had these herbs and things that they would use. It was this continuity there. You knew that older people had this way of using old religion or methods to cure. I remember there were these people who were shamans in the neighborhood and they would sell you whatever they would have. You had this moment where you believed it, but it was old-fashioned so you always rejected it until you got older, and then you say, “Well, maybe there’s something to it,” and you change. To Sleep with Anger was about that. It was this conflict between old religion and new religion. A friend of mine, when he was younger, was totally against that way of thinking. Then I saw him later on, he was older and he was going to church and all this stuff. I said, “I thought you didn’t believe in all that sort of thing.” He said, “Well, I’m getting old now. I better hedge my bet.” He totally shifted his belief system.

JENKINS: Every performance is dancing on the tip of a crabapple switch. There are moments, especially early in the film, where you think Danny Glover’s character could be a friend. The things he’s doing could be working in the positive, but then you realize, “No, no, no, Harry is not there for good reasons.”

BURNETT: Well, he’s based on a folkloric character. It’s almost like a Faustian character, he meets you on some dark road and he cons you out of your soul. In order to get your soul back, you have to out it with him.

JENKINS: It reminded me of those stories about Robert Johnson going down to the crossroads.

BURNETT: Oh, yeah, yeah, that’s another one.

JENKINS: Making a deal with the devil. I want to tell one last story, man. I remember when we first met in Rotterdam, and I’ll never forget it. I want to say this publicly in Interview Magazine. I’m at my little master class at Rotterdam. Before we even start, the moderator says, “We have to celebrate a true master filmmaker who’s in the room.” Everybody was like, “Who are we talking about? Isn’t this a Barry Jenkins master class?” Everybody rose to celebrate you, Mr. Burnett, because you certainly were and are the true master filmmaker in the room. It was so wonderful to know that you had taken the time to come and see me talk about things I know so little about, so much so that I felt I absolutely had to sit down with you today. How do you feel about your work now? You have an honorary Academy Award. How does it feel? What do you think is the current state of cinema for you, and for us at large?

BURNETT: Well, look at you, the honors that you’ve gotten. I just feel grateful I’m in the same company with you guys and these young filmmakers that are leading the way. Look, we were starting when there was a change necessary. The L.A. rebellion was making films against the Hollywood interpretation of our lives. The thing, I think, we were very proud of was the fact that we were changing the narrative and the look of what Black filmmakers should be working toward. I was screening my film in Hawaii and this lady came up to me after the screening and said, “I didn’t know Black people had washing machines.” You can understand. Well, you don’t get mad, you understand why, because they’ve never seen us as human beings. The filmmakers that we grew up with were attempting to bring that to the screen. We are people like everybody else, with the same issues and words and concerns and life-threatening things, and that makes you understand us.

This whole idiot, Ron DeSantis, who wants to eviscerate who we are by destroying Black history. Anything Black, they don’t want it in any libraries or anything. When we were in film, it was during the Civil Rights movement, and we had a responsibility because we thought in a naïve way that we were going to change things. That’s why I made Killer of Sheep the way I did, not imposing my values on a situation, just trying to present people as human beings sharing the same goals and concerns about life and death. Our responsibility was to make it possible for our kids to grow up and be a part of society and its direction and so forth. That’s what we were supposed to do. It wasn’t about taking credit, because I never thought I was going to make money making films. Spike [Lee] made it possible to think of it. 

JENKINS: Well, I have to say, you guys accomplished that mission both in the work you created, but also showing that that work could be created within a community, working together. So much of this charting of our experience has been done by folks like you, so that when I go to Hawaii to present my film, it’s not going to be a surprise that the characters in my film have washing machines. Humanity, the dignity of just being, won’t be a surprise. I salute you, my friend. It’s an honor to speak with you truly, truly, truly.

BURNETT: It’s been my honor to speak with you too.

JENKINS: Thank you, boss. I’m going to be back in L.A. in May and June, Charles. It’s been a couple years, but I’d love to see you in person and catch up again.

BURNETT: Yeah, we should. I think we should always have this dialogue in some form or another, have a closeness and understanding, because we learn from each other in many ways. We sort of pass each other in the night like ships.

JENKINS: We’ve got close to that one thing, man.