The Philadelphia Inquirer published a recent interview with director and producer Roger Ross Williams, on his film, Prudence, and on getting Kanyed:
As Roger Ross Williams says, laughing about it in hindsight, he holds two records in the annals of the Academy Awards. One – and this is the important one – is that he’s the first African American to win a directing Oscar, for his documentary short, “Music by Prudence.”
And two, he is the first Oscar winner to be Kanyed when he stepped up to accept his award.
Sure, there have been random Oscar-speech hijackings over the academy’s 82 years – but they were before the verb to Kanye entered the lexicon, inspired by Kanye West’s obnoxious interruption of Taylor Swift’s Video Music Awards acceptance spiel last fall.
“Yeah, I’m solidified in the academy archive,” says the Easton, Pa., native, on the road last week with the subject of his inspirational doc, Prudence Mabhena, a wheelchair-bound 21-year-old from Zimbabwe with a voice like angels. “Music by Prudence,” which Williams filmed in Zimbabwe over 2008 and early 2009, premieres Wednesday at 8 p.m. on HBO2.
The Oscar-night Kanye incident – as viewers who weren’t bored silly by the otherwise somnambulistic ceremony may recall – happened when Williams, about to go into his thank-you litany, was upstaged by Elinor Burkett, his erstwhile producer.
The two had had “bad differences” over the project, as Burkett has since confirmed. A lawsuit was filed. An out-of-court settlement was struck, and Burkett was removed from the film.
But her name was still on the Oscar nomination credits, and so Burkett was there at the March 7 Hollywood ceremonies, televised the world over. She claims that she introduced Mabhena to Williams, and that without Burkett’s involvement, there would be no film. Williams acknowledges that she told him about Mabhena and her band, but says that he raised the funds, and made the inquiries and contacts that got the project rolling.
“Pretty quickly, even standing there, I realized that this was an interesting moment. This is like a moment you don’t normally see. . . . At the end, I got to point out Prudence, and that was great.”
“So unfortunately, the fact that I was the first African American to be recognized with a directing Academy Award got overshadowed,” says Williams, 37, on the phone in a van being driven (not by him) from Bethlehem to Philadelphia recently. “It didn’t get overshadowed in the African American press, but it did on E!. . .”
That said, Williams acknowledges that the usurpation on live TV brought more attention to the film – and to Mabhena, seated amid the betuxed and begowned movie-biz crowd – than it would have if his speech had gone off undisturbed. And, Williams says, Burkett’s muscling in didn’t really ruin the moment for him.
“I was certainly taken aback,” he says. “But I pretty quickly, even standing there, realized that this was an interesting moment. This is like a moment you don’t normally see. . . . At the end, I got to point out Prudence, and that was great.
“But my speech was about Prudence, and that finally the world could see the Prudence that I fell in love with, the Prudence whose spirit I was inspired by, and finally I was getting this platform to say, ‘Now you guys get to know this incredible woman.’
“That didn’t work out as planned.”
As Williams’ film describes, Mabhena has arthrogryphosis, a rare congenital disorder that deforms the joints of the body. Shuttled between family members and abused by her stepmother, Mabhena, since age 9, has lived at the King George VI School and Center for Children With Disabilities in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe.
“Music by Prudence” chronicles Mabhena’s life story, her childhood despair, and her musical awakening. She and several of her classmates, also with disabilities, formed a band, Liyana. She now teaches at her old school, and is using her newfound fame to become a disability rights advocate and activist.
On her current visit to the States, she and Williams are presenting the 32-minute film, followed by Q&A sessions and usually an impromptu number or two from Mabhena. (“Everywhere we go, every screening we do, someone always asks Prudence to sing,” Williams says.)
Williams, whose family is descended from the Gullah, West African slaves brought to the Carolinas to grow rice, lives in New York. He’s been working in documentaries and television for the last 15 years, but “Music by Prudence” is his first independent project. He attended Northampton Community College just outside Bethlehem, Pa., and then New York University. A journalism major, he got the movie bug when he was assigned to cover the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, in the mid-’90s.
“So unfortunately, the fact that I was the first African American to be recognized with a directing Academy Award got overshadowed.”
“I was so impressed by the documentary filmmakers who had taken such great risks to follow their passion,” he recalls. “The amount of energy it takes to get films made, I was so impressed by that, and by the art of filmmaking. . . . I just thought this is what I want to do. Some day I’m going to be there. I’m going to be the filmmaker.”
A decade and a half later, Williams has an Oscar – and a place in the academy’s record books.
“Not bad,” he acknowledges. “Not bad.”
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
