The filmmaker's mind.
When I went to film school, I was a little insecure about my background. So I wanted to be impressive. I learned rather quickly that trying to impress creates work that is shallow and incomplete. What is much more fulfilling is simply telling the truth. That became my creative mandate.
A few years ago, I came across an interview with Miles Davis. Answering a question about music genres, he said they were "created by white people to define our expression, to help them understand it." He went on to say that for Black musicians, they were playing for the people; they would "play what the day recommends." Reading that resonated on a deep, deep level. It became my creative cornerstone.
I wrote The Caterpillar and The Butterfly to show Black people the truth of ourselves, in all of its beauty and its ugliness, and do what Mr. Davis said: create for the people what the day recommends. This was especially important about Chicago, where the story takes place. Many people know and love the fancy, shiny Chicago, the one that wins travel awards and leaves people in awe of its breathtaking beauty. Many more know the thugged out, gangsta Chicago, whose figures have been legendary for over a century starting with Al Capone.
My film is about my Chicago. The middle-class and working-class Black people just getting through the day, sharing all kinds of community with each other, and making meaning wherever we can. Most of the characters are based on real people that I know. Girls I grew up with whose mouths are as loud as their hearts are big. Hard-hearted women whose steel goes far beyond the surface and somehow remain some of the most fiercely caring people you'll ever meet. The many men, friend and stranger alike, who've made me laugh, who have shown me what love looks like in practice. The people on trains who have held my hand while I cried, who have held the bus to give me a chance to make it, who have celebrated with me, sat next to me, told me about their day, or their life's biggest lessons.
The characters in this film feel real because they are.
The script is both literary and hyperrealistic, because every day Black people deserve high art that is accessible to the people who make up its subject matter.
My artistic approach for The Caterpillar and The Butterfly is a cinematic language that I've dubbed Hood New Wave. It takes its cue from the neorealism of the Italian Neorealism and LA Rebellion movements. It also takes cues from Drill-era music videos — scrappy work that focused its lens on people, in their place.
My vision for this film, and for Hood New Wave in general, is to play in the contradiction of highly stylized subjectivity and straightforwardness. That contradiction mimics the very real experience of Black life in America.
Hood New Wave is D'Angelo, Beyoncé, FBG Duck and Chief Keef. It is Devin Allen, Keizo Kitajima, Gordon Parks and Dawoud Bey. It is also Mike Nichols, Barry Jenkins, Charles Burnett and François Truffaut.
It is rooted in the Black cultural values of realness in and of expression. Maximalism and rawness, walking hand in hand. Performance, color, composition, sound and form are the pillars, and the most important thing is for all of them to feel real. Shooting on 16mm captures that depth and unflinching reality, and drives home the point that our neighborhoods and our stories don't have to be pretty in order to be beautiful.
Living in the hood is to be constantly immersed in life. The goal of this film is to immerse the audience in that same vibrancy.
