Your film is about an actress who has suffered sexual abuse, and who does not want to act naked, placed in a position where she is pressured to do so. It is currently being re-released by Milestones films. Could you tell us about how the project originated? What was its production context? What place does it hold in your artistic itinerary?
Naked Acts is based on a screenplay I worked on for two years; the story was based on all the issues that my girlfriends and I talked about as young Black women in the 1990s. We thought a lot about representation and how Black women were often portrayed negatively in popular culture and media. I wanted to make a statement about that; also, I wanted to comment on the epidemic of sexual abuse and assault of girls and women throughout the world. Both issues were on my mind, and it felt to me that they were also intertwined. Film felt like the natural art form in which to explore these issues.
Naked Acts was and remains the most ambitious and fulfilling project of my artistic life. As a first-time screenwriter and director, I was creating my first major work as an artist, before I went on to become an author of novels and memoirs. I knew I was taking a big risk; what I couldn’t know is that distributors at the time treated the film as too controversial. It turns out to have been ahead of its time.
There is a constant dialectic between the situations your characters are in and the situations your actors are in. How did you work with your actors? What role did they play in elaborating their characters?
Throughout production I was in constant conversation with the actors about the ways they themselves were experiencing what their characters were experiencing. I invited their feedback, and their input. Cece as a character is a collaboration between myself and Jake-ann Jones; she as the actor was bringing her own thoughts and insights to the role, which I encouraged. It felt as though we were building Cece together as a character.
Your film subtly presents a varied, critical yet sympathetic view of the history of blaxploitation and, more widely, black acting in film, through the characters of the mother and the grandmother. How did you place yourself in relation to this history?
As a lover of film, and as a Black woman, I have always been a student of Black film history, and in particular the history of Black actresses. I wanted to provide some of that context to the story so that audiences would empathize with what it means to pursue the craft of acting as a Black woman in American society. That pursuit comes with specific challenges borne out of Black women’s particular sexualized history in this country. You cannot understand contemporary roles for Black actresses without understanding the history of Blaxploitation films; and you cannot understand those films without understanding the ones that came in the decades before. Representation of Black life on screen is part of a continuum closely tied to the freedom movement for Black people overall. I lived through some of that evolution through recent decades; it felt important to capture this context as a backdrop for the story I was telling in Naked Acts.
Naked Acts inevitably takes on a completely different resonance after #MeToo. How did you view this movement’s birth and development? How do you think it can affect readings of the film today?
The issues that the #MeToo movement exposed have always been there; it’s no surprise that the #MeToo movement got its currency initially from actresses coming forward to speak about sexual assault. In my film, Cece is wary of being used by both her male director and her male producer — as actresses have always needed to be. It’s an exploitative industry. Today, thanks to the #MeToo movement, we have language for and more comfort with speaking these truths. I believe this is what makes Naked Acts timeless despite its being made 30 years ago — it examines and interrogates an issue that is still very much alive today.
Interview by Nathan Letoré
