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The Secret Life of Bees:
A Special Preparation
by Laura Major
Before going into the drugstore, Director Gina Prince-Bythewood
tapped her young actor on the shoulder, "Jennifer, whatever you do, don't hit
anyone." Confused, the Oscar-award winning actor of Dream Girls, Jennifer
Hudson walked into the North Carolina drugstore unsure what would happen next or
why she would need such a warning.
The unique telling of life's universal themes of love and
belonging in 1964's racially turbulent south within Sue Monk Kidd's 2002 New
York Times bestseller The Secret Life of Bees easily seeped into the
movie's preparation in much the same way honey seeped through the walls of the
author's childhood bedroom. While improvisation and research are not unusual
preparatory measures for performing a period piece such as this, the exercises
Prince-Bythewood developed exposed some of her youngest cast members to the
mindset of South Carolina in 1964. Knowing her casts' lack of personal
connection to or personal reference of that time, the director had to move past
just exposing them to the music and clothing of the generation. As Prince-Bythewood
summarized, "Jennifer was coming up on the Oscars then...and just thinking of
how I'm going to bring her down to where Rosaleen was, no education, she's
working as a nanny, she's invisible, this is 1964 and she had nobody to talk to
about that; I mean we weren't alive at that time so I had to do something
dramatic."
In a time where pure racial hatred has given
way to tolerance, acceptance and sometimes racist passivity, the director
constructed an exercise that brought the everyday race relations of 1964 into
the cast's own mental and emotional framework. Bythewood sent southern-born I
Am Sam star, Dakota Fanning and Chicagoan Jennifer Hudson on a shopping
excursion at a drugstore and diner. It wasn't until Hudson witnessed the polite
service Fanning received that is afforded to everyone today and contrasted it to
her own experience of being ignored and insulted with racial epithets in the
same mock-scenario, did she come to realize that racism was an outward
expression of a belief system that was a commonly accepted form of human
interaction for the time period.
Throughout interviews with the young actors at
the faith-based press junket, amazement at the race relations of the time period
were echoed repeatedly regardless of everyone's familiarity with Rosa Parks'
story, stories of lynchings and the videos of African Americans beaten in the
streets with batons and hosed down like wild dogs at the hands of the police
during racial protests. When asked about the seemingly pervasive amazement at
1960's race relations, one of the youngest male cast members, Tristan Wilds of
90201 and The Wire commented, "...you don't really understand what
goes on unless you go through it yourself..." One of the older male actors, Nate
Parker of The Great Debaters said it best when EDC Creations CEO and
Literary Publicist Ella Curry asked about research and breaking from the '60s
character when the work was done, "We're still in the Civil Rights movement. The
only thing that changes is the clothes and the hair." Two completely different
perspectives from young African American men no more 10 years apart speak to the
depths of discovery The Secret Life of Bees brings to all who encounter
it.
Listen to the live
interview with Jennifer Hudson
Listen to the live
interview with Dakota Fanning
Listen to the live
interview with Director Gina Prince-Bythewood
Listen to the live interview with
Author Sue Monk Kidd
Listen to the live interview with
Nate Parker
About Laura Major:
Laura Major is a multicultural fiction author and freelance writer
residing in the greater Phoenix area of Arizona. Her first novel, Mismatched
was published by Amira Press in February of 2008. Laura also manages a
multicultural website, Sable Lit Reviews.com, one of the few of its kind
providing commentary on the multicultural impact of current events as well as
multicultural book reviews.
View site map page
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