An Interview with Bill Duke

Abstract

Bill Duke says in his interview, “I have a great deal of respect for the audience’s intelligence,” a position that is all too rare in commercial filmmaking. He asks his audience to partake of a fictional world that is highly stylized and moves beyond the limits of convention. Duke’s films—A Rage in Harlem (1991), Deep Cover (1992), The Cemetery Club (1993), and Sister Act II (1993)—are each, in their own way, indebted to the theater, where Duke began his career. The set design, lighting, costumes, and compositions are often theatrical; they portray a heightened and exaggerated version of reality. Duke, at times, uses sound and editing in an innovative, non-naturalistic way, presenting a visual and aural challenge to his audience. Yet his films, as Duke says, maintain a “delicate balance”; the reverse aspect of the stylization reveals a core of truthfulness on the level of human behavior. Like many resourceful directors working in mainstream cinema, Duke uses popular genre—romance, thriller, melodrama, screwball comedy— as a kind of envelope to contain a wide and deep range of human interaction, as well as a rich subtext flowing beneath the surface of the work. Duke is abetted in his pursuit of emotional authenticity by a host of gifted actors: Forest Whitaker, Danny Glover, Zakes Mokae, Gregory Hines, Jeff Goldblum, Laurence Fishburne, Ellen Burstyn, Olympia Dukakis, Diane Ladd, Danny Aiello, and Whoopi Goldberg, among others.