Ernest Dickerson’s new film Double Play, an adaptation of the acclaimed Dutch-language Caribbean textbook standard by Curacaoan author Frank Martinus Arion, received its world premiere at the Rotterdam Film Festival.
The novel uses a game of dominoes as a framework to look at the unrest on the Caribbean island during the tumultuous transition from Dutch colonial rule to independence. The film adaptation stars Lennie James, Colin Salmon and Louis Gossett Jr. as men with different personalities but an all too similar interest in women.
Director Dickerson rose to fame for his glorious cinematography. He will forever be associated with Spike Lee, with whom he began working at film school in New York. Dickerson was the director of photography on six Spike Lee films including She’s Gotta Have It (1986), Do The Right Thing (1989) and Malcolm X (1991). Other credits include John Sayles’s The Brother From Another Planet and Krush Groove.
Dickerson’s move into the director’s chair started with the Tupac Shakur-starring urban drama Juice (1992). Films such as Surviving the Game (1994) and the underrated Snoop Dogg ghost drama Bones (2001) also feature on a CV glittered with award-winning work on acclaimed television shows such as The Wire, ER, Dexter, The Walking Dead and Treme.
Filmmaker: What’s your relationship to Curaçao and why did you want to make a film there?
Dickerson: I love the island. I consider it my home in the Caribbean. I fell in love with it when I shot Almacita, Soul of Desolato for Felix de Rooy in 1985 and went back intermittently. I love the people. I love the landscape, you can’t beat the weather. So when I got a chance to do a film there, I couldn’t turn it down.
Filmmaker: Interestingly, the start of the film is almost like a tourism video where the voiceover is describing the island. Is that to let outsiders know more about the island?
Dickerson: Exactly. That was on purpose and the great thing about adding a modern day story to wrap about the tale. The book is all set in 1973, but the screenwriters put a modern day story to resolve some things left unresolved in the book. I asked my composer to give me something lighter in the beginning when he shows up at the airport, so it’s more like a commercial for the island before we flash back to 1973 and get into the film proper.
Filmmaker: How do you see the island?
Dickerson: It is a place of contrasts. It’s a beautiful place but it does have a colonial history. Actually our modern day is post-colonial, but in 1973 it was still colonial as it was still part of the Dutch Kingdom.
Filmmaker: There is a deliberate pacing to the story. Things creep up on the audience and it has a much slower rhythm to what we are used to, especially when compared to Hollywood films.
Dickerson: I was glad that I could do a film where I didn’t have to worry about Hollywood conventions. We knew our film was going to be international, that it wasn’t going to be a quote- unquote “American film.” I love the fact that I was making a “foreign film.” I’m trying to capture the rhythm of the island, which isn’t fast. We will hopefully lull them in by the fact that it’s a good-looking movie and let them slowly get into our story because this is a very complex story. The book is very dense, the book is thick. It tells so many different stories that come to a head at that fateful game of dominoes.
Filmmaker: One of the interiors had a very red wall and it made me think of Do The Right Thing. You seemed to have veered off that colorful course with your TV work, but here it seems that I can feel that eye again of those early movies you shot for Spike Lee?
Dickerson: With the TV episodes I don’t have as much control over the total look. I believe strongly in using color as a way of helping to tell the story. With The Walking Dead, that palette has already been set up by the previous episodes, so I cannot really do anything with that. The Wire, that palette was already set up. The only time as a television director that you can work on that is when you do a pilot. I did a pilot for a show called Low Winter Sun and designed the palette with Patrick Murguia, who is the same cinematographer that worked on Double Play. The palette of Detroit is the palette of a city that is a broken beauty, so we worked on that. But that’s the thing: I like to use color in my cinematography, I always use it expressively. I try to use it in my directing, in the films that I can do it in, so I think you’ll see more of that in my films, but maybe not so much in the television work that I do as an episodic director.
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