DX: You mentioned how black audiences, in general, don’t want “to think” while being entertained. Is that why movies like The Great Debaters aren’t commercial successes?
CD: You can’t really explain that aspect of our life and our culture without really including so many things that have changed with us over the last 40, 50 years. The black community wouldn’t be where we are today if we still had the mentality and perseverance and outlook that we had 50 years ago. I say this all the time, as great as integration was, on one level it was the worst thing to ever happen to black people in America. When you talk about the lack of attention to those kind of things and that kind of stimulus, then you gotta talk about wanting to better your community and on and on. It’s all the same thing. You can’t take the arts and excise it from all the other problems. It’s all related.

But to answer your question, in a general sense, this picture is not going to get the press and the promotion and the saturation that First Sunday will get. If they made a movie called Pickaninnies in Heaven and promoted it, we’d still go and see it. Somebody would be up there laughing. “Man, that was some funny shit!” But then, if you did a movie about Hannibal, the only way it would draw is if you had Denzel [Washington] on an elephant and Al Pacino or Russell Crowe behind him on another elephant for it to become a successful film. It’s frustrating. A film like this should be devoured; just in the classical nature of it. Yaya [DaCosta, Honeydripper costar] and I were talking earlier. There was one review I read in New York that was kinda accusing Sayles of playing to stereotypes in this movie with the juke joint guys with the knife and the gun. You got the blind blues sage. Characters we’ve seen before. My feeling about stereotypes is this: There’s nothing inheritably wrong with stereotypes; it’s what you do with them. There are porters, butlers, maids and shoeshine boys. People got cut. I got shot in a damn juke joint in 1967. I know what it’s like in a juke joint. Those characters are real. You [can’t] demean them –I’m not talking about the director doing it; even the actors themselves. You’ve got to approach every role with some dignity. The director can’t say, “Can you play it with dignity?” Imagine that. You’ve got to start with that. Everything else will fall into place. It’s the sign of the times. If more of us, young and old, were in tune to appreciate the off-line films, not the big studio blockbusters, [that would help]. If you put more performing arts programs in the inner cities instead of bars and fried chicken joints, the crime would go down. That’s the power of the arts. The arts change people’s lives. They really do. If you had more of those, you’d have less violence and crime. You’d still have all your problems but you’d have less of them. I wish I had a good answer for that. I’m not degrading any of the chitlin’ circuit plays or any of that. That stuff has its place. People pay to see that. They pay to see that but won’t go see something on Broadway. Audiences are not born. Nobody’s born with culture. Nobody is innately cultured. Every Asian person that can play a violin, it was taught to them. They were exposed to it from childhood. They got an appreciation for it. It’s the same way with black kids can get that appreciation for the arts or anything else. If you got a kid who sits around in school and doesn’t do anything, and then you say, What are your interests? They might say, “Well, I like to play with numbers.” To me, that says grab that kid and take him down to Wall Street. Take him down to Wall Street and ask, Is this what you’re talking about? I bet you’ll find what they’re really interested in if you simply ask them. Sometimes it’s not about the three R’s. Sometimes it’s about what’s in the person, what’s in the human being. Exploit that and the three R’s will come because they’re excited about something.