Out of the Black Box
“In any other [black] film, if there was a person like Darius he’d be comic relief, he would be ridiculed for his intellectual ambitions,” Witcher says. “I believe anything you put in a movie is cool by virtue of the fact it’s in a movie and you’re watching it in the dark. From the beginning filmmakers have used movies to put forth their particular agenda. I thought, fuck it. Let me push my agenda. Let me put in a movie what I think is cool and not have the movie make fun of it. You can’t walk away from the film thinking I’ve ridiculed reading or set up the character who expresses himself through words.”
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“The script was called Public Enemies,” says Witcher. “I turned in my draft, and I was immediately fired and out of work. The film never got made. I wasn’t working, and I was borrowing money to stay afloat. I got another job working for Disney. Then I wrote Love Jones and sold that. I got this directing job, and I’ve been working ever since.”
