Oprah Winfrey talks - a lot.
An hour a day, seven days a week, nine months of the year, Winfrey has been talking since her self-titled talk phenomenon premiered in syndication in 1987.
Now, on the eve of the premiere of "Beloved," the film adaptation of Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that has been Winfrey's labor of love since securing the rights to the book nearly a decade ago, the talk-show queen is not mincing words.
"I've never been prouder of anything I've done," Winfrey stated frankly in a recent interview with The Michigan Daily.
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| Courtesy of Touchstone Pictures After searching 18 years, Paul D. (Danny Glover) finally finds Sethe (Academy Award nominee Oprah Winfrey). Both were former slaves on the same plantation. |
But as far as Winfrey is concerned, the arduous creation of the film has proven its own reward.
"The whole movie's gratifying. It's still very hard for me to watch," Winfrey said.
Winfrey alluded to the difficult content of the film, which deals with issues of slavery, sacrifice and forgiveness. Such heavy subject matter is what drew Winfrey to Morrison's material in the first place.
"This hit my gut," Winfrey recalled. "It affected me in a way I felt I could not only portray (the lead character) but create a story that America would feel."
More than a feeling, Winfrey hopes the film will affect audiences on a much deeper, philosophical level, as not just a popular entertainment but as an historical document.
"It is the tribute to the ancestors and the ancestry of this country, the intertwined, interconnected history that we all share."
Since the film draws its plot and setting from a chapter in African-American history, Winfrey, who plays newly-free slave mother Sethe, believes the film offers a revolutionary perspective of the experience of slavery, a view that focuses on the psychological.
"In all the movies we've ever seen and books we've read about slavery, we always look at the physicality," Winfrey pointed out.
"Slaves worked in the field, they worked hard all day long and they worked from sun-up to sundown. Yeah, that was hard. Nothing is harder than the realization that you're life is not your own."
That realization is what causes Winfrey's character to run from her enslavement in Kentucky to the freer, greener pastures of Ohio.
"When Sethe says, 'Looked like I loved my children more when I got here, because as long as we lived in Kentucky, I knew they weren't mine to love,' what she knows is every day, when she went to the fields, that from sun-up to sundown, she lived in the psychological space of knowing that when she came home, her children might not be there."
It is at her own realization about "Beloved" that Winfrey calls upon her "favorite role model, my mentor," Sojourner Truth, who had 13 children sold off into slavery, for reinforcements.
"To come home 13 different times and have your children gone and not lose your mind?," Winfrey pondered. "That's the history, that's the strength, that's the real power, that's the courage."
Of course, when it came to "Beloved," others looked to Winfrey as a role model.
Co-star Thandie Newton, featured in such films as "Gridlock'd" and "Interview with the Vampire," plays the enigmatic title character to Winfrey's Sethe and took note of Winfrey's acting technique.
"Beloved's allowed to cry for herself, she's allowed to feel the pain of what she's suffered," Newton explained. "Sethe, on the other hand, I think a very interesting choice that Oprah made as an actress, was not to cry for herself as Sethe."
Winfrey disputes Newton's notion of a certain ingenious approach to acting, citing Morrison's lucid incarnation of Sethe in the novel as the real deciding factor.
"I didn't decide, Sethe decided for me. Sethe does not cry. I cry a lot but Sethe does not cry ... . That's the kind of woman she is. Because she knows that if she goes there, she won't be able to stop crying."
And Sethe is precisely the kind of woman Winfrey thought she could be for the span of the film, immediately upon reading the novel.
"Everybody who reads a book has in their own mind a visual image of the characters. When I read this book, I always thought I was Sethe and Danny Glover was Paul D."
Glover, who plays Sethe's former friend and present lover Paul D., was also Winfrey's costar in 1985's "The Color Purple," a fact that proved a disadvantage to getting the "Lethal Weapon" star cast opposite her in "Beloved."
"Some people said, 'God, you don't want Danny Glover ... they'll think you're trying to do ("The Color Purple") again,'" Winfrey remembered. "I thought, well, it's been 13 years since we did 'The Color Purple,' people play different roles all the time. I couldn't see anybody else playing Paul D."
Winfrey did not possess the same certainty, however, when choosing a director for her pet project.
"When I first purchased the rights to it, I knew this was a special project. I knew that it needed a kind of layered, subtle sensitivity. I thought, at first, I needed a foreign director to do that."
After meeting with such foreign luminaries as Australia's Peter Weir, Winfrey next believed that "Beloved" craved a "woman's sensitivity."
This led her to meet with "The Piano" auteur Jane Campion, indie filmmaker Julie Dash and even Hollywood wunderkind Jodie Foster, who had dealt with "Beloved" in her thesis at Yale.
"Jodie didn't think she could get it on screen. Jane Campion didn't think she knew enough about the black experience. Other women I met with, I didn't think they had the technical skills to pull it off - this is a big project."
Next, Winfrey thought she needed a black director simply "'cause he was black," before she realized that she was using the wrong criteria altogether in scouting directors.
"Then I decided to come to my senses. 'What am I doing?' What you really want is somebody who shares your vision, somebody who has the same compassion and passion and energy that you do."
She found those qualities in Jonathan Demme, responsible for such disparate works as "The Silence of the Lambs," "Philadelphia" and "Married to the Mob."
"I met with lots of directors in 10 years and after each meeting I would come away thinking, Is he the one? Is she the one? And when I sat down with Jonathan, I knew he was the one, I didn't have to ask anybody ... . He saw what I saw, felt what I felt."
Though any another director may have felt threatened by Winfrey's clout, Demme and Winfrey engaged in an unspoken agreement that precedes most productions.
"Bottom line is that I'm the producer and executive producer and all that stuff, but the director rules," Winfrey stressed. "When you get down to creative differences, everybody understands going in it's the director's decision that gonna rule."
Such a complete concession for the good of the film was also made by Toni Morrison, who sold the film rights to "Beloved" to Winfrey outright without a negotiation because she was so emotionally drained after writing the novel that she "didn't want these people in her house again."
And Morrison knows now that it was the right decision, despite initial apprehensions, a feeling conveyed by Winfrey.
"My greatest compliment has come from Toni," Winfrey recalled. "She said, 'I don't see Oprah on screen.' She was worried that I'm emotional, which I am, and Sethe is not. But she said, 'I don't know whether she inhabited you or you inhabited her, but I didn't see Oprah.' So that is my greatest critique, it's better than Time magazine for me."
Regardless of what Morrison or Time or Rolling Stone say, though all have been especially generous with their praise, Winfrey has faith in the power of "Beloved"'s two-fold "essence," simple lessons that can be learned from Sethe and her mother-in-law Baby Suggs, played by Beah Richards.
"You can love in spite of your circumstances. That's what Sethe dared to do, that's what spirituality is all about. That's number one."
"And number two," Winfrey continued, "is Baby Suggs' 'Love your hands, lift them up.' What she's saying is that is doesn't matter what the world tells you about yourself .... You hold them up and love your heart because your heart is the prize."
That on-screen spirituality carried over in Winfrey's own life, causing her to reexamine her life and the role she plays in the lives of millions of Americans, which in turn caused her to renew "The Oprah Winfrey Show" until at least 2002.
"That's me and that's what I now try to do every day on my show, with these women who think that their heart is some guy. It's what I try to do with women on the show who think that their heart is their children and their children don't respect them so they don't have a life. It's what I try to do with people who feel their heart is what happened to them when they were seven and five and ten ..., that now they're stuck in that victimization."
"You're heart is the prize," exclaimed Winfrey as a final reminder of "Beloved"'s message before jetting back off to TV land, with America's heart a prize she's already won.
10-14-98
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