Tayarisha Poe grew up totally enamored with “The Godfather.”
“My parents loved that movie and my mother would do my hair while we watched ‘The Godfather’ trilogy,” Poe said. “So, it’s written into my DNA.”
The film franchise made her fall in love with stories of people behaving badly and explaining it away somehow.
Poe noticed a common denominator among these types of films – they typically starred older white men. So, she started writing “Selah and the Spades” back in 2014 to fill a void.
“I also wanted to know what it looked like to see myself – or someone who looked like me – wrestling with these questions of morality,” Poe said. “People love to see black women apologize or be punished. I don’t get what weird sadism it is, but I’m not down with it. I just wanted to see someone who looked like me being able to mess up and be guilty and be selfish and be loud and take up space – and not be sorry.”
The film, Poe’s feature debut, was a standout of the Sundance Film Festival when it premiered as a NEXT selection – and was scooped up by Amazon last summer. It debuts on Amazon Prime Video this Friday (April 17).
The film stars Lovie Simone as Selah – a no-nonsense high-school senior looking for a protégé to take over the faction she helms at an elite boarding school. Just as in a deck of cards, the spades are the most powerful suit. And Selah keeps them as the most revered – and feared – group by any means necessary.
The film also stars Jesse Williams, Celeste O’Connor, Gina Torres, Henry Hunter Hall, Evan Roe, and Jharrel Jerome.
Given her own experience attending a boarding school, Poe thought the setting would be perfect for her to explore the type of behavior and choices that Selah makes throughout the film – and provide another opportunity to spotlight certain character types that are typically passed over in film.
“I wanted to focus my camera on the kids that tend to be the secondary characters in these types of stories or tend to be some background character passing by,” Poe said. “Usually the stories are just about the white kids in these privileged spaces – so I just wanted the focus to be on the kids who look like me.”
Selah is good at being bad – and at keeping a cohort of mischievous school groups in rotation without alerting the watchful eye of the school’s headmaster. She is also protective of the status she worked so hard for four years to attain. So much so, that she is willing to act against the best interests of the future of the Spades to keep it intact.
The film is not another teen movie. The character arcs and subplots are left for the audience to imagine.
“If I give you all the answers, then why am I asking you to watch this movie?” Poe asked.
She allowed her palate as a watcher of films to frame what she gave audiences as a writer/director for “Selah and the Spades.”
“I really value the work that audiences do,” Poe said. “As an audience member, I value not getting all the answers. I value that you think I’m smart enough to figure things out. I value that you as a filmmaker think that I have the capacity to use my own experience to inform what’s going on here.
For me, I get more out of what I’m watching when I get to the end and I’m like ‘I think I know what happened, but I’m not really sure – so I’m just going to watch it again to make sure. That’s more fun for me, so I definitely tried to create a little bit of that experience as a filmmaker.”
She hopes that “Selah and the Spades” can be a distraction as people deal with social distancing and quarantine because of the COVID-19 global pandemic.
“I hope that it gives people something else to think about if they are having a difficult time right now,” Poe said. “Art can really provide a balm for times like this and I hope that it can be a balm for someone.”
Even before it was released, Amazon announced that they were developing a television show based on the film.
“It’s a wild feeling because when I was writing this story, I kept saying to myself, ‘This would make a really good TV show,” Poe said. “The world felt so rich. Even as I was writing this story for the feature film, there were all these different side stories that I knew would never fit into the feature that I would just jot down like, ‘one day, maybe I will be able to use these things.’ In a way I feel fortunate that I get to keep my scraps for now. It’s kind of a dream come true.”
Through Selah, Poe hopes to bring a new normal of representation.
“Some people are going to hate it. Some people are going to love it,” Poe said. “But I think that one thing nobody can take away is that there is a black girl leading this movie and she is telling you who she is and taking up space and not apologizing for it.
The world finds a way to find a problem with black women no matter what we do, so we may as well do what we want.”
Selah and the Spades will be available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video starting Friday, April 17.
The film is rated R with a running time of 97 minutes.
