Behind the Scenes: The Color Purple (Spielberg, 1985) with Whoopi Goldberg and Danny Glover

Right after the screenplay, the most essential thing is casting for a film. But I got to give Ruben Cannon the credit. You know, Ruben Cannon presented to me great choices. Many, many, many great choices. I'd read the book, loved the book, and was tracking to find out what was going to happen to it. There were rumors that Steven Spielberg was going to direct it, and then Quincy Jones was producing it. And I never solicited a job before. But I didn't want to take any chances, so I wrote a letter to Quincy. And before I mailed it, I received a call from him. Would I meet with him? And we actually met here at Amblin with Steven, and I got the job. As far as Sealy, I just kept hearing about this amazing stand-up comedian in the Bay Area named Whoopi Goldberg. And I laughed at the name. I was just doing small theaters around New York and Los Angeles and Canada and Europe. And I wrote a letter to Alice Walker. I heard her reading the book on National Public Radio. And so I pulled over my daughter, and I was listening to her read. And then I wrote her a letter. And then I got to New York, and there was a purple envelope waiting for me, saying, listen, I know your work. I live up in the Bay Area. So I passed on your information, which I thought was kind of wonderful of her. I knew that she should be Sealy and not some other actresses, because she has an indomitable quality. And she has that wicked sense of humor. And you cannot imagine her being down without having a really sharp opinion about it. I remember meeting her, having her come down. And I had her do her audition. And her audition, what she wanted to do, she said, let me do my routine. Let me do some stand-up for you, just so you can spit. I need an audience. And he said, oh, there'll be like seven or eight people. And I walked in, there were like 40 people there. And Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson and Ashford and Simpson and all these people. And I'm thinking, this is really cool. A little scary, but very cool. And Whoopi did this wonderful routine. Had her sew on stitches. And she had her reins. There was totally 360-degree scope from Valley Girls to Puerto Rican and everything. Just Whoopi. Nobody does it like her. Stephen went mad for her. He really loved her. He said, that's the one, you know. I'm not doing the movie if she doesn't do it, you know. So I did my show. And he said, oh, I'm directing Color Purple. I'd like you to be in it. I said, oh, OK. He said, oh, I think I'd rather play Sophia. Because I liked her character more. I thought she had more going on than Celia. And he said, no, no. I think you'll be. I swear, it could be really bad, you know. Because I don't do this, you know. And he said, well, no, I think it'll be all right. I said, man, if it sucks, you're going to be really in trouble. He said, well, you've sucked before. That's the worst thing that can happen. Then I did a screen test. And the good news that came out of it was that Whoopi Goldberg was going to be Celia. There was nobody else alive in the world in 1984 that could have possibly been Celia. She was the only Celia. The Color Purple for me was a fantasy. It was an obsession. It was a part of my greatest heart's desire. I have never wanted anything in my life before or since as much as I wanted to be in The Color Purple. I was a local news anchor and reporter in Baltimore and then came to Chicago that fall season and started working on this new show called A.M. Chicago. That's how I introduced myself to people in the community. I'd go to the beauty shop and I'd say, oh, excuse me, to a lady under the dryer. Have you heard of this book called The Color Purple? And I thought, I have got to find a way to get in that movie. We were in the process of casting a film. I get a call from Michael Jackson. You have to go to Chicago right away and testify in this lawsuit against Michael. There's some guy saying he wrote three or four hits. The court case was at 10 o'clock in the morning and I'm frustrated. I couldn't sleep. And I turned on the TV about 915 and I see this face and I don't know what it was. And just you say, that's Sophia. He called the casting agent. The casting agent, Reuben Cannon, came to Chicago and I auditioned for The Color Purple after him calling me saying, we're auditioning for this movie. And at the time they were calling it Moonsong because Steven Spielberg was so secretive about the project. Now I am auditioning for the casting agent. I was so obsessed with The Color Purple that who gets a phone call from a casting agent saying, come read for this movie? And I said, are you sure it's not The Color Purple? He said, no, it's Moonsong. I came on a day in Chicago to audition when it was 72 below zero, windchill factor. And I went and I auditioned. And the moment I saw the script, I knew it was The Color Purple and thought that God had stepped into my life. I waited two months and I heard nothing. So I booked myself into a health farm and I am going there to try to make peace with this idea that I have auditioned for The Color Purple. I have auditioned for it, something I never even expected. And now it looks like I'm not going to get it. How could that be? And I am running myself around the track and I'm crying and I'm trying to give up on the idea that I'm not going to be in The Color Purple. And out runs this woman from the kitchen and she said, there is a phone call for you. There is a phone call for you. And the phone call was calling me to Steven Spielberg's office tomorrow. And I was told, if you lose a pound, you could lose a part. And what are you doing at a health farm? And so I left that health farm and stopped at Dairy Queen to make sure that when Steven saw me, he would not think that I had lost a pound. And I went to Steven Spielberg's office the next day and auditioned in front of Steven Spielberg. And so I flew over to L.A. and I tested her. And she read directly from the book. And I remember I gave her the job at the same time I gave Willard Pugh the part to play Harpo, which is interesting because she has since named her production company Harpo Productions. And, you know, she sat in the room and realized that Oprah spelled backwards as Harpo. Harpo and Oprah, Oprah is basically Harpo backwards, sitting next to each other in my office. And I said, you have the part in Color Purple. Willard began to cry, but Oprah began to scream. And I remember she threw her arms into the air. And I had this model of the space shuttle and it went flying into the air in four pieces. Her hand just hit my little model of the space shuttle. She was so ecstatic. The happiest day of my life was the day I realized that I had achieved the role of Sophia in the Color Purple. I have never been happier than that. I wanted to get Tina Turner to play Suge Avery. And I went on a kind of a broad campaign to get her to say yes. But she didn't want to. And she had a very good reason. I live Celia's life. I don't want to live it again. And she said she wanted no part of it, you know. So Stephen had this wonderful lady, Margaret Avery, that tore the part up, you know. And we were in great shape. I went out and got the book and I read it. And I just could connect it so strongly with the character Suge Avery. I mean, aside from it being my own surname. But I was determined for Reuben Cannon to see me. And he says, you're not right for it, Margaret. But, you know, I will let you read. And the next thing I knew was, you know, I did get the opportunity to meet with Stephen. I totally forgot that I had directed Margaret Avery in a television movie called Something Evil in 1972, a few short months after directing Duel. And she reminded me that we had worked together before. I had no idea. She had a very small part. She sang a jingle in a commercial. So that was for sure. I had seen Danny in Places in the Heart. And I just thought he was remarkable. And I wanted to work with Danny very, very much, very badly. And I didn't have a second choice for Mister. I didn't actually have to audition, fortunately. Quincy basically said, yeah, baby, let's do this, you know. Danny Glover had a very, very difficult position in a film like this. Because he is, he's really antagonist slash protagonist, really. I never judged it. I mean, I think that's the worst thing you can do as an actor, is begin to judge the character. You can, all you can do as an actor, as an artist, is try to be and try to live inside the character, wherever that is. So that's the way, the process that I work in. Because Mister exists within a certain social and historical context. I never saw Mister Isabella. I saw Mister as a victim. A victim of his father, a victim of his grandfather, a victim of his era. Danny was great to work with. And I felt so close to him on the movie. And then, of course, Adolf Caesar, who I'd seen in Norman Jewison's movie, The Soldier Story. I thought he was perfect for, to take responsibility for all the bad lessons he had taught his son. We had the extraordinary good fortune of bringing people like Oprah into the fold, and Whoopi Goldberg, and Danny Glover. And needless to say, Stephen wanted and encouraged their input as well. So the whole collaborative experience was quite extraordinary with this movie. What Stephen brought to it certainly was unique. He was, he was clearly dependent upon and allowed himself to be there for the actors in a ways, you know. In fact, he didn't pretend to know everything. He created this community in which we were able to participate in. We were in each other's lives for hours during the day, during the rehearsal period. We didn't particularly do anything. We talked about our lives. We did some improvisation. We did little things like that that grew us together. We did some rehearsals, but I found that the rehearsals were not helping me and not helping them. It was creating a lot of anxiety. It was making a lot of the younger actors and the newer actors realize they're in the big leagues now. And oh my God, the fear was palpable. And I felt that the best thing to do is to suspend all of the rehearsals and to pretty much just commit ourselves to making the picture. The scene is very violent and it's very hard to watch. Any kind of separation between siblings or parents and children are almost impossible to watch and to bear. And I remember how hard that was to shoot. And I think because of that, each setup is one take. And once they went, unless something happened with the camera, there was no reason to make them go through that anguish a second time. There was so much coverage, they did have to do it over and over again from different camera positions. So they had a few minutes to rest between setups, then they have to put out again. It was very difficult. It was very hard. It was hardest on Danny. Danny hated what he was doing. For me, that was a very emotional scene and difficult for me. He was in the character, but he was also Danny and he was not happy that day. Spielberg whispered to Desiree during myself, whatever you do, don't let him separate you, stick together. And I don't know what he whispered to Danny. I saw him go talk to Danny. I remember the toughest thing Danny had to do was beat their hands to get them to let go. I remember holding onto that thing and Danny Glover just, oh mister, smashing my hands for real. That was, that was hard for him. That was really hard for him. There was some moment when it became so real that I began to shake after shooting the scene. I remember just being so, um, feeling such a loss because I had been told not to separate from my sister and he managed to separate us. And then I just felt this dirt hit me as Vista threw it at me. And just what came out of me was why? In preparing for the role, I wrote out the biography of the character and all the little details of childhood and fears and frustrations and secrets. All I knew was that I was in a movie and that's all I know. That's all I understood. You know, the people were putting clothing on me that wasn't mine. I shouldn't go to lunch wearing my clothes because I could mess them up. So it was just like SpongeBob walking around just absorbing everything in, in awe and not having any idea that there was a magnitude to what we were doing. For me, it was all internal about, oh my God, I'm sitting here at a table and Steven Spielberg is behind the camera. Oh my God. It's the thing I think I've missed in the rest of my career was finding somebody whose, whose understanding of film was as, as deep as his. Because he could say to me, this is the piece of the film where I want you to feel like, you know, Scout discovering Boo Radley behind the doors. Oh, okay, cool. You know, and he'd be saying all this other technical stuff to other people. I'd be like, what's he talking about? So then he'd come over and say, well, remember in Lost Horizon when, you know, I said, yeah, yeah, it's okay. That's what I want. Okay. So it was quite wonderful. That scene in the cornfield, you told Harpo to beat me all my life. I had to fight. I love that scene because I got to work early that morning and they were just setting the cameras and so forth. And I said, I can do it. I can do it. I don't need anybody here to even do it with. So I did that scene looking at a clapboard in one take. I was so involved every day with everybody's work. I just come to watch everybody work, even when I wasn't working. We went in whether we were called or not. You know, even when we weren't called, we called each other and said, you go in here, I'm going in, we go in. The food was great. We liked watching scenes. We were the color purple groupies. I mean, we went to every single night of dailies. I was so on edge, so nervous, so terrified that I wasn't going to be able to pull this off and had wanted it so much that I feared every day that Stephen was going to change his mind and give that role to somebody else. Thanksgiving dinner scene was a surprise because Oprah, her character, came alive and she gave this wonderful monologue and it gave so much more heart and conflict to the scene. I could just tell that she had ideas. She wasn't telling me I have ideas, Stephen. She was just saying, I could just sense that she was yearning to, because she was crying a lot that day. I was the last person to speak at the dinner table. And then I just kept rocking. And Stephen said, tell them how you're really feeling. And that entire scene became ad-libbed. She was very involved in the scene and what she had gone through. And I said, can you just sort of say what's in your heart and just start talking? It just came up out of nowhere for me. And that's the day I got it. That was the day I became an actress. Whoopi got up from the table. Stephen came over and hugged me. Everybody started applauding because everybody else also knew that I'd broken the fear barrier for myself. When you finish a movie, it's a combination of sadness and bliss because you're done and it's in the can. And I just remember wanting to be friends with everyone afterwards. So it was a little bit of sadness to be done, because it was a big deal. We're all touched by the piece. And sometimes I run into Stephen and his wife, Kate. I mean, you run into people and you see them. So it's like we're forever connected. I remember thinking that something wonderful had happened. Some major change had just occurred in my life. I didn't know what it was, but I knew some major change had happened. And I knew that I had made a very, very good friend in Stephen. And so it just sort of felt like a natural, the natural end of things. In the last scene, when we're playing pat-a-cake, I remember it was a field and it was actually shot, you know, at dusk. We all become equalized with age and death, you know, and become all equal partners there. Whatever we are at some point in our youth or whatever, when we get old, we have the same aches and the same pains. At that particular point in time, when they all come together, they've lived their lives, they've made their stand, and they become a part of each other's memory in a different way. The premiere of The Color Purple in New York City, Stephen Spielberg comes up to me and he says, I know you were scared. Uh-huh. I was, Stephen. He says, but I could see your fear was working for you, so I let you stay scared. I was just overwhelmed with pride for the film and even more overwhelmed when the nominations for the Oscars came through. I was disappointed in, you know, when Stephen wasn't nominated, because it just, it was, it was absurd. It didn't make sense. To know that your peers recognize you, that was, that was incredible. I was rehearsing for that moment from the time I was born. I always wanted an Academy Award. I just thought, well, yes, I would like to have an Oscar, you know, not realizing that, how hard they are to get. For some reason, this part passed me by. I just thought, oh, I would like to have one of those. And then, you know, suddenly somebody calls you at four o'clock in the morning and says, oh, you just got nominated for an Oscar. It's like, what, what, what, what? I went to the Academy luncheon and I shall never forget. Gene Siskel, the late Gene Siskel said to me, enjoy the luncheon. If I were you, I would bronze the roles because you're not going to get an Academy Award. You're a novice and Angelica Houston's probably going to get it. That's what Gene Siskel had told me. And I did take the roles and I did bronze them. And I still have, along with all of my other awards that I've received over the years, my bronzed role from the Academy luncheon is one of my, you know, great achievements. And Gene Siskel was right. Sitting there was painful in the Oscars. It was very painful as the nominations were read. Not only did I not get an Oscar, none of us, 11 nominations and not one Oscar. In the mid 80s, when Color Purple came out, there was a real heightened sensitivity about the lack of black films in Hollywood. And what was Hollywood trying to say when it did make a film? And I think that people weren't sure how to take the movie.