Photo: Andrew White / Parkwood Entertainment
The richness of the Black experience was the focal point in all of Beyoncé’s Black Is King, a wonderful visual film that gave Disney + a subscriber boost when they debuted on the service last month. The film was of course a very Beyoncé experience, with its visual decisions significantly reflecting our current political moment, while also re-imagining The Lion King for a new audience. But it could have gone even deeper if it were not for the presence of the coronavirus. As Black Is KingThe directors recently told The Fader in a new interview, the filming was forced to stop when COVID-19 became a pandemic in the spring, which in turn influenced many creative decisions. “Sure. We planned to add more to the story, ”explained Kwasi Fordjour. ‘We had to present that idea and really look at everything we had and go, Okay, this is what we have, here’s the message, here’s the story. How can we improve this? We had the key ingredients and all of those things helped tell the story as we told it. “
Fellow director Blitz Bazawule added that unfilmed Black Is King scenes had to come from leftover images, which presented a unique challenge to the creative team – could they still tell a unified story? Well, we would say it, but all those nice GIFs help for sure. “COVID was such a shift in our whole worldview and I think the universe is so wise. The timing of this piece could not have been better, ”said Bazawule. ‘The fact that we were planning to add more and the universe said no. We created so much content that we never fully saw or listened to, and we had to come back and make out what we already had. “TikTok thank you.