The Piano Lesson: Malcolm Washington on following his father Denzel into the movie world 

It’s a fitting collaboration for a movie that’s themed around family, identity and heritage. Based on Wilson’s popular 1980s play, The Piano Lesson revolves around two siblings (John David Washington and Danielle Deadwyler) who disagree about whether to sell or keep a family heirloom piano.

From the moment he first read the play, Washington was moved at how it spoke to his own sense of family and heritage.

“I've been somebody that's always been aware of this idea of legacy, and it's meant different things to me at different times,” he says. “I've felt like I've always had my parents wrestling inside of me, by my mom's life experiences and who she is as a person, my father's as well.

“Whenever you make anything you want a certain kind of trust and protection. And there's few people that I trust and are more protective of me than my family.

“Exploring this text made me dig even deeper and extend this the scope of that search generationally. It gave me a new understanding of myself in a way that was very profound, where I felt both empowered by standing on such firm, solid ground and also so little in this grand scope of great people that came before me and made so much of their lives through sacrifice and so much work, and made my life possible.” 

It should come as no surprise that Washington’s first feature would be an August Wilson adaptation. Father Denzel has become one of the biggest champions of the writer, whose plays chronicling the African American experience in the 20th century left him described as “the theatre’s poet of Black America”.

Denzel got an Oscar nomination for his role in the adaptation of Fences which, along with his play The Piano Lesson, both won Wilson the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Other adaptations of the writer’s work in recent years include Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, starring Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman.

For Malcolm Washington, The Piano Lesson was a challenging story to take on. “One of the big challenges is getting over that reverence a little bit, because if you really want to meet the work at its level, at its peak, you have to put all of yourself into it,” he says.

“That requires a certain kind of ownership over the process. And as that's the most respectful thing you can do, is put yourself into it, pour all of what you have into what you're making, and hope that at the end of the process, all of your reverence and respect and personal experience all melt together in a way to make something that's honest and truthful.” 

During research in preparation for the movie, Washington did a deep dive into the life and times of Wilson. “He grew up in his mother's house with many siblings, and they all shared one room together. He was born Frederick Kitten but he honoured his mother in his pen name and the name that we know him by. The idea that you can tie into that legacy was such a big thing to me, and a big decision of ending the movie with a dedication to my mom was very much inspired by him.

“In a conversation I was having with his widow, Miss Constanza Romero Wilson, she said that when he would finish a work, he would talk to her about how he hopes that his mother would be proud of that work. So when I finished this work, I was like: I hope that my mother's proud of this work. I hope she sees her stories in it.” 

For a time, the young Washington thought he might become a basketball player. “I won California state championships - I take great pride in that! - in high school, and then I played a little bit in college, and that was a big part of my youth and my upbringing.”

But over time, his passion for cinema became something he started to pursue as a career. “I’m the youngest in my family, and my brother and my sister were big cinephiles - they watched so many movies growing up. When you're the youngest, you don't really decide anything. You just show up. I was just taking in all that they were playing and we watched so many films.” 

Taking a film class while at college proved to be a eureka moment, he recalls. He hadn’t realised how much of an intellectual and historical side there was to screen storytelling, and he remembers being blown away. “Once I started looking at film as a prism to look at other ideas and rather history or philosophy kind of context to it, it opened everything up to me in a way that was like: ‘Whoa, this feels like the beginning of something’. He went on to study filmmaking, later shadowing one of cinema’s great mavericks, Spike Lee.

“When I graduated school, I got to apprentice for Spike and see how he moved, and see what the working life of a director was. I found that it was a rigorous life - I would meet Spike every day at like five in the morning, six days a week, and he's so serious about his commitment to the work and his consistency to craft for 30, 40, years.” 

Washington feels that growing up in a filmmaking community in Los Angeles helped him see beyond the red carpet from an early age. “When my dad was away at work, I didn't know what he was doing, per se. I just knew he was gone to work. Growing up in LA, the film industry is so in front of you, and I think that you see the film industry in a different kind of way.

“It doesn't look like glitz and glamour, because you just see the working life of artists and of craftspeople, where it’s: they have to leave, they have to go to work before I even wake up to go to school. They're gone all day working at something. What they do, it just felt like such a serious job, so time consuming and hard work, but at the same time, you know people who do it, so there's a closeness to it.” 

The Piano Lesson is now on Netflix