The New Yorker: The Provocateur Behind Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Issa Rae
Melina Matsoukas, a director of music videos and television shows, had just returned home from a trip to Cuba when she got a call from Beyoncé, asking her to direct a video for a song called “Formation.” Matsoukas had directed nine of Beyoncé’s videos, and considered her “family.” But this assignment was unusually demanding. Beyoncé was working on “Lemonade,” a deeply personal “visual album” that touches on betrayals in black marriages—her parents’ and, reportedly, her own. “Formation” would be the first single, and an introduction to Beyoncé’s new aesthetic: both vulnerable and political. She wanted to release the song the day before she performed it at the Super Bowl, which meant that Matsoukas would have to submit a video within a few weeks. “It was the fastest delivery I had ever done in my life,” she told me.
When I visited her loft in Hollywood recently, Matsoukas opened her rose-gold laptop and pulled up the video. The brassy opening beats began as Beyoncé crouched on the roof of a police car, wearing a red-and-white blouse and a matching skirt: evocative of the rural South but made by Gucci. Matsoukas, who is tall and thin, with dark hair and high cheekbones, radiates a disconcerting hyperassurance. (She’s a Buddhist, with a fluctuating practice.) She is, as she says, “very loud and New York,” but her apartment projects an almost hermetic cool: Africanist art, a golden skull on a shelf, a tar-splashed vanity mirror.
After Matsoukas agreed to direct the video, Beyoncé invited her to her house in Los Angeles, and explained the concept behind “Lemonade.” “She wanted to show the historical impact of slavery on black love, and what it has done to the black family,” Matsoukas told me. “And black men and women—how we’re almost socialized not to be together.” This was a fraught subject for Beyoncé. She and her husband, the rapper Jay Z, are among the most famous couples in the world, and they had long been surrounded by rumors that he was unfaithful. Beyoncé considers herself a feminist, but for black women feminism can be a tenuous balancing act—advocating for women’s rights while supporting black men against racism. Black feminists have often been forced to pick between being politically black or politically female. “It’s an unfair struggle that only black women can understand and relate to,” Matsoukas said. With the “Lemonade” album, Beyoncé was publicly calling out the men in her life, an unexpected and, to her fans, thrilling decision.
The video for “Formation” would be an anthem of female and black empowerment, set in Louisiana, where Beyoncé’s maternal grandparents are from. “We spoke about the South, New Orleans, her mother’s history as well as her father’s,” Matsoukas recalled. The concept suited Matsoukas, who is known for videos that retain contemporary hip-hop’s commercial glamour but feature black women as the heroes. While the lyrics offered a certain amount of feminist swagger—Beyoncé promises that, if a lover pleases her, she “might take him on a flight on my chopper”—there wasn’t an obvious story line.
As Matsoukas develops an idea for a video, she spends hours browsing online and through art books and magazines, looking for images that resonate. “I treat each video like a thesis project,” she said. Stacks of old sources are piled behind her couch: books by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Noam Chomsky, and C. L. R. James; back issues of Wallpaper; math and science textbooks from college. For the “Formation” video, she found ideas in the work of Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Octavia Butler. She began to conceive scenes of black history, from slavery through Mardi Gras parades and the Rodney King protests. “I wanted to show—this is black people,” she said. “We triumph, we suffer, we’re drowning, we’re being beaten, we’re dancing, we’re eating, and we’re still here.” She wrote out a treatment and sent it to Beyoncé in the middle of the night. Within hours, the singer had written back to say that she loved it.
Matsoukas, looking for a set that resembled a plantation house, rented a museum in Pasadena and decorated it to summon “Gone with the Wind” and “Twelve Years a Slave.” Then she had her art director “blackify” the house, hanging French Renaissance-style portraits of black subjects. Films about slavery “traditionally feature white people in these roles of power and position,” she said. “I wanted to turn those images on their head.” Matsoukas planned technical details to create a sense of verisimilitude, shooting some scenes with a Bolex camera—for a “grainy look,” like that of documentary footage—and others with a camcorder. She hired a camera operator named Arthur Jafa, who had been the cinematographer of “Daughters of the Dust,” an iconic 1991 film about Gullah women in South Carolina whose focus on black sisterhood echoes throughout the “Formation” video.
Matsoukas had two days to shoot Beyoncé, between her rehearsals for the Super Bowl. She devised a scene of Beyoncé performing on top of a squad car, as it slowly sank into the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina. “I wanted it to be a police car to show that they hadn’t really shown up for us,” she told me. “And that we were still here on top, and that she was one with the people who had suffered.” She shot the scene on a Los Angeles soundstage, with an artificial lake backed by a blue screen made to look like New Orleans. A crane on a barge suspended a camera overhead while a lift lowered the police car, and Beyoncé, into the water. Matsoukas operated another camera from a speedboat. “Everyone was scared, because the water was cold,” she said. “And Miss Tina”—Beyoncé’s mother, Tina Knowles—“is calling me, like, ‘You’re going to give her pneumonia, and she has to perform at the Super Bowl.’ ” Beyoncé, who was wearing a wetsuit under her clothes, didn’t complain.
In the first edit, the video ended with an image of Beyoncé sinking into the water, but the singer wanted the final note to be more uplifting. A friend of Matsoukas’s had recently joked about the “black-girl air grab,” an incisive gesture made with your forearm upright as your fingers stretch toward the ceiling and then close in a fist. In extra footage, Matsoukas found a portrait of Beyoncé sitting in the plantation house in a white dress, half in shadow, air-grabbing as she faced the camera. “It just felt so perfect,” she said. She spliced it in after the drowning scene as an emphatic last gesture.
The response to the video was immediate and contentious. On Slate, a documentary filmmaker named Shantrelle Lewis accused Beyoncé of profiting from tragedy, writing, “Are we in need of mainstream blackness so badly that we’ll mistake its exploitation for validation?” Police unions throughout the country protested, saying that Beyoncé had an “anti-police message.” But the video was enormously popular among fans and critics, winning a Grand Prix Lion Award, at the Cannes Lions Awards; Video of the Year at the B.E.T. Awards and at the MTV Music Video Awards; and, earlier this month, a Grammy for Best Music Video. “I didn’t know the video was going to incite all those conversations,” Matsoukas said, closing her laptop. “But I was very pleased it did.”
In the “Formation” video, a black man wearing a yellow T-shirt and a black Stetson rides a horse through a deserted alley, edged with shrubs and red brick walls; his white Adidas sneakers are fitted with spurs. The scene was inspired by Matsoukas’s maternal grandfather, Carlos, an Afro-Cuban preacher and musician, known to friends as “the Cuban Nat King Cole,” who rode in rodeos in Harlem and the Bronx. “We’d see him on his white horse, and he was just this regal-looking black cowboy,” she recalled. Her maternal grandmother was a Cuban maid, who brought her six children from Havana to New York after the revolution. Matsoukas’s paternal grandparents were Greek and Polish Jews living on the Upper West Side. Her parents, David and Diana-Elena, met through one of Diana-Elena’s brothers, who had encountered David in a socialist student group.
Matsoukas was born in 1981 and grew up in Co-op City, a sprawling housing development in the Bronx. Her father worked as a carpenter, and her mother taught math in a local high school. When Matsoukas was eight, the family moved to Hackensack, New Jersey, but as a teen-ager she often returned to the city to go clubbing. “I was just trying to be grown,” she recalled. “Young girl trying to do too much.” She read Malcolm X and Assata Shakur, and listened to socially conscious hip-hop by Rakim and A Tribe Called Quest. “She’s always been an old soul, and she’s always been confident,” her mother told me. “I sometimes had to remind her, ‘Melina, I’m the mother here.’ ”
In high school, Matsoukas began taking photographs—including portraits of her friends, dressed in Afrocentric clothing—and she went on to study film at N.Y.U. and cinematography in the graduate program at the American Film Institute. She admired the directors Spike Lee and Mira Nair, and imagined making films that documented the lives of people “who look like me and think like me.” Her college thesis was a music video featuring a friend who was a singer, filmed on the subway and in an apartment building in the Bronx that her father owned.
Her first paid gig—two hundred and fifty dollars—was a video for a song called “Dem Girls,” by her cousin the rapper Red Handed, in Houston. “It was just in the hood, doing hood stuff,” she said, laughing. The result, which featured an assortment of preening video girls, was distinguished less by its imagery than by its precise focus and framing. Matsoukas shot in black and white, with split screens showing contrasting views of the same scene: gold-chained rappers playing dominoes set against children running through the grass.
After she finished graduate school, an agent named Inga Veronique got her a job directing a video for Ludacris and Pharrell. The song was a strip-club anthem called “Money Maker” (“Shake your money maker like somebody ’bout to pay ya”), but, Matsoukas said, “I wanted it to feel rich.” Borrowing from fashion photography, she posed models in front of bright-colored backdrops and lit them as if for a photo shoot; to accompany one chorus of the song, she created a montage of gleaming watches, sunglasses, and stacks of cash. Veronique said that the video was “fashion-y without beating you over the head with fashion.” The song went to the top of the hip-hop charts, and the video drew attention from the industry.
In 2006, on the night of the MTV Music Video Awards, Matsoukas met Jay Z and Beyoncé at a club in New York, and Jay Z hailed her as a rising star. Matsoukas shook Beyoncé’s hand and told her, “I’m coming for you.” Two months later, Camille Yorrick, a record executive who worked with Beyoncé, called to ask Matsoukas to direct four videos for a forthcoming album. “I had only done four videos in my whole life!” Matsoukas said. “I was really scared.” Still, her work appealed to artists’ managers. “The thing that stood out to me about her early videos was the way she made people look,” Yorrick said. “She just made them look really beautiful—people of color, white people, it didn’t even matter.”
As Matsoukas made videos for such singers as Whitney Houston and Jennifer Lopez, she often relied on highly stylized settings. Generic lyrics could yield generic imagery: she set Lady Gaga’s “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich” in a moodily lit mansion filled with piles of money, and Robin Thicke’s “Sex Therapy” in a moodily lit mansion filled with acquiescent models. Her videos were often less concerned with narrative than with what the film theorist David Bordwell has called “world making.” Unlike other directors, she selects the wardrobe for a video, and creates mood boards of clothes and accessories for her performers. “Fashion is as much a character in her work as everyone else,” Yorrick said. She is also unusually capable of coaxing performances out of musicians. “She knows what she wants, and she knows how to command a set,” Yorrick went on. “She’s a negotiator—she negotiates her way to the best product.” Beyoncé said of Matsoukas in an e-mail, “She is a force, deliberate and methodical.”
When Snoop Dogg asked Matsoukas to make a video for a song called “Sensual Seduction,” in 2007, she took the job with trepidation. A few years earlier, Snoop had released a film, called “Doggystyle,” that blended hip-hop and pornography. “You walk into that kind of situation and you’re, like, ‘He’s a pimp—I don’t know how he’s going to react to a female director,’ ” Matsoukas said. She envisioned a video that was radically at odds with Snoop’s usual work: an early-eighties throwback, in which he would dress up in outrageous suits and wigs and perform with a keytar. She won him over, she said, with playful enabling: “In order to make artists feel comfortable in a space they’re not normally comfortable with, I go along for the ride.” By mid-shoot, she had Snoop shirtless and dancing. “I remember being, like, ‘Well, we want to attach this weave to your beard,’ and he was, like, ‘Sure, glue it on,’ ” she said.
In 2011, Rihanna asked Matsoukas to make a video for a song called “We Found Love.” By then, Matsoukas had grown tired of making videos that simply conjured a mood. “I had done a lot of performance-based stuff, and I just wanted to tell stories,” she said. She admired David Fincher’s work with Madonna, which felt like four-minute melodramas, and she was drawn to experiments like Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up,” a cinéma-vérité chronicle that follows a drunken, coked-up lowlife through a night out in London—fighting, vomiting, groping women—until, in the last scene, the lowlife is revealed to be a woman.
Matsoukas drew up a treatment for Rihanna, which evoked “Romeo and Juliet” and “Requiem for a Dream”: a depiction of a relationship charged with drug-fuelled passion and domestic violence. To play the male lead—“that man we all want but we know we shouldn’t fuck with,” Matsoukas said—she found an amateur boxer from London named Dudley O’Shaughnessy. On the set, a farm near Belfast, the chemistry between Rihanna and O’Shaughnessy arose out of improvisation. Before the first scene, Matsoukas recalled, Rihanna “was in her trailer getting ready, and he was on set waiting, and of course we were behind. So when she came out there was no time for formal introductions. It was, like, ‘O.K., take her hand and run, and get lost in it.’ And then I was, like, ‘And if you feel like it, maybe kiss her.’ And he did—they kissed on the first take.”
Two years before the shoot, Rihanna’s boyfriend, Chris Brown, had assaulted her in a car, and pictures of her bruised face had filled the tabloids. Rihanna’s fans saw an uncanny resemblance between Brown and O’Shaughnessy. Matsoukas denied that the resemblance was intentional, saying only that the video “was based on my terrible love life and obviously her terrible love life and every woman’s terrible love life.” Nevertheless, the violence of the onscreen relationship can feel unsettlingly reminiscent of Rihanna’s real-life assault. “She was open to taking it there,” Matsoukas said, “and with being honest and showing what life really is.”
On the set, as Matsoukas prepared to shoot an argument between Rihanna and O’Shaughnessy in a parked car, fans crowded around them. Matsoukas warded them off with a bullhorn, then slipped into the back seat to coach the performers as a cameraman shot from outside. In the scene, Rihanna and O’Shaughnessy can be seen screaming inaudibly at each other. “They were saying the most nonsensical things, like ‘Your pants are too tight!’ ” Matsoukas recalled. “But veins were popping out.” The owner of the farm eventually grew uncomfortable with the spectacle, and evicted the crew. “I wanted it to feel free, and like they were living life, and Rihanna took off her shirt,” Matsoukas said. “That was probably a bit too much for him.” But the video helped Rihanna establish a grittier image. And it earned Matsoukas a Grammy for Best Short Form Music Video, making her the first solo female director to receive the award.
Two decades ago, the music video looked like a dead art. MTV was steadily losing viewers, as young people turned to purchasing or pirating songs online. But the rise of video-streaming services, in the late aughts, again linked the success of pop songs to videos. In 2015, Americans streamed more than three hundred billion songs, most of which were videos—an increase of a hundred and two per cent from the previous year. Matsoukas now checks her work on a laptop with a compact twelve-inch screen. “I like to see a video through a computer or through a phone to make sure it looks good at its worst,” Matsoukas told me. “I hate when you perfect something for the ideal way of consuming things and then when you see it on YouTube it looks like crap.”
A pop star is the head of an enormous business that sells one product: herself. Matsoukas’s clients have to trust her to present them in a way that feels artistically gratifying and also inspires people to buy their music. Hype Williams, perhaps the most inventive video director of the nineties, once said, “At the end of the day, what we do is technically supposed to be a marketing tool as well as something creative.” Female artists, especially, are drawn to Matsoukas because she guides them in bolder directions, attracting new attention. “She has the ability to hit the nervous system,” Malik Sayeed, a cinematographer who worked on “Formation” and “Lemonade,” said.
In 2012, Natalie and Elliot Bergman, the siblings who make up the band Wild Belle, asked Matsoukas to direct a video for “Keep You,” a lovelorn song about a cheating partner. Matsoukas’s treatment portrayed a turbulent relationship between Natalie, who is twenty-eight and white, and a prepubescent Jamaican boy, who, between bouts of philandering, clutches a Teddy bear, sucks his thumb, and swaggers around in a Boy Scout uniform. “When we saw the treatment, we were a little bit taken aback,” Elliot told me. “But we also trusted Melina.” Elliot recalled being persuaded by Matsoukas’s intensity on set: “She’s in your face. She’s yelling at the top of her lungs, and she’s right in there with the kids dancing on the car, dancing harder than any of them.” By the second day of shooting, Matsoukas’s voice was almost gone.
“Keep You” is Wild Belle’s most-watched video on YouTube, but controversy doesn’t always benefit Matsoukas’s collaborators. “I like to create provocative imagery,” she told me. “Sometimes it works and sometimes it goes awry.” In 2012, she directed a video for No Doubt’s “Looking Hot,” a Wild West fantasy, in which the singer Gwen Stefani appears tied up and wearing a feathered headdress. As the video goes on, she dances around a fire, sends smoke signals, and writhes on a tepee floor with a wolf. The American Indian Studies Center, of U.C.L.A., responded with an open letter describing the video as “the height of cultural misappropriation,” suggesting that it recalled “nineteenth-century paintings advancing the ethos of manifest destiny.” A day after the video was released, No Doubt took it down.
Matsoukas’s videos have also drawn criticism for being derivative. In 2011, she directed Rihanna in a video for the song “S & M,” in which the singer danced in latex fetish wear, brandished a whip, and led a man around on a dog leash. The provocation worked: even as the video was banned in several countries, it received tens of millions of views on YouTube. But later that month the artist David LaChapelle sued Rihanna, claiming that imagery in the video had been plagiarized from his photographs. (Rihanna settled the suit.) During the production of “Formation,” Matsoukas intercut her own footage with shots of New Orleans from a documentary about bounce music called “That B.E.A.T.” The documentary footage had been licensed from the company that owned the rights, but the filmmakers were still startled to see their imagery subsumed in a different, and much higher-profile, production. Abteen Bagheri, the director, tweeted that the use of the footage was “not cool,” adding, with apparent resignation, “It’s the sad reality of the music business.” Matsoukas said that she was hurt by the criticism, but she also suggested that the pop-culture industry thrives on borrowing. “I’ve also seen stuff that I think looks similar to mine,” she said. “People are influenced by similar things. I try to stay away from close references.”
There are very few women of color working as directors in Hollywood, and Matsoukas has sometimes felt that she was not taken seriously. “People will challenge you and try not to listen,” she said. “The director of photography will try to get over you and say, ‘Oh, that’s not possible—we can’t light this way,’ and I know what the possibilities are.” If a camera operator won’t film a scene the way that Matsoukas wants it done, she will step in and shoot it herself. Paul Hunter, a veteran director who helped found Matsoukas’s production company, told me that he “loved her sense of style and cinematography and thought that she had a really special eye.” Without missing a beat, he added, “It doesn’t feel like a woman is directing it; it feels like it’s just a top professional.”
But, as a black woman in an industry dominated by white men, Matsoukas has an unusual affinity with her most frequent collaborators. Beyoncé wrote to me, “I feel safe working with her and expressing or revealing things about myself that I wouldn’t with any other director, because we have a genuine friendship and I trust her artistry.” Their first videos together were playful and unambitious: a teaser for the song “Kitty Kat,” in 2007, was a minute-long vignette of Beyoncé vamping in a leopard-print bodysuit. Over time, their work became moodier. In “Why Don’t You Love Me,” from 2010, Beyoncé drinks Martinis and screams lyrics into a Princess phone, her mascara running, like a deranged housewife from “Valley of the Dolls.”
Matsoukas set the video for the 2013 song “Pretty Hurts” at a fictional beauty pageant, focussing on the ways that beauty standards affect women. She gave Beyoncé bulimia, and shot a scene of her throwing up in a bathroom stall. (Though, even then, she didn’t fail to make her star look captivating.) “They’re cool girls who play together,” Dream Hampton, a filmmaker and music writer, told me of Matsoukas and Beyoncé. “Melina is very supported. Black filmmakers don’t generally get to play in film—it costs too much money. But Beyoncé is willing to invest.”
Matsoukas has also become close with Beyoncé’s family; she has directed videos for Solange, and in 2014 she spoke at her wedding. “One of the special things about our friendship is, nine times out of ten we are on the same wavelength,” Solange told me. “Her being a black woman being able to tell those stories in such a bold, unique way is really rare.” In “Losing You,” from 2012, Solange wanted to feature sapeurs, an informal society of Congolese men who compete to have the most ostentatiously stylish outfits. Matsoukas recalled that security concerns prevented them from shooting in Congo, so they moved the shoot to South Africa and invited some sapeurs. “We really had no money,” Solange said. “We didn’t have a real plan, because we didn’t have a full production team.” For a scene in which Matsoukas wanted magazine clippings on the walls of a night club, she and Solange worked with the crew to cut up magazines.
Last year, on Solange’s thirtieth birthday, Matsoukas posted a tribute to their friendship on Instagram. She recalled their first meeting, on a conference call, when “I thought you were high but later realized you were just a slow ass talker,” and a moment of bonding when they “ate mad sushi and became sisters.” In the post, Matsoukas described the “Losing You” video as “one of the best pieces of art that I’ve ever made.”
When Matsoukas started working on the “Formation” video, mainstream black artists were showing unaccustomed interest in issues like police brutality. “The people rose up, and the artists were so behind—the artists were still navel-gazing,” Hampton told me. “Because of the Black Lives Matter movement, artists are not relevant if they’re not talking about what’s happening in the streets.” One of the most arresting scenes in “Formation” depicts a black boy facing a line of white policemen, doing what Matsoukas calls a “peace dance.” The camera cuts to a wall emblazoned with graffiti, which reads “Stop Shooting Us.” “I wanted to talk about police brutality and talk about us dying and us being killed, but do it an artful way,” she said. The boy was supposed to dance shirtless, but he had arrived at the set in a black hoodie. Matsoukas told him to keep it on. When Beyoncé saw the footage, she questioned the change. “I was, like, ‘Please let me keep it,’ ” Matsoukas told me. Beyoncé acquiesced. The singer and her dancers then performed at the Super Bowl wearing black berets and militaristic leather that resembled Black Panther attire.
After the performance, Beyoncé told Elle that she was not anti-police. “I have so much admiration and respect for officers and the families of the officers who sacrifice themselves to keep us safe,” she said. “But let’s be clear: I am against police brutality and injustice.” The backlash was intense, with extensive Fox News coverage and police unions threatening not to provide off-duty security for Beyoncé’s “Formation” tour; in response, the Nation of Islam offered its own protection. Matsoukas worried about the heated reaction. “It’s kind of scary,” she said. But she doesn’t regret her choice of imagery. “When they said ‘Formation’ was anti-police, I was, like, ‘So what are you, pro-shooting us, then?’ ” she said.
Beyoncé funded the “Lemonade” film herself, allowing for a kind of artistic control that few black artists have experienced. Despite boycotts, the album sold more than two million copies. It was first released on the music platform Tidal, of which Beyoncé is co-owner, helping to attract more than a million new users in a week. The “Formation” tour promoted her other ventures: Before one performance, I watched two extended ads for her sportswear line play on the giant screens. Other black musicians Matsoukas has collaborated with—most notably, Rihanna—espouse the same message of economic self-determination. We have money now, their lyrics suggest, so we’re going to build a kind of power that has been denied us. “Malcolm X, during the Nation of Islam years, was absolutely a capitalist,” Hampton said. “Elijah Muhammad’s idea of self-determination and independence was very much linked to black capitalism.” With Matsoukas’s help, Beyoncé has made the idea of capitalist liberation an essential part of her presentation. The last lines of “Formation” encourage listeners to put business before feelings: “Always stay gracious, best revenge is your paper.”
Matsoukas is now working on her first television show, an HBO series called “Insecure,” which grew out of the comedy writer Issa Rae’s Web series “Awkward Black Girl.” The show is a sendup of Rae’s trials in work and romance, and a love letter to South Los Angeles, where she grew up. Most music-video directors hope to eventually move to film and television, which offer more prestige and creative scope. Few are successful. “The industry discounts music-video directors as being all style, and so it makes it hard for executives to see beyond that,” Paul Hunter, the veteran music-video director, said. Another director in the industry told me, “In videos, you can do quick cuts and pretty shots because it’s exciting just to look at Rihanna or Beyoncé’s face. When you don’t work with big celebrities, you can’t get away with that.”
Rae requested Matsoukas for the job, but told me that she and Matsoukas sometimes clashed on how to balance authenticity and glamour. “Her taste is more elevated than mine,” Rae said. “A lot of our biggest battles come from me wanting this to be grounded, and we end up meeting halfway. She comes from a more heightened world, and I’m self-proclaimed basic.” Matsoukas, who is an executive producer of the show, brought on Solange as the music consultant. Where the Web series was amateurishly filmed, with nondescript interiors and haphazard lighting, “Insecure” is artfully composed and glossy. The characters’ travails play out in a shabby-chic apartment, a glass-walled boardroom, or a South L.A. mansion—environments that suggest excellence rather than a struggle to get by. For a sequence in which Rae’s character pursues a love interest at a corny open-mike night, Matsoukas found a historic club with swirling tile mosaics on the walls, then painstakingly lit it to flatter the actors. “She’s a perfectionist,” Deniese Davis, a producer on the show, said of Matsoukas. “It obviously wears everyone out around her, but I think when you see the end result you always appreciate it.” “Insecure” received six N.A.A.C.P. Image Award nominations, including best directing in a comedy series. The show recently began preproduction for a second season.
One afternoon, Matsoukas and Davis took Matsoukas’s black Range Rover out to scout locations for B-roll. Davis drove while Matsoukas, wearing a rose-colored blazer over a lacy camisole, skinny Levis, and peach heels, shot video on her phone. As reggae played on the car stereo, we headed to Leimert, a mostly black neighborhood in southern L.A., with palm-tree-lined streets and tidy bungalows and ranch houses in pastel shades.
Rae had made a list of places that were significant to her when she was growing up. The first was the Vision Theatre, a vaudeville-era landmark facing Leimert Park that has been in the midst of stalled renovations for two decades. Matsoukas shot only the building’s green tower, avoiding its dilapidated façade and shuttered windows. “We’re trying to show Leimert and Inglewood in a nice way,” Matsoukas explained. “To show that it is a vibrant community that has a lot of culture. It’s where the black people are.”
The next site, in a nearby plaza, was a concrete fountain, with a flute in the center streaming water. “That fountain is not poppin’,” Matsoukas said. She studied the fountain warily. “Maybe a moving shot from the street or having someone pass through it,” she mused. “The trees kind of frame it nicely.” But there was a limit to what Matsoukas would work with. Rae had included on her list a doughnut shop that she had frequented as a kid. “I’m, like, ‘I’m not shooting the Krispy Kreme,’ ” Matsoukas said. “I don’t know how to make that look good.” ♦
The author of this article is Alexis Okeowo, she joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2015. She is working on a book about people standing up to extremism in Africa and is a fellow at the New America Foundation. This article was originally published on NewYorker.com
