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| The Dutchman Photo: South by Southwest |
In his narrative feature directorial début, Andre Gaines adapts playwright Amiri Baraka's 1964 one-act play, The Dutchman. Set on the New York City subway, the psychological thriller revolves around Clay (André Holland), a troubled Black businessman who has a chance encounter with the mysterious white stranger Lula (Kate Mara). Meanwhile, Clay and his wife, Kaya's (Zazie Beatz) therapist, Dr Amiri (Stephen Mckinley Henderson), inexplicably appears to him outside of their counselling sessions.
Clay's chance encounter with Lula appears to be a dangerous omen that threatens to unravel his life completely. To escape this encounter, he must answer deeper questions that have led him to this moment.
Gaines' previous credits include his 2021 feature documentary début, The One And Only Dick Gregory, and 2022's, After Jackie. From looking back to the famous American comedian, Gaines's focus shifted to the struggle for racial equality in Major League Baseball, focusing on Black ballplayers Curt Flood, Bob Gibson and Bill White, who would build on the achievements of Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play in the major leagues, in April 1947.
In conversation with Eye For Film, Gaines discussed honouring the spirit of Baraka's play while updating It for a new generation, the key thematic threads of the story and not being able to quit filmmaking.
Paul Risker: A director's first narrative feature is a milestone moment. How do you look back on the experience of making The Dutchman?
Andre Gaines: Prior to stepping into the director's chair, my background for the past decade was as a producer-financier. I went to NYU to film school for dramatic writing but left and started my company, Cinemation, which produced The Dutchman.
This was a play I had been pursuing for well over six years — I didn't realise how long I'd been pursuing it. It's the sort of thing that sometimes happens with producers, and I'm a pretty dogged one. If there's something I want, I try to go after it until I have it, and that was the case with this.
I financed The Dutchman like I did my first documentary feature, The One And Only Dick Gregory. There were several other financiers who came in toward the end of postproduction for finishing funds and other things, but it was in the middle of the SAG and WGA strikes.
Having a track record of financing films, it was unique in that we couldn't raise additional capital, and we couldn't do a negative pickup deal with the studio. We couldn't do any of that in the middle of the strikes of 2023, and I know from past experience, if you've got all these fancy actors rounded up, and you're ready to go, then you have to go, now. There is no "Oh, let's put a pin in this until I can get rid of some of my capital and raise some more money." No, you'll step away from it, and you'll look up two years later and see you're trying to make that same movie that you could have made two years ago.
Coincidentally, the rights that I had been pursuing from the Baraka estate came to fruition with The One And Only Dick Gregory because it premièred at Tribeca to a sold-out crowd of about 600 to 700 people. The Baraka family were there, because they're local to New York and New Jersey, but I didn't realise that they were in the audience. I was put in touch with the family through a mutual friend, and we were off to the races. We started writing the script right away in late '21, early '22, and then shot the film in '23 and premièred it just now.
PR: Baraka's play was first performed in 1964. Art can be a powerful lens through which to explore, and sometimes very bluntly, who we and our society are. Also, themes don’t die; they transcend time and remain relevant to the social and cultural discourse. From 1964 to the present day, does The Dutchman offer us a specific lens through which to view human nature, society, and cultural values?
AG: There were two things that jumped out to me about this play. It was made into a movie in 1967, but it was not an adaptation, it was just a very well-done play on film. They just shot the play as it was — two people on a train with the late great Al Freeman Jr., and the late great Shirley Knight. It played Venice Film Festival and played a number of others where she won a couple of best actress awards. It was really quite a marvel at the time, and during that period of time, there were a number of plays on film: 12 Angry Men, Death Of A Salesman, and Virginia Woolf with Elizabeth Taylor.
The problem with that from a technical standpoint is that The Dutchman play is a 55-page one-act play. I tried to get away with the easy route of taking the play, dropping it into the final draft and seeing what the hell happened, but that just didn't work. A 55-page play to a 55-page screenplay, we were barely halfway there. But thematically, you're right, themes don't die, they just morph with the times.
The predominant theme here was a real challenge to black masculinity that Clay, the lead character played by André Holland in this case, is experiencing. In the play, he's such a passive character and Lula is the one really driving the action. Something that André Holland and I workshopped was how do we make Clay more active? How do we give his decisions and his choices more agency, so that he's not just being ping-ponged around by life? That came through in the screenplay, and André worked on foundational character work to highlight that in real time.
The other theme of the play that I wanted to update is the realities of technology and the lack thereof back in the 1960s. In the original play, Lula kills Clay, but in my adaptation, I wanted to take an opportunity to not only explore my version of things but provide a more optimistic counter narrative to the realities of what the original author, Amiri Baraka, was going through at the time. I wanted to utilise technology, in this case, a cell phone that everybody has that didn't exist at that time. What might the implications of that be when it comes time for Clay to seek salvation and actually be free?
So, it was those two things that drew me in, and it's something that drew my stars, André, Kate, Zazie and Aldis, to it. They gravitated towards those themes and those parts of the story, and we got a chance to come together and make something magical happen.
PR: Adaptation is not about being literally faithful to the source material. Instead, it's about being faithful to the spirit of the original work that you then mould into your version of the story. This, to my mind, is the essence of adaptation.
AG: I appreciate that, and we've had a lot of great reviews which appreciated this, and the one or two that we didn't get so great, were commenting against it. I was talking to my producer about it. You're frankly damned if you do; damned if you don't. If I went ahead and did a straight translation, which is what I'd call it because it's not an adaptation, if you take this text, whether it's a book, a play or a foreign film, and literally put it on screen. Or in some cases, put it in English or whatever, without advancing it, adapting it or actually saying something about the work.
I didn't want to do that because, first of all, I didn't have the luxury. It's 55 pages; it's 55 minutes. It's not a feature film. If it were two acts it might be a different story, but it's a one-act play. So, I didn't have the luxury of just taking the play's text and translating it to film. By virtue of that and the fact that it is about these two people and their journey together, it provided what felt like an exciting opportunity as a filmmaker to open it up and to tell this story. And it's one of the things that everybody gravitated towards.
PR: In any story there's the question of "what if?" What would have happened if a character had made a different choice? How differently would the story have turned out? You're doing this with The Dutchman, only you're literally exploring the alternatives. This question is a fundamental part of the audience's experience and the connection they share with the narrative.
AG: Yes, it is. The meta part of this that came about when writing it was the opportunity to tell a story at its core about an author seeking to rectify his past mistakes and creating this monster in Lula. I took it a step further where it's borderline supernatural, just because that's the type of movie I like to watch. I only make things that I want to see. If I don't want to see it, I don't make it. But at its core, that's what it is.
You can break the cycle of history; you can rectify previous mistakes; you can rewrite your own story. You don't have to be a victim or a slave to the past as opposed to living in the present and for the future. All of these types of things are part of our experiences as human beings, and so many people related to that coming out of the screenings — talking about growing up in a broken household, being married with children and being successful, growing up with an abusive father or an abusive mother, or being in a terrible relationship and never thinking they would find a way out of it. You don't have to actually be subservient to the mistakes of your past or the mistakes of your ancestor's past. This primary theme was at the core of this story, and Clay discovers that at the end.
PR: The film offers a reflection on how fragile life is, and how significant the choices we make are in shaping our lives. We can easily find ourselves on a knife edge, and whether we fall or not is not only down to our own choices, but those of others. For me, the film speaks to that mature point of view that's often weighed down with regret as one looks back on one's life, all too aware of the fragility of life.
AG: Yes, it's a great observation. The reality of those outside forces was on my mind all the time. In this film Dr. Amiri, the therapist that shows up outside of therapy, is not as free wielding of a puppet master as it might necessarily appear. Clay's a real man who's essentially been thrust into a morality play. Not only to teach him a lesson about himself, but something about his own marriage and his relationships, so that he can break down those walls, open up, and be more present in the lives of his wife and his friends, and not be so stuck in his own head and ways of doing things.
André Holland and I went to school together. We've known each other for a long time, and it's the first time we've actually worked together. He was my first and only choice for Clay, because he's a real Thespian, a fantastic actor, and he is very familiar with this play.
As a first-time director, the best piece of advice I ever got from multiple dear directing friends of mine, very successful ones from Mark Forrester to Reggie Hudlin, was to hire good actors. That was their first piece of advice, and they couldn't be more right because with these guys, especially with Andre, Kate, Zazie and Aldis, they bring something to their characters that I hadn't even written yet.
It's not on the page; it's buried in the words. They breathe life into these characters and, by being so good at their craft, they gave me the opportunity to shape a tapestry with them, rather than being an acting coach or something. We were well beyond that. We were looking at a way to shape the scenes and the arc of the story with some of these performances, which I was often able to push them towards through multiple takes just to see how it lands because of their prowess. It was a real joy, and it was a lot of hard work. I don't want to give the impression that it was some type of cakewalk, because if you're making a film, it's hard. That's part of it, but there were a lot of those elements that we were able to bring into focus.
PR: I remember Peter Jackson saying that the film is perfect until you shoot the first shot. Then it ceases to be perfect. Is this an experience you share?
AG: I said this in a couple of the Q&As here. Every film breaks your heart, it just does. It breaks your heart for two reasons. One, there's the film that's in your head, there's the film that's on the page, and then there's the actual movie that gets made, and none of them coalesce. Even though the words that are on the page are being spoken. I like a little bit of that spontaneity and improvisation. The goal is to try to do what we rehearsed and amplify it. Instead of it being a five, let's take it up to an eleven.
The other thing, too, is I quit after every movie. I just decide it's over, and I don't want to do it anymore because it's so much work; it's exhausting, and it takes a piece of your heart with it every time. So, yeah, it's very true.
At one of the Q&As, I got applause because I'm at the festival among other filmmakers and writers like yourself, and so people understand my pain and know what that means. Why can't we choose an easier profession, like selling coconuts on an island somewhere? Here's your coconut, give me $5 and call it a day. But no, we have to sleep with this at night. We wake up with it in the morning, and it's with us when we're at the gym. It's all around us, but I wouldn't choose anything different.
PR: A director told me that the person you are before you start a film is different to the person you are when you finish a film. Is filmmaking a transformative experience for you personally?
AG: There were a number of things I took for granted being a producer that I will not now as a director. One thing that changed me, particularly as a director, is seeing those magical performances and that lightning in a bottle happens before your eyes.
I've been on set before as a producer, and even though you're a creative producer, you're detached from it in a way. My dear friend and fantastic producer Jonathan Baker, who co-produced The Dutchman with me, was not in the room with us when we were rehearsing. It's just Kate, André and I or Kate, André and Zazie or just Zazie and I directly across from each other doing that scene work. When she starts crying at a moment where tears are not required or sought after because we've made some breakthrough; we've hit some emotional core of the character, then that's magical. Those are memories and experiences I'll take with me for the rest of my life.
What's so exciting is being able to put up on screen and bring to an audience those quiet moments that are entirely different when you're in front of a crew of 140 people. It just becomes a different thing, but it still resonates, and it still works, and it still becomes what you hope for it to be. It's not anywhere near exactly what you thought it was going to be, but it's something that you can still be proud of at the end of the day. So, yeah, it was a transformative experience.
The Dutchman premièred at the 2025 SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas.
