Delroy Lindo

To answer your question, it started, my preparation for this started with Ryan sending me two books, Blues People by Amiri Baraka, who was Leroy Jones when he wrote the book, and Deep Blues by Robert Palmer.

And I read those books.

That was my intro into the world of Sinners.

And in reading those books and then referencing those books throughout production, I was given an entree into the lifestyles of these musicians.

There's a certain kind of itinerant quality that they moved around a lot.

The constant for them is their music.

so that there is this deep-seated connection to the music.

And because they are following where the music takes them, that then becomes an intrinsic part of their lifestyles.

There are no words.

That's exactly where the music comes from.

And yet another affirmation for me, Tanya, in terms of how people have received this work, it's incredibly affirming that audiences, many audiences, have made the connection between the pain of what I was experiencing and the birth of the music

And I certainly was not thinking about that in the moment.

No.

The humming, the hollering, no, it was not scripted.

It happened organically on probably the sixth or seventh take.

And what is so beautiful about that moment and its retention in the film, it was born of a company of people all working together.

And what I mean by that is

We had a very specific distance to get the scene.

We had a finite amount of real estate to get the scene in.

We started at point A, and by the time we got to point B or point Z, I had to have finished the monologue.