The Piano Lesson director annotates personal photos from film, describes 'emotional' family affair on set

Malcolm Washington remembers the big "whoa" he felt the first time he experienced August Wilson's play The Piano Lesson a couple years ago.

"It was that profound for me that I went from zero to a hundred," he recalls, telling Entertainment Weekly why he immediately jumped into making his feature directorial debut with an adaptation of the 1987 production.

The story centers on a brother and sister, Boy Willie and Berniece, who have opposing views about what to do with their family's piano, which carries with it painful ties to their ancestors. Boy Willie wants to sell it and use the money to buy land, while Berniece wants them to keep the instrument because of the history it holds and the sacrifices made within their own family to obtain it.

"When I found The Piano Lesson, I was going through old images of family, digitizing them and piecing our family tree together and trying to find out how much information I could going up the line — and on a larger level, contemplating what these people, my ancestors' lives, meant for me and how I fit into this puzzle," Washington explains. "Sometimes I think you look at the long arc of history that Obama talks about and you feel it's so far from you, but when you actually start building those links, you see that you're much closer to it than you could have ever imagined.... There's moments [in life] where things line up for you in a way that you have to acknowledge the moment that you're in and what's coming to you."

His own family history didn't just inspire Washington to make the movie, some of them actually took part: Dad Denzel is a producer, sister Katia is executive producer, while brother John David reprises his role, Boy Willie, from the 2022 Broadway production. Joining John David from that show are Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Potts as brothers Doaker and Winning Boy, uncles to Boy Willie and Berniece, and Ray Fisher as Boy Willie's friend Lymon.

Danielle Deadwyler and Corey Hawkins are Berniece and pastor Avery (Danielle Brooks and Trai Byers played the roles on Broadway), both of whom Washington says "blew the roof off" with their performances. "They're such dynamic actors," he says, "and I was really excited to get to show the world this part of their craft."

As for those returning cast members, Washington relied heavily on their experience with the characters. "If you're ever making a movie and you have an opportunity to cast Samuel L Jackson, you just do it," Washington says, laughing. "He has such a storied history and connection to the material that it was like he was our guardian angel the whole way. So of course he was going to be a part of [the movie]. He was connected to it before me."

And while Malcolm didn't put his brother John David through the wringer and make him audition, he did want to make sure he was on board with his vision for the film. Luckily, the Tenet and Ballers star was all in, and Malcolm says things "definitely got emotional" working together. He describes his brother as an "instinctual" actor, who "fights tooth and nail to make himself free and present" in the process.

"He started ad-libbing, which is crazy in an August Wilson thing. He would just go off on these runs sometimes — they were so incredible that one of them ended up as the tagline for the movie: 'Can you feel that? That's your family, that's your blood.' That's him," Malcolm recalls of his brother's performance. "It was so fearless. And when you have one of your lead actors that is fearless, it instills that kind of fearlessness in yourself as a filmmaker.... Our approach to this, the whole way through, has been very bold and different. That was instilled in me by watching him work."

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Below, Malcolm shares personal photos taken during the production of The Piano Lesson, along with his own notes about the making of the movie, which opens in select theaters on Nov. 8 followed by its streaming debut on Netflix on Nov. 22.