Yes, Malcolm Washington is the son of Denzel, the two-time Academy Award winner. And yes, other members of the Washington family—such as his older brother and collaborator, John David—work in the entertainment industry. But Malcolm’s feature-film directorial debut, The Piano Lesson, didn’t come easily.
Growing up in Toluca Lake, in Los Angeles, Washington and his siblings—two older, and a twin sister—watched movies constantly. “When you’re the youngest, you don’t get to pick what you watch,” Washington, now 33, says. Still, as a child and even as he ascended through the Windward School in his late teens, films hadn’t yet spoken to Washington in a significant way. Instead, he focused on basketball, earning a spot on the University of Pennsylvania’s team in 2009.
Without any real “desire to be a filmmaker” upon his matriculation, Washington ended up in a course taught by the film historian Donald Bogle. “He wrote this great, seminal text, called Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks, about the history of Black representation in film,” Washington says. “From that class, it was like, ‘Whoa, wait, what? [Film] could be a study of history, of identity, of race, of America?’”
That course served as a “huge jumping-off point,” says Washington, “to talk about all these things I was engaging with for the first time.” From there he became a film-studies major: “I wanted to scratch that itch, and follow my curiosity down its rabbit hole.”
His budding interest in cinema was only furthered when, in his sophomore year of college, he saw Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, with his mother. It “was the first kind of conceptual film that I had seen in theaters—and it just hit me,” says Washington. “It ended, and me and my mom were just holding hands, crying in the theater. It became the most influential movie of my development.”
After graduating from Penn, in 2013, Washington enrolled in the M.F.A. program at Los Angeles’s American Film Institute (A.F.I.), whose alumni include David Lynch and Darren Aronofsky. “I dove in and committed my life [to filmmaking],” says Washington. In his second and final year of the program, in 2016, he directed a 20-minute short film on police violence, called “Benny Got Shot,” as his thesis project. “That was for sure the biggest thing I’d made up to that point.”
Upon departing A.F.I., and with “Benny Got Shot” now under his belt, Washington landed an apprenticeship under the director Spike Lee. “That felt like a postgraduate degree,” says Washington. From school he had learned the “framework of making a film,” but under Lee he developed a new sense of the work ethic required at the highest level of the art form. The experience was transformative. “In my generation, especially among Black filmmakers, Spike is our dictionary. He’s the lexicon.”
After a year under Lee, Washington set off on his own, working on “shorts, and more shorts,” including Summer of 17 and The Dispute. Then, in the fall of 2020, he read August Wilson’s play The Piano Lesson for the first time. The story follows a Black family (the Charleses) in the wake of the Great Depression as they debate whether to sell or keep a family heirloom: a potentially lucrative grand piano, which was designed and owned by their enslaved ancestors.
Although Washington hadn’t been seeking out a concept to pursue for his first feature film, he found himself discussing his vision for an adaptation with John David. “I just had a clear vision of it,” Washington says, and with the prompting of his brother—“He was like, ‘You go for it, you write it’”—he connected with the screenwriter Virgil Williams and began a draft.
By 2022, with a script in hand, Washington went about accruing his cast. John David was on board “before the film even existed,” says Malcom, to play Boy Willie Charles, the son of the Charles-family patriarch, Doaker. And for Doaker himself? Washington cast none other than Samuel L. Jackson.
“I went to Sam’s apartment and sat with him and talked about my vision,” says Washington. “We ended up just talking about our families, because [The Piano Lesson] is so much about ancestry and lineage.” The meeting led to Jackson’s commitment to the film—“and then it happened for real.”
Speaking of ancestry, the film, which premiered at the 51st Telluride Film Festival in August, was produced by the elder Washington, Denzel. But for Malcom, the resonance of family within The Piano Lesson looms even larger than his father. Tinkering with Wilson’s story, “I lost myself and discovered myself in it,” he recalls.
“This is about my family, my great-grandparents, my uncles,” says Washington. “It just became so personal, seemingly out of nowhere—not by design, but [the play] was just this living, breathing thing, like a time capsule, a document of my family.”
Like his own experience in making the film, Washington hopes that audiences can find something within The Piano Lesson that resonates on an individual level. “I hope that they can watch the film and, when it ends, feel like they’ve experienced something that connects them to their ancestors,” he says. “That they see themselves in it. That they recognize that their life is possible because of the decisions and actions and sacrifices of so many before them.”
“And when the film ends and the screen goes black,” says Washington, “that it was just a mirror. It was a mirror the whole time.”
The Piano Lesson is available for streaming on Netflix
Jack Sullivan is an Associate Editor at AIR MAIL
