Beyonce was supposed to “add more to the story” of ‘Black Is King’ before the coronavirus pandemic shut down filming.
The 38-year-old singer released her powerful visual album on Disney+ last month, and two of the directors for the production – Kwasi Fordjour and Blitz Bazawule – have now said they were forced to revise the story because of the global health crisis.
Kwasi revealed: “Definitely. We were planning to add more to the story. We had to table that idea and really look at everything we had and go, ‘Okay, this is what we’ve got, here is the messaging, here is the story. How can we enhance this?’ We had the key ingredients and all of those things helped tell the story the way we told it.”
To help piece together the story without shooting any more scenes, Kwasi and Blitz had to grab old videos and unused footage, which presented a unique challenge for the creative team.
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But Blitz believes the setback happened for a reason, as it made for the perfect timing of the piece amid the Black Lives Matter protests.
Speaking in a joint interview for The Fader, he said: “COVID was such a shift in our entire worldview and I think the universe is so wise. The timing of this piece could not have been better. The fact that we were planning to add more and the universe said nope. We were shooting so much content that we never fully watched or listened to, so we had to go back and create from what we already had.”
‘Black Is King’ is based on ‘The Lion King: The Gift’, the soundtrack LP Beyonce produced for the 2019 remake of ‘The Lion King’, in which she voiced Nala.
The ‘Crazy in Love’ hitmaker executive produced, wrote and co-directed the release which puts “the voyages of Black families, throughout time” in the spotlight and follows “a young king’s transcendent journey through betrayal, love and self-identity”.
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