Don Cheadle takes on the role of provocative DJ and civil rights pioneer Petey Greene

Talk to Me

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Mass demonstrations and race riots marked Washington, D.C. in the ’60s, as people like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X descended on the city to protest racism and the conservative establishment. In the midst of the turmoil, a larger-than-life radio DJ became a voice for the city’s black population, still poor and marginalized 100 years after the end of slavery. The DJ was Petey Greene. Haven’t heard of him? Neither had Kasi Lemmons until she signed on to direct Talk to Me, a new biopic about his life.
    “The project was irresistible to me,” says Lemmons. “I’d never heard of him, but he was very, very appealing. He was so influential in this community. He’s such a D.C. icon; every cab driver has a Petey Greene story.”
    Lemmons has made only three features in her 10-year directing career, including the atmospheric Eve’s Bayou (1997), set in a southern gothic ’60s Louisiana. Atmosphere was also important for Talk to Me, in which she had to re-create the D.C. where Greene first got on the airwaves. In order to get it right, she reviewed archives full of photographs of the city. While the research was mostly for the sake of accuracy, it also inspired Lemmons artistically. “One of the most brilliant films I’ve seen was filmed out the window of a car driving through the streets of D.C.,” she says. “It was just someone’s home movie.”
    To reproduce the atmosphere of the times, she and her cast watched period interviews with African-Americans talking about what it was like to be a minority in America. One of the reasons Lemmons signed up for the movie was to reenact the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and this proved one of the hardest scenes to put together. “We had a mock-up of the city block with model buildings and model cars,” she says. “I was lying on the floor with the cars. I really wanted to get it right. I wanted you to be able to enter the footage.” She used models to plot the course of the riots for her crew and watched hours of newsreels taken during the riots. The goal was to be able to splice her re-creations with actual footage of the riots and have them appear virtually indistinguishable.
    Her quest for accuracy took other forms as well, and included bringing Dewey Hughes — Greene’s producer and one of the movie’s principal characters — into the studio. “He made himself available to the production department, even to the wardrobe department,” she says. He coached actors on how their characters would have spoken and demonstrated some of Greene’s body language. Hughes’s son even co-wrote the screenplay. “He had to learn a lot about his dad,” laughs Lemmons.
    To cast the movie, Lemmons carefully selected her actors from an international pool of talent. Don Cheadle plays Greene, with British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor as Hughes. “There was a list of only four people who could’ve played Dewey (Hughes),” says Lemmons. “I had a lot of people of colour who weren’t American. There were Carribbean Canadians, British Nigerians.”
    Lemmons’s attention to detail is clear throughout the movie. The riots and concerts in the ’60s are convincing, and the film is careful to keep the audience aware of the political context of Greene’s life, from the Pentagon protests of 1967 to the cultural shift that America experienced during the DJ’s 15 years on the air.
    At the centre of it all is Greene’s dominating personality and the loud voice that filled the morning airwaves over America’s troubled capital. “I felt a need for Petey’s voice in