Radha Blank explains the facts and fictions of the forty year...

The audience can’t help but engage with the outsider, and that’s exactly what Radha Blank’s black and white directorial debut “The Forty-Year-Old Version” gives them. The film assumes that there are no age restrictions on career advancement, and it’s a defensible claim: famous artists from Claude Monet to Leonard Cohen didn’t have success until their thirties and forties. That’s Blank’s narration, on-screen and off.

“It doesn’t matter how much you put into something, no matter how old you are, because you should always expect your efforts to be undervalued,” she said in a recent interview with IndieWire. “But you can’t really take that personally. It is just the way it is. ”

In the film, which won the directorial award at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival world premiere, Blank plays a fictional version of herself – a once promising playwright, nearly 40 years old, whose career has stalled and who is now teaching drama to students as she tries to deal with her own unfulfilled professional achievements.

There is some truth to the premise, but that doesn’t mean Blank has never had any success. The film, which began as a web series, was in fact inspired by Blank’s experience as a playwright and rapper in Harlem. Like the character, she received some solid notices for her off-Broadway work nearly a decade ago. “Seed,” which opened in Harlem in 2011, following a jaded social worker; As a result, she lost her mother and tried to make sense of her professional ambitions. All of that makes it into her film.

But Blank did not become completely dormant during this time. She has also written for successful television series like Fox ‘Empire’ and Netflix’s She’s Gotta Have It, and those paychecks made for a far more stable career than the fictional character in her directorial debut. “Television is nice and lucrative because I could buy a house with no debt,” she said.

But “The Forty-Year-Old Version” marks a crucial turning point in the multi-hyphenation that WME and Lena Waithe represented as executive producer prior to its Sundance premiere. “I have an arsenal of scripts waiting for their moment,” she said. “I want people to ask me what I want to write for myself, and I hope this film will make me do that. I left television to work on the film, and it had been my only focus for the past year and a half. So it has to work. It has to have an impact for me to have a career as a filmmaker. I hope so. ”

Another aspect of her life explored in the film is the character’s emerging work as a hip hop artist. This much is true: Just like in the film, Blank took the stage name RadhaMUS Prime and invented the persona after she was fired from a script gig a few years ago. And like her character, she’s still in control of shape, although it’s a career move she’s been aiming for for a while.

“I’ve been rhyming since I was about 10 years old,” said Blank. At one point in her teenage years, she actually thought that this would be her main career goal. “It was a fun hobby when I was a teenager and the producers I worked with were mostly men,” she said. “I feel like hip-hop is an art form. You’re allowed to brag, live in a place of bravery and just tell the truth in ways we normally wouldn’t. ”The RadhaMUS Prime personality eventually inspired the web series that later debuted in Feature film length should be.

The title of the film is obviously an appropriation of Judd Apatov’s comedy “The Forty Year Old Maiden” from 2005 and, like this film, runs for two hours. Blank said she wanted the title to have complex implications for popular storytelling – and black story assimilation in particular. “Throughout history, people have embraced black culture,” she said. “Besides, I thought, why can’t we have a self-deprecating black protagonist of a certain age who comes to a realization of herself?”

Blank also co-opts a long history of on-screen black and white love letters to New York, from Woody Allen to Spike Lee to Martin Scorsese, all of whom see them as the inspiration for the film’s distinctive look. Cinematographer Eric Branco (who also directed Chinonye Chukwu’s “Clemency”) used 35mm film to capture the city in all its subtleties, from dirty bus stops to cocktail parties. The elegance creates an ironic contrast to Blank’s rough existence. “It’s a film that was made with respect for the New York artists who inspired me, but from my point of view, which is rare,” she said. “I think digital works for some things and film works for others, and I think film is so delicious. I hope the next movie I make is in the movie too. “

The next project is likely to continue her interest in bringing her real life to the cinema. Blank said she was writing a father and daughter road trip story based on a true story about her relationship with her father, with whom she had a controversial relationship. “We did this road trip and stopped at a friend’s and the friend was Sun Ra,” she said, referring to the avant-garde jazz musician.

Blank may be the breakout story of 2020, but it’s not looking for big commercial opportunities. “There was a time when storytellers took more risks,” she said. “So I hope this film sets the tone for the kind of career I want where people don’t expect me to be safe.”

While Blank’s ego often gets in the way of her professional ambitions in film, the reality is that she has developed a more complex relationship with the way her work is now perceived. “It reminds me of the time when I was performing and creating something that I thought was very serious that people would laugh,” she said. “And I’m up there in character like, ‘What the hell is so funny all of you?’ But I understand that when it comes to black audiences, there are many reasons why we laugh. Sometimes it’s because we feel uncomfortable. Sometimes we laugh because we know something. I think the moment I performed I realized that you can have an intention, but your audience will get it as they get it. “

“The Forty-Year-Old Version” is now streamed on Netflix.

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