This weekend, as part of the Cinepocalypse festival of genre films, Ernest Dickerson will appear at the Music Box Theatre to introduce revival screenings of two movies he directed, the horror comedy Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995) on Saturday at 5 PM, and the adolescent crime drama Juice (1992) on Sunday at 2:15 PM. Dickerson has enjoyed a long career in both film and television. He began as a cinematographer in the early 1980s and shot over two dozen films, the most famous being Spike Lee’s first six features (among them She’s Gotta Have It and Do the Right Thing). In the same year that he shot Lee’s Malcolm X, Dickerson made his directorial debut with Juice; the film has developed a large fan base over the years, earning its place alongside such beloved modern crime movies as Brian De Palma’s Scarface and Mario van Peebles’s New Jack City. After directing several other features, Dickerson made the transition to TV, where he’s been steadily employed ever since. (Some of his high-profile credits include multiple episodes of The Wire, Dexter, and The Walking Dead.) When I spoke with Dickerson last week, he reflected on the differences between directing movies and television, making the transition from cinematography to directing, and the legacy of his more famous films.
Do you ever get hired to direct multiple episodes in a row?
When you’re directing an episode of a show where the characters and style have already been established, how do you find ways to assert your own creativity?
That’s why television is now many times more exciting than movies. One of the first things that gets jettisoned in a film is character development, because movies just want to cut to the chase as soon as possible. But in television, you can stretch things out a little bit more. You can examine the characters’ lives, take time for the characters to actually become somebody to care about.
White Heat is one of my favorite films. In reality, those kids wouldn’t be watching it—they’d probably be watching Scarface, but I don’t know if Scarface would have been on television in ’92 in the middle of the day. I wanted to make that reference to White Heat because I always liked that scene where [Cagney] finds out about his mother’s death. I grew up in the 50s and the 60s, and a lot of the movies that I’ve seen were on television. Channel 5 in New York used to show a lot of the Warner Bros. films on Sunday afternoons or late at night, and I absorbed a lot of them.
I don’t think he ever enjoyed it. It was something that was required of him after he made such an impact as Mars Blackmon. I remember him telling me that part of the deal to get his films made was that he had to play a role [in them]. I think he wanted to get out of that as soon as he could.
