Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Courtesy Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

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How did you get started?

We got a little bit of money and tested it with Toni Morrison and Thelma Golden. Lucas Hauser, who worked on my previous material, edited it down, and it was just obvious that what we had was great. You could look at that five-minute section of Toni Morrison and know that this was the way to do it: no cutaways, maybe a photo here and there, Elvis never on camera.

How long did the interviews run?

From 35 minutes with Colin Powell to an hour and a quarter with Toni Morrison.

It must have been really difficult to edit them down.

Very difficult. They’re all short films with their own little arc, and you’re looking for the perfect ending and the perfect opening. It’s a very complex structure, despite the fact that it seems very simple.

In the beginning of the film you say it’s “an assembly of short stories on race, struggle, and achievement.” What were you hoping to achieve with it?

If you went to a studio and said, I’m going to do 22 short films with the person looking straight at the camera, and they’re just talking, and the whole thing’s going to be 90 minutes long, they would just throw you out, because it’s against every rule of cinema. But I knew it would work, because the people are so interesting, and I thought if you could go to a gallery and just stand there looking at a photograph for a few minutes, then you could certainly look at a film where someone’s saying something interesting.

It’s like adding a time element to your portraits.

Exactly.

How did you get everyone so comfortable in front of the camera? Some of the subjects, like Sean Combs, for example, seem unusually forthcoming and vulnerable.

I’ve been doing that for 30 years as a photographer, and I think Elvis does it too. I’m very adept at understanding where people are coming from, reading the signals, understanding how nervous they are, doing all the little things that you do to make somebody feel good in front of lights and a camera. I think that’s why the film works so well, because the people feel very relaxed, very open.

Aren’t a lot of these people used to that kind of attention?

Some of them are professionals who are media-trained, but not all of them. And I think even the ones who are gave us stuff that you don’t ordinarily see. You’ve never seen Colin Powell this way. And he’s a pro.

Al Sharpton says in his segment, “No matter how eloquently someone says we’re beyond race, we’re not. Just look at the facts.” Do you think the project is going to have a different reception post-election?

I think the film has really become the film of the moment, because it’s about 22 highly achieving people — Obama would be just another one in there.

Did you ask Obama to be in it?

We’d been trying to get him, but then we worried that if he were in it and it were showing before the election it could look like a political film, and I didn’t want that. Now we could have him, because now he’s just the president of the United States.

One blog post I read about the film suggested there could be a sequel about mixed race.

Well, Slash is in there.

I had no idea he’s black! I was surprised to see him there.

I’d say 80 percent of people don’t have any idea. I’ve overheard people at film festivals turning to each other and saying, “I thought this was about black people” when Slash comes on.

But I think The Black List template is ideal for anything. You could do Hispanics, women, any group you want, and have them talk about that experience.

Let’s talk about your other work a bit. You’ve obviously had a great deal of commercial success — where do you see the line between commercial photography and art photography?

Back in the ’80s, I started a campaign for Comme des Garçons — when no one knew the brand or who Rei Kawakubo was — of artists wearing her clothes. That was the ideal commercial job for me because they came to me and said we like what you do, we saw it in a museum in Japan, can you shoot artists for us wearing these clothes? That was the first commercial work I’d ever done.