It was said after Hurricane Katrina that the choice of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club out of New Orleans to carry on their annual coronation ball and parade when there were few other institutions left standing after the storm’s devastation was key to reviving the city’s spirits, demonstrating the resilience of the community that wasn’t going away any time soon, even if the flooded streets suggested otherwise. The boisterous brass band and floats overflowing with celebrants tossing out beads from the deck may not have been back up to full steam at first, but it sparked a rebuilding effort that kept up a nearly century-long tradition as far as the Zulu Club itself was concerned and gave hope to restoring an even larger history as the metropolis would undertake the daunting prospect of a physical reconstitution.
When the Zulu Club was able to bring people together at such a moment of uncertainty, it seemed particularly cruel that only 15 years later, their annual celebration was faced with an even more direct threat in 2020 after the lockdown in the wake of COVID prevented anyone from gathering. The period of isolation was even grimmer when so many elder Zulu members passed away as a result of COVID and the long-held belief that funerals should be celebrations of a person’s life, complete with parades and jazz played in their honor, had to occur with people safely distanced from one another in cars, hardly having the energy they once did in more typical times.
This pivotal moment for the mutual aid organization didn’t go unnoticed well beyond Crescent City and soon Matthew O. Henderson found himself headed to Louisiana to start filming what would become “A King Like Me,” which chronicles the comeback of the Zulu Club’s festivities while extending an invitation to all to join the party. The film finds a gregarious de facto host in Terrence Rice, a sixth-generation New Orleanean (who as it turned out ushered Henderson into town as well behind the scenes) who knows every in and out of the French Quarter as well as the storied history of the Zulu Club, an organization that originated to give pride to the Black community when to march in their parade was make them feel like royalty in the Deep South where to participate in others’ events meant carrying kerosene lamps and pick up horse manure. When the traditions of the organization haven’t changed much, a generational battle has ensued over such recurring elements as the use of blackface, which some elder Zulu members want to keep up as a tribute to an era in which it was the alternative during times when they legally were forbidden from wearing masks as part of their costumes while others see it as part of the racist legacy they’ve tried to transcend, but the ties between the young and old are what’s also given the Zulu club such power when any challenge has occurred, everyone has come through for one another with the confidence that comes from surviving tough times before.
“A King Like Me” can be bittersweet at times when it’s clear the purpose of the partying has been rooted in staving off hardship, much of which has been unnecessarily shouldered by the Black community of New Orleans that has been treated as second-class citizens and forced into undesirable areas of the city to live. (It’s downright tragic when Terrence notes of the chemical plants near his home with resignation, “Nobody wants cancer, but everybody’s going to die one day.”) However, it’s inspiring to see that what the Zulu Club has built become unsusceptible to any passing threats when people believe in it – and one another – so fully and Henderson, in his feature directorial debut, brings audiences into the revelry. Following its premiere at SXSW last year, “the film recently made its streaming debut on Netflix and the director generously took the time to talk about how “Palmer,” the Justin Timberlake drama for Apple played an unexpected role in leading him to Louisiana, the influence of longtime producer/director Fisher Stevens and shifting roles behind the camera from being a cinematographer to directing.
I’ve heard coming from Brooklyn, your first time at Mardi Gras was in 2022. How did you end up in New Orleans to make this film?
Yes, my first Mardi Gras was Mardi Gras 2022 when it was actually really horrible because it was the first after the pandemic, and I had no way to compare it to anything else. But from the [group] that we were rolling with, they said the crowds felt really good and maybe not as good as they had been in the past, but there was great crowd and there was also just great anticipation because because it’s a city built on hospitality, tourism and fun and revelry, and when they weren’t able to do it for the first time in 40 years, everyone was really eager and excited to be back on the road.
I had started to work with Fisher Stevens, who is a producer and a great mentor for me on this project, back in 2016 on a project that I was a camera operator for him on and we’re always [looking] to find another project to work on together and he called me in May of 2020, a few months into the pandemic and said, “I just read this article about the Zulu crew in New Orleans and how devastated they were as a result of the super spreader [event] that Mardi Gras was that year.” He had just finished filming “Palmer” with Justin Timberlake for Apple in Louisiana and he has a long decades-long history of just going back and forth New Orleans for both work and pleasure. So he [said], “I’ve got a great group of individuals down there. I’m pretty sure we can get connected to the [Zulu] club. Do you want to see if we can make something work here?” We drove to New Orleans in June, after speaking with a lot of the participants in the film on Zoom interviews and just establishing who we were going to speak to during the couple days that we were going to be down there and myself, Fisher and another [director of photography] Bill Kirstein drove to New Orleans and essentially drove 25 hours to get there —one person drove, one person talked to the driver and one person slept in the back. We just ripped down the highway down there and spent about two-and-a-half days where we interviewed 16 people that kind of became the bedrock of the storytelling for our film.
Terrence Rice quickly emerges as a central figure in the film. Was he always a focal point?
Terrence is absolutely a lifelong friend now. I’m very grateful to have met him on this project, but it’s interesting because we had several Zoom meetings and pre-interviews with some of the participants leading up to our trip in June, but originally Terrence was our local fixer. He was our connection to the Zulu Club and introduced us a lot of the members of Zulu in addition to a lot of other voices in the film like Dr. Takeisha Davis and Asali [DeVan Ecclesiastes] And we hadn’t planned on interviewing Terrence, but he spent two-and-a-half days with us and every single interview he’d been leading and guiding us, so Fisher was like, “Let’s sit down and talk” so that interview with Terrence on the tractor was the last interview that we filmed on that trip. Literally the next morning we got in the car and drove back to New York and the three of us just couldn’t stop speaking about how impactful all the interviews that we conducted during that trip were, but especially how important Terrence was. It’s funny that even after that, [Terrence] didn’t yet become the main character of the film — we went through a lot of different iterations of the film, but we realized sometime into the edit process his story was the emotional core.
This may be silly to ask, but how did he end up on a tractor for that interview? It’s not your usual sit-down and it also doesn’t seem like part of his general background.
Our hand was forced a bit on that first trip because of COVID, so all of our interviews were all outdoors. We were eight feet plus away from our subjects, reaching into them on zoom lenses and interviewing those participants in different places around around the city. Terrence’s interview actually takes place in his backyard and we were trying to find a chair that would work and the tractor was actually stuck in the middle of his lawn because the engine died. Fisher and myself and the other DP were trying to figure out where we can set this interview and while we were doing that, Terrence was just sitting on the tractor and we were like, “Let’s do it on the tractor. It is not connected at all to what Terrence does for his job, but we wanted all of those interviews to feel even though there was the restrictions because of our social distancing for these interviews to feel intimate, organic and natural as natural as possible, which is why most of the interviews are shot handheld, which is difficult when [over] two-and-a -half or three hours, but it just blended into the aesthetic of the film.
The other scene that piqued my curiosity and all the more interesting because of the presentation was when Terrence and Michael “Quess” Moore, a local activist and radio host, debate the use of blackface in the parade. How did that conversation come up?
Yeah, it was great because as I mentioned Terrence, operating in the role of our local connector, was present for all of the interviews and New Orleans is not a big place. Everybody knows everybody and since he had a connection with a lot of our participants, after the interviews were finished, Terrence would often strike up a conversation, not necessarily to be filmed, but just talking to his friend, and because Terrence is a member of Zulu, he often found himself as the Zulu apologist, defending Zulu in certain situations or just speaking his truth. That became a natural thing when we were filming to put our cameras down for a second and then all of a sudden, they start talking and we were like, “Well, let’s start filming again.” We didn’t actually catch the very beginning of that conversation, but we picked it up and what it evolved into was just a beautiful debate.
Was there anything that happened that may have taken this on a direction you didn’t expect?
That conversation on the tractor was actually not in the film for a very long time. Terrence was in the film, but that moment was not because I was really chasing this idea of what it meant to be King Zulu, [where] I’m following a couple characters that were connected with that storyline and to see how those characters were impacted by the club and have impact on the community. Fisher [Stevens], if he was here, would tell you that at certain points I was trying to force fit characters into the narrative of the film, and Fisher was always like, “Hey, check out that scene with Terrence on the tractor. There’s something there.” And it’s definitely a lesson as my directorial debut in documentary I will now heed and understand, [which is how Fisher would] always tell me to trust in your characters. Your character will lead you and tell you exactly where the film needs to go.” And when we finally listened and dropped Terrence’s tractor scene in and then started to build out from that, the film came alive. Terrence and his inner thoughts became the emotional core.
You alluded to it earlier, but in spite of your wealth of experience on other productions, was directing a feature any different?
It definitely is, but I was very fortunate because when we were in the edit for “A King Like Me,” we were actually editing in Fisher’s basement and right next door to us was his edit team while they were working on the Beckham film that he produced and directed for Netflix. To see him [at work], he was so transparent and vulnerable with me, as was his wife Alexis Bloom, who was also editing a film at the same time, about the things they were struggling with as directors. Filmmaking is hard and every time you make a film. It’s hard and not necessarily seeing them making the same mistakes that I was making as a first-time director, but acknowledging the fact that you’re going to mess up – you’re going to forget to ask a question, you’re going to forget to get a cutaway shot – and for both of them to show me that they were also struggling with the same things, it really gave me a lot of confidence.
I understood what it means to be a director is that you’re not going to get it right every time, but it’s the reason why you have people that are all around you – your producers, your editors, your aides and your social producers – who can help you navigate through those times you might have messed things up. And I learned the most throughout this process the importance of a great editor and that relationship because as a director, you go in this idea of what you want this film to be, but an editor can put that on its head and really reimagine in a beautiful way what what the film can look and feel like. Those were some of the things that I learned, but it’s not easy. I hope to do it again.
I hope so too. What’s it been like putting this out into the world so far?
There’s a tremendous level of vulnerability when you are sharing something that you’ve worked on for so long. We started the pre-production of this film in May of 2020 and the film premiered at South by Southwest and there’s a dual connection for me when I was the director of this film, but I also shot a lot of this film, and when you’re shooting something, you fall in love with how it looks and even if it’s not working, you love the way it looks, so when the film was on the film festival circuit and now that it’s on Netflix, it’s still challenging. We had a screening in New York recently and I was standing in the back of the theater the whole time, kind of hiding in the corner.
But the beautiful thing about the last year that the film has been out in the world is how people are reacting because people respond to different parts of the film or in different ways than you expected. In the edits, you’re [thinking], “Oh, this is going to get the tears” or “This is going to get the laughs.” Then you’re sitting in a theater watching the film with other people and [you think] I didn’t realize that was as emotionally affecting as it was. My favorite part about it all is no matter where we screen the film, there’s always someone that will come up to me after the screening who is a native New Orleanian who will say how much they appreciate the film and how much even they learn. That’s something that’s been really great and it’s not a prideful thing. We wanted to make this film for New Orleans, and when we premiered in New Orleans, I was terrified because I [wondered] how are people going to react to it? But the love that the film has received has been tremendous.
“A King Like Me” is now streaming on Netflix.