Prison Movie Sing Sing stars Oscar nominee Colman Domingo

Colman Domingo first met Clarence Maclin on a Zoom call in 2022. Domingo’s slate that year included playing Mister in the remake of The color Purple and the title role in Rustya biopic about civil rights activist Bayard Rustin that would earn him an Oscar nomination. Maclin, on the other hand, was a decade out from serving his 15-year sentence in New York’s notorious Sing Sing prison for robbery. “We started talking about the bond of brotherhood that Shakespeare illuminates,” says Domingo. Shakespeare, they agreed, was key to the film they were about to make together.

Sing Singdirector Greg Kwedar and co-writer Clint Bentley’s prison drama — more than eight years in the making — first screened to rave reviews at the 2023 Toronto Film Festival. Now, after a slow build, it’s a busy Oscar contender. Domingo plays John Whitfield, AKA Divine G, a leading force in the prison’s theater group, supported by New York’s Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program. Maclin, known since his youth as Divine Eye, plays a reworked version of himself; he is the hard man of the training yard. It was the real G that got him to join the theater troupe, which, he says now, enabled him to turn his life around.

Kwedar read about the RTA while working on a documentary at another New York state prison, Green Haven. The organization had been helping prisoners put on plays since 1996. It seemed to be working – the recidivism rate for RTA alumni was 3% compared to an overall rate of 60% – but what really inspired him was a Esquire magazine report on a production, “a time-traveling musical comedy” called Breaking the mummy’s code.

That play, written with the prisoners by professional director Brent Buell, had everything from zombie mummies to Freddy Krueger. “There was something about the playfulness of the work juxtaposed with its surroundings,” says Kwedar. “The joy of the process just jumped off the page. I wanted to experience some of that joy myself.”

He contacted Buell, who had kept in touch with many of the old-timers Sing Sing gang. Buell invited Kwedar and Bentley to meet them over breakfast. “Around that table there was just a special energy,” says Kwedar. “Just the camaraderie, the New York accents, the humor, the deeper vulnerability. And we were just like, ‘If we could just take what this feels like and put it in a movie, we’d have something.’” He started working with RTA himself as an acting teacher; meanwhile, he and Bentley worked on writing.

For years it didn’t work. What they should have done, they realized, was to work in the same way as the theater group. “We had to open up our writing process,” says Kwedar. “It couldn’t be that traditional. Because we were making a film about a community, and so our process had to embrace that mindset. And then the real Divine Eye and the Divine G came into the storytelling process with us at that point. And immediately it was alive on the page in a way it just never had been before.”

The Sing Sing the cast includes 13 former prisoners and three professional actors. Everyone, including the entire crew, was paid the same. In one corner of the script, Kwedar had written the words “Colman Domingo,” not expecting that bit of dream casting to come true, but Domingo jumped at it. He wanted it all – the flat pay scale, the mix of professionals and RTA alumni, the themes and the fact that Kwedar wanted him to bring all the skills he had: writing, producing and directing as well as acting. “They really asked everything from me and I gave it my all,” says Domingo. “Directing the film, and finding the soul of the film and highlighting these men who are not usually explored in their fullness. And because I’m with those men, I thought I can’t just act. I have to take a little more of myself.”

Above all, he brought the positivity that illuminates Divine G’s sad story. The real John Whitfield fought for years to prove that he had not committed the crime for which he was imprisoned. The parole board rejected his appeals repeatedly, but as the film shows, he never gave up trying. Domingo found a parallel to his years when he was struggling and penniless, long before he became a leading stage actor, star of Euphoria and Oscar nominee. There were dark years.

“When I learned about him, I thought, Oh, I understand that man. I understand him deep,” says Domingo. “And that’s the part of myself that I brought to this film. What happens when things are hopeless or bleak? I’ve had those moments where I didn’t have money or success. I guess the answer, you must find out in your soul, is: what keeps you going? And I kept going because of faith and thought there was something for me.”

He never interviewed the former prisoners or asked direct questions. “Instead of questioning them about their experience, I just said, ‘Let’s sit and have lunch.'” Maclin describes it as a “subtle shroud” and says that he seemed to absorb the real Divine G until he began to resemble him. . “You’d look out of the corner of your eye and catch a glimpse of Colman and you’d swear it was Divine G. And he listened a lot more than he talked when he might have come in, say. great. He’s Colman Domingo!”

None of them see Sing Sing as a prison film. It doesn’t deliver the clichéd shocks of a conventional prison drama: there are no stabbings in the shower, no rapes in the corridor. If anything, it’s more like one of those Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney movies where a bunch of kids put on a show. For Domingo, Sing Sing is about the redemptive power of making art. “You know that outside of these spaces, in the safe spaces that they created, there is violence, there is terror, there is a kind of hell on earth in the prison industrial complex,” says Domingo. “But inside this program there is grace and tenderness, an opportunity to be gentle and use language and art.”

They shot the film primarily in a prison that had been closed just two weeks before they moved in. It was gloomy. “You knew how it all felt: how the air was stale, how you couldn’t find your true north, and what it does to you psychologically,” says Domingo. “Every time we had a break, I had to go outside. While you’re in there, you think, ‘This doesn’t feel like a place for people, regardless of what they’ve done or not done.'” People could reasonably expect , that the film would be gloomy. “But what I love is that there’s so much light,” he says, “and joy and hope. And it’s really fun.”

Kwedar simply says he can’t believe how far they’ve come. When Sing sing premiered in Toronto, A24 picked it up the same week. After that… silence. A 2024 release was always planned, but Kwedar was worried that the magic dust would take over, that it would just sit on a shelf forever. “And then we got back to SXSW and it was almost more overwhelming.” There was even a screening of Sing Sing itself, in the theater room where To break the mummy’s curse was originally performed. They showed it in San Quentin. And now it’s in the Oscar race. “Every time I pause and really think about what’s going on with this movie,” Kwedar says, “I just lose my breath.”