ATLANTA — Hollywood used to love the big biblical epic movie back in the 1950s and 1960s with classics such as “Ben Hur,” “Spartacus” and “The Greatest Story Ever Told.”
Jeymes Samuels, a 34-year-old British musician and producer whose breakthrough film was the 2021 Western “The Harder They Fall,” loved these movies and missed them.
“But even watching those movies, they never resembled the world I grew up in,” said Samuels, during an interview in Atlanta last month at the Four Seasons Hotel. “Bible stories are all about the hood, people from the land of the have-nots. I just didn’t know anyone who looked like Charlton Heston or Marlon Brando.”
So Samuels created “The Book of Clarence,” an unusual take on the weeks leading up to Jesus’ crucifixion, featuring an entirely fictional yet complicated character named Clarence. A skeptic of Jesus with a comedic air about him, Clarence is played by Oscar-nominated actor and FX’s “Atlanta” cast member LaKeith Stanfield.
The film, shot in Italy in late 2022, is now in theaters.
Samuels said the film idea had been percolating in his head for many years but only came to fruition when he cast Stanfield on the set of “The Harder They Fall.”
“I knew I had Clarence. He was delivered to me on a golden chariot,” Samuels said. He looked at Stanfield and said, “The movie only became real to me when I found you.”
Stanfield said once he read the script, “it was ride or die. I had a religious upbringing. A lot of the themes in the script were familiar to me. … Clarence’s story identified directly with me.”
Clarence, to Stanfield, “is a regular guy who happened to be around in the time of Jesus and the apostles. We never hear from the people who were around him and how they looked up to a messiah. I wanted to emulate that and situate a story with Black skin in a story we’re not typically seen in.”
Stanfield said he hopes Clarence’s journey “resonates with people so they can see themselves in him and his brother,” a twin who is an apostle of Jesus, also played by Stanfield. In Clarence, he added, “I hope you want to be better and do better, to bring your family up, find your faith and find your foundation.”
Samuels, while writing the script for “The Book of Clarence,” focused on his own ideas and didn’t worry about what others might think of his take on a classic biblical story, which includes modern-day quips and jokes. “You cannot create truth under scrutiny or judgment,” he said. “You have to eradicate the notion of other eyeballs and stay in your tunnel. It was just a really, really exciting ride from script to screen.”
When he pitched “The Book of Clarence” to studios, all of them said no — except Legendary Entertainment, which has made films such as “Dune,” “Godzilla vs. Kong” and “BlacKkKlansman.”
They gave Samuels the budget and creative space to make the film he wanted to make.
“I honestly felt like a spirit was running through me and everyone else on set,” Stanfield said.
