While The Color Purple is still racking up sales at the box office, Oprah Winfrey has already set her sights on her next film project.
The mogul tells The Hollywood Reporter that she’s optioned the rights to The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese, one of her book club selections. But given the plot — which revolves around an Indian family who loses at least one person each generation due to a drowning — she realizes she’s going “to have a hell of a time getting that done because it’s also a story about people of color.”
In THR’s recent cover story on The Color Purple, Winfrey noted that the film’s performance at the box office would likely affect the future of other projects about Black or brown people. She says that despite the racial reckoning after George Floyd that saw Hollywood commit to investing in such narratives, it’s still a challenge to make those kind of films.
But she also notes that studios are less likely to take chances on more complicated projects in general.
“I think that everybody is so afraid and controlled by what they feel is going to work. There is a great loss in people understanding the true power of storytelling that has brought us through eras in Hollywood where you could tell a story like The English Patient and you could tell a story like the original Color Purple and audiences would respond. And now if you don’t have a brand, already marketable brand behind it, it’s hard to sit in a room and pitch a story,” she lamented. “Because unless you’re saying, ‘I’m bringing Rihanna or Beyonce or Taylor or one of the people who have 200 million followers, people are like, ‘What’s the hook?’ …. So I think that that is true for certainly telling stories about people of color. And I think it’s also true for everybody who’s trying to do some serious filmmaking about all stories. It’s challenging.”
And while Covenant of Water was a bestseller, it’s also serious fare.
“There’s nothing we can sell in that, inside that. There’s no dolls you can make and there’s no product you can conjure from it,” she said. “So listen, I am here in the space of finding and creating stories as an offering to the world to show the world to itself and to try to do that in a way that lets in particular, not just exclusively, but in particular people of color see the reflection of themselves in the highest light.”
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