Jesus Walks With Me
After exploding onto the scene with his 2021 directorial debut The Harder They Fall, filmmaker Jeymes Samuel pans his lens from the Old West to the New Testament with his sprawling new epic The Book of Clarence. Inspired by the biblical dramas Samuel grew up admiring and the scale with which they conveyed art and entertainment in equal measure, the film is an attempt to revive, with swagger, a hibernating genre for contemporary audiences who have seen it all. But they’ve never seen this.
The Book of Clarence tells the story of Clarence (LaKeith Stanfield), a down-on-his-luck denizen of Jerusalem in the year 33 A.D., who embarks on a misguided quest to capitalize on the rise, celebrity and influence of a messiah named Jesus. For Clarence, God doesn’t exist, but Jesus and, most notably, his 12 apostles do. They may follow a flawed magician, in Clarence’s eyes, but they are beloved stars all the same. They are also protected and revered. For a neighborhood philanderer and peddler who suddenly finds himself owing local gangster Jedediah the Terrible a sizable amount of coin, that part is key. Jeymes describes in his own words, his motivation in making this film -
“The Book of Clarence is my way of giving people a full meal of how I see cinema, as an all-inclusive environment. While I am not part of a religious sect, I count myself as a believer in God and something greater than myself. But this film is not meant to be a ‘religious’ film or a retelling of biblical scripture. It really is for everyone, no matter what your belief system may be.”
The Book of Clarence
“As a storyteller, I want to give audiences something they’ve never seen before. As a person of faith, I want to deepen our understanding of the historical context that has shaped our beliefs. And as an entertainer, I want to show you a wicked good time. Where those three points intersect is The Book of Clarence, a cinematic extravaganza 2,000 years in the making.”
“The film arose out of my desire to tell a story about the environment in which I was raised, but situated in a biblical setting. I am a huge fan of cinema and I’ve always loved westerns and biblical epics, which is why those are the first two genres I explored straight out of the gate as a filmmaker. I grew up on their larger-than-life depictions and sturdy craftsmanship. But in today’s landscape, these genres are rarely explored. I feel like that is such a mistake because these stories, rooted in the historical, hold the potential to illuminate our present-day lives.”
“Back in the day, there was The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), Jesus Of Nazareth (1977), Quo Vadis (1951), Samson And Delilah (1949), The Robe (1953), The Ten Commandments (1956) – all of these wonderful, vibrant movies of scale and substance. Going to see a biblical epic was as common as going to see the latest superhero saga today. But for me, Jesus was the best, dopest superhero of all time. Perhaps the first one ever.”
“The idea for The Book of Clarence came out of my admiration for this breed of cinema, and truly, I love them all. But I always found something particularly compelling about those movies that didn’t necessarily tell the story of Jesus or adhere to the very pointed and purposeful parables laid out in the Bible, stories that instead ran parallel to those proceedings. Movies like Ben-Hur (1959), for instance. I loved others like Spartacus (1960), as well, that really unearthed something of daily life in that era, that were ground-level and all the richer for it.”
“After all, the Bible gives you broad strokes. Those are the bricks. The mortar that holds it all together is our faith. But what of the stories that exist within the cracks of that mortar? What of the everyday nonfiction of lives that crisscrossed with biblical history as a backdrop? What of the hairdressers and village cobblers and mundane charlatans that walked the very same earth as Jesus Christ?”
“The Book of Clarence is one of those stories. More to the point, it’s a story about a man’s journey of self-discovery. Clarence is a dreamer, but he isn’t an executor of those dreams. He can do anything, but he doesn’t see it within himself that he can. He doesn’t know his own power. He’s a man without faith who finds it along the way and who discovers that, with God at his back, he, too, can walk on water. My sincerest hope is that you’ll see this film and conclude that, while our dreams may seem out of reach, our ambitions are quite tangible and real.”
“And hopefully you’ll have a wicked good time as well. We certainly did while making it.”