How best to describe the multi-hyphenate talents that are Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman? Between them, the married pair have worked as actors, musicians, visual artists, poets – and are now co-directors of the Afrofuturist fantasia Neptune Frost. In a total dereliction of journalistic duty, I ask them to solve this riddle for me. How do you normally describe yourselves?
“Well, I recently bumped into a guy I know from a store in LA, walking in Paris,” says Williams. “And he said: ‘What are you doing here? Are you a designer?’ And I said: ‘I’m a poet.’”
“The coolest response,” Uzeyman interjects.
“Well, I could tell he was like: ‘OK, this guy’s a little crazy,’ or ‘Yeah, he’s lying,’ or something. But it took me a long time to give that response in the past. I’m happy to be able to say that now.” Williams may go by poet these days but having collaborated, in his career as hip-hop artist, with some of the biggest names in music – everyone from Trent Reznor to Kanye West to Rage Against the Machine – you might think he would have had no trouble raising money to make hip-hop musical Neptune Frost. Guess again.
“It was a very fucking hard film to produce,” says Williams. “People were not convinced. People kept telling us: ‘You on the [African] continent, you don’t need that much money.’” He rolls his eyes, recalling fielding various idiotic suggestions, from “shooting guerrilla-style” – which is not typically how a choreographed musical is best put together – to asking the cast and crew to work for free. “We had people tell us: ‘But they’re working with you. They should be very proud. You don’t have to pay them upfront.’”
Williams and Uzeyman ended up starting the shoot with enough money for six days of filming, and calling people at night to raise the rest of the money. Uzeyman looks stressed even thinking about it, several years on. (The film wrapped just before Covid hit; the couple got the last flight out of Rwanda to LA.) “We were on the cusp of really closing down. I don’t think we would do anything like this again.”
I’ve met the pair for coffee in a hotel located, appropriately enough, in Bloomsbury, an area of London closely associated with Virginia Woolf, author of one of the world’s first great pieces of genderfluid storytelling, Orlando. You can add Neptune Frost to that canon.
The film follows an intersex hacker (played first by Elvis Ngabo and then Cheryl Isheja) who is drawn into the tech sancturary of Digitaria. There they meet Matalusa (Bertrand Ninteretse) who mines coltan, an essential substance required for producing electronics. What follows is a genderqueer, revolutionary odyssey, filled with righteous fury and a strong critique of the systems whereby mineral-rich African nations are mined by wealthier countries, without benefiting from the vast profits extracted.
But Neptune Frost is also a very beautiful film, locating gorgeous tableaux in unlikely places – the lilac-grey expanse of an open-pit mine scarred with flashes of orange-red overalls, as workers hack mineral ore from the bare rock. Shot in Rwanda, the film is thoroughly multilingual, mixing Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Swahili, French and a little bit of English (notably, “fuck you, Mr Google!”). Oh, and it’s also a musical, a big-screen evolution of Williams’s 2016 album, MartyrLoserKing, from an idea he’s been working on since 2013 in various forms including a graphic novel.
Neptune Frost is, to put it mildly, not like anything I’ve seen before. It’s fresh, it’s original. As you might expect, it’s highly poetic. I ask its creators how they think their younger selves would have felt about it, if someone had plonked them down in front of Neptune Frost and said: “Hey, watch this,” at the age of, say, 15?
Saul laughs – a huge, generous laugh. “That’s what we were moving from, from the jump, you know.” He tells me about a recent experience he had in a clothes shop. “I was in a vintage store the other day, and I saw an old Benetton sweater … ” This very specific sweater turned out to function kind of like the famous madeleine in Proust: a specific sensory evocation of Williams’s past, but crucially (and unlike the cake in Proust), it was all about the not having. “I could never have had it when I was 15.”
Proust’s protagonist, of course, gets to eat the sweet treat. For Williams, seeing the Benetton sweater was all about now being able to have the thing you were once denied. And like the sweater, Neptune Frost is an attempt to conjure something that the 15-year-old Williams would have loved. “I would have heard a film in a language that I never heard before. I would have seen faces I’d never seen before. Music, movement, costumes that drove me wild, people that look like me. I would have lost it the same way I lost it when I watched Do the Right Thing when I was 17 or 18. Or The Wiz or Beat Street when I was 13, you know, this would have been a life-changing moment for me.”
Neptune Frost answered an unfulfilled adolescent longing for Uzeyman, who was born in Rwanda and later educated in France. “At 15, I was in the movie theatre almost every day, watching old films. I was very much falling in love with cinema at that age. And I was watching things like the Godard films, so many films, and bizarrely there was always something missing for me, in the cartography of film.”
Williams builds on this idea. “You know, for us, growing up, there was no question that we had to find our way through a Peter Pan, through an Oliver Twist, a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and you know, none of them ever looked like us. We were there as children, going: ‘Who am I? How am I supposed to put my head in this thing?’ So, you know, if I had been able to see this … ”
Williams isn’t talking here about something as straightforward as simply being able to “see yourself” physically reflected in a film through casting actors that look like you. Narrative is equally important. Neptune Frost is a heroic narrative, but its Black heroes are coming from a very different place, literally and figuratively, to conventional white western heroes. A superhero or a James Bond is normally hoping to preserve the status quo, against a baddy who seeks to disrupt it – but where does that leave anyone who has very little investment in the status quo?
Williams recalls that, at the age of seven, “I loved Spider-Man or whatever, but the mythology surrounding heroes and heroism, and what is a hero, and what are they fighting to defend … ” He shrugs. “I’d like to challenge that, to aim to plant or nurture something that will blossom beyond the patriarchal martyrdom that we’re expected to align with, in narrative and science fiction and all of this shit.”
Uzeyman is the more softly spoken of the pair, more tentative in manner, but this difference in delivery often belies the content of her words. I ask her about their references. Do I detect a hint of David Cronenberg in the film’s attention to the intersection of technology and humanity? I’m not sure either of them are altogether persuaded by this, but the film geek in Uzeyman is certainly a fan of Cronenberg as a visual film-maker, citing The Brood as a favourite: “I love how he films gore. I really like his painterly qualities. I like him very much as a painter. I like his use of red and greens. But in terms of his story, to me it makes me laugh. I think it’s a very comedic thing.”
Williams cackles at this. “I’m haunted by Videodrome, which I saw alone when I was like 10 or 11, up late at night, alone.”
As in the film itself, lightning flashes of good humour illuminate a conversation that touches on some bleak subjects. I am startled to find we’ve somehow been chatting for an hour and a half. Emerging from the hotel into the bright sunshine, I feel as if I’ve travelled through time and space. It’s a similar, hard-to-pin-down effect to the one created by watching Neptune Frost.
Neptune Frost is in UK cinemas from Friday 4 November. Anisia and Saul are taking part in Q&As at the Ultimate Picture Palace in Oxford on 2 November, Ritzy Brixton 4 November, Hackney Picturehouse 5 November and Bristol Watershed on 6 November.
