Why Auteurs Like Sean Baker Adore Charles Burnett’s ‘Killer of Sheep’
Director Charles Burnett joined The Hollywood Reporter‘s It Happened in Hollywood podcast to discuss his masterful film Killer of Sheep, filmed as a UCLA School of Film thesis project in 1972 and premiering six years later at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Nov. 14, 1978.
“Killer of Sheep is a lyrical portrait of a community on the margins,” Oscar-winning Anora director Sean Baker has said. “The film doesn’t ask us to feel sorry for its characters, to pity them, but it does demand that we afford them dignity and respect. This demand comes as a whisper not a shout. Groundbreaking!”
A new 4K restoration of the film is currently screening in New York and Los Angeles, with Burnett, 81, on hand to introduce the film. But Burnett took time out of his schedule to speak to THR about how Sheep came to be.
“I went to the school in South Central, and then I went on to LACC College,” recalls Burnett, who enrolled in electrical engineering. While at LACC, however, he took a creative writing class.
“I really fell in love with it,” he says. Around that time he started going to midnight arthouse revival screenings in the Los Feliz area of L.A.
“I started seeing experimental films and really interesting films,” Burnett says. “And so I always liked films, and I always wanted to do some work in camera, but I never had an opportunity to get a camera.”
He eventually did get his hands on a still camera and embarked upon a career in photojournalism. “After I shot this incident of this poor lady, young girl who died of an overdose, I just gave it up,” he says.
Eventually he enrolled at UCLA, where the tuition at the time was quite affordable compared to what they were charging at USC. It was while at UCLA that he met with other Black filmmakers who were eager to create a new language of film. They called themselves the L.A. Rebellion.
“We got together and we, we would talk day and night about what film, what we should be making. And we were responding to the negative images Hollywood kept creating, perpetuating, you know?” Burnett says of the group, who met at the legendary Mexican restaurant El Coyote.
Despite the documentary-like feel of Killer of Sheep, Burnett says the entire film was scripted and even storyboarded.
“It had a conventional script in many ways, except that the structure was completely different. I wanted it to look like a documentary in a sense, that I was answering life as it happened, and it was going to comment on itself,” he says. “I wanted to get an idea of what life is like in my community, like when I grew up and what I saw, and try to make sense out of that.”
The film is currently playing at Film Forum in NYC, and will open at the Laemmle Noho in LA on April 25th. The American Cinematheque will have select shows throughout the week starting April 26th.
For more from Charles Burnett on the making of Killer of Sheep, listen to the full episode of It Happened in Hollywood.
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