Amistad (film) - Production History

Production History

Amistad is often referred to as director Spielberg's attempt to balance the images created in his 1985 film The Color Purple. Although that film was a critical and box-office success, a great deal of African Americans (men in particular) felt the film went out of the way to portray black men in a negative light. The Turner Classic Movies site discusses the issue in depth:

The idea of filming the Amistad affair came from actress and director Debbie Allen, who had run across some books on the subject. After running into fund-raising problems, she brought the project to Spielberg, who wanted to stretch his artistic wings after making The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), and was looking for a prestige production to direct for DreamWorks SKG, the studio he'd recently co-founded. Spielberg was an unlikely person to tackle the Amistad story, since his previous picture about black characters, The Color Purple, had been badly received by the black community, its eleven Oscar® nominations (no wins) notwithstanding. "I got such a bollocking for The Color Purple," he told a New York Times interviewer, "I thought, I'll never do that again." But he saw great potential in the Amistad story and decided to take it on, even though his crowded schedule meant doing pre-production while DreamWorks was still being launched and post-production while Saving Private Ryan (1998) was before the camera.

Notably, in the film Spielberg includes several references to the African slave experience that resonate deeply within the African American community today. Among these were the introduction of Christianity through a neo-colonialism method, and the idea that Americans who sided with slaves often forgot that the slaves had a history before they arrived in America. Amistad is notably from the distinct perspective of African men, who in the film are seen as heroic, protective, courageous, resolute and intelligent. Many film classes show clips from both Amistad and The Color Purple to highlight not only the middle passage scenes and its lingering effects on American society, but also how black men are portrayed in media and what stereotypes are created as a result.