Director Sam Pollard on HBO's 'Black Art,' 'MLK/FBI' His Work With Spike Lee & More [Deep Focus]

At 70-years-old, filmmaker Sam Pollard has had a massive career spanning five decades as a dedicated chronicler of the Black experienced in America. But it’s arguably just getting its due in a major way and unlike never before (“The phone’s been ringing off the hook,” he said). Pollard— a director, editor, and producer— is an Oscar nominee (Spike Lee’s “4 Little Girls” doc, which he co-produced and edited), has been nominated for seven Emmys and has won three different times (two wins for the Spike’s incredible Katrina doc, “When The Levees Broke”) and has also been honored with a Peabody Award (for Spike’s second Katrina doc, (“If God Is Willing And The Creek Won’t Rise”).

So, behind the scenes, he’s known and is a giant in the world of documentaries (he was recently honored with a prestigious lifetime achievement honor from the IDA Documentary Awards). But to paraphrase a perfectly-put New York Times in a recent profile of Pollard, he has been slowly crafting a “quietly monumental filmmaking career” over the last fifty years that is starting to reach its apex.

Pollard’s career has probably been best known as the editor of Spike Lee’s films in the 1990s and 2000s (“Mo Better, Blues,” “Jungle Fever,” “Clockers,” and the aforementioned celebrated docs, to name just a few). However, thanks to the one-two punch of “MLK/FBI,” the IFC Films documentary released in January, and “Black Art: In The Absence of Light,” the critically-acclaimed HBO doc about contemporary Black art in the United States that came out earlier this month, Pollard is finally getting some major name recognition (though last year’s HBO’s critically-acclaimed “Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children,” which Pollard co-directed paved the way for this newly recent wave of acclaim).

And yes, there’s a lot of work that came before that. He’s directed and or co-directed at least 20 features and TV series—”Eyes on the Prize“; “Sammy Davis, Jr.: I’ve Gotta Be Me“’ “Mr. Soul!”; several American Masters series for PBS on cultural giants like August Wilson and Marvin Gaye; “Two Trains Runnin’”; and his editing and producing credits are massively long. He’s a veteran and an elder statesman of film and documentaries. I was honored to talk to Pollard about “Black Art,” “MLK/FBI,” his seminal work with Spike Lee, and a lot about his entire career.

Below, a quick condensed-for-clarity Q&A highlight, but please check out the full podcast for the entire conversation. Pollard is also an educator and teacher, and there’s a generosity of spirit in the filmmaker that makes for words of wisdom that are easy on the ears. For deeper context, “Black Art” focuses, initially, on the late David Driskell’s landmark 1970s art exhibition, “Two Centuries of Black American Art,” but then veers off into its contemporary influence (some deeper Driskell context in the clip below; he sadly passed away from COVID-19-related health issues last year).

It strikes me that while a doc on Driskell’s seminal art exhibition would be more than enough, it was important to explore its contemporary echoes.
You know we knew we couldn’t get everybody, but we wanted to reach out to people we thought had different approaches to their art and different approaches to the idea of creation. That’s how it came about. I could have done the film just around ‘Two Centuries,’ but I thought it would have probably had what I call a feel where it was just looking at 19^th and 20^th century artists. And even though they’re very important, Jacob Lawrence and Amy Sherald, and Selma Burke they’re all very important artists.

It also seems art collectors are an important of the equation in the doc, the way they celebrate and amplify black art. Swizz Beats’s gallery gets some shine here.
Oh yeah. Well we knew, yeah we knew that we wanted to add collectors and that for years there’s been African American collectors. David Driskell had been collecting since he was at Howard University. So we wanted to find the African Americans who were collectors. And one of the reasons that we were so attracted to Swizz Beatz is he’s contemporary, he’s hip. The young audience would probably understand who he is and gravitate toward him. And knowing that people like him and Sean Puffy Combs, Jay-Z and Beyonce are collecting art, I think would be an opportunitycollecting art, I think would be an opportunity —a window to open up to younger people to sort of say, “let’s go these museums,” and so it gives people an opportunity to see that people of their generation, from what I call a hip hop generation, are into artwork.

“Black Art: In The Absence of Light” is available now on HBO and HBO Max. “MLK/FBI,” is available on VOD now as well. Listen to the interview below.

Update: HBO have made “Black Art: In The Absence of Light” up for free on YouTube and you can see it all here.

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