“The United States vs. Billie Holiday” is about the singer s protest anthem "Strange Fruit" and one narcotics officer s vendetta to stop her from singing it.
CinemaBlend
Feb. 23. 2021 12:12 AM
The United States vs. Billie Holiday doesnât so much feel like a film based on a screenplay as much as it does a series of index cards pinned to a corkboard.
Starring:
Andra Day, Trevante Rhodes, Garrett Hedlund, Melvin Gregg, Natasha Lyonne
Written By:
Suzan-Lori Parks
The United States vs. Billie Holiday doesnât so much feel like a film based on a screenplay as much as it does a series of index cards pinned to a corkboard.
Every biopic trying to capture the life of an individual faces the exact same inherent problem: an individualâs life doesnât play out like a traditional story. Awareness of this frequently leads filmmakers to go the route of identifying and playing out a meaningful event that encapsulates who a person was, but every so often there are movies that aim to just try and squeeze a whole existence into 120 or so minutes. The great risk, naturally, is creating what functions less like a narrative, and more l
Being tasked with re-creating Billie Holiday’s iconic looks in “The United States vs. Billie Holiday” was a challenge for costume designer Paolo Nieddu, both because director Lee Daniels’ biopic required so many costume changes and because there was a pressure to get the history right. Ultimately, Nieddu, who previously collaborated with Daniels on “Empire,” determined that the film’s aesthetic was an imagined take on Holiday rather than a definitive reality.
“I knew Billie has a lot of fans, and there are a lot of people who might say, ‘That’s not realistic,’” says Nieddu, who had eight weeks of prep time before production in Montreal in late 2019. “But we created our Billie. It’s not an A&E ‘Biography’ documentary. This is ‘Lee Daniels does Billie Holiday,’ and that’s where I had to take my mind and focus. It became our interpretation of this time.”