Newcomers, director Kasi Lemmons and Amy Vincent, set Eve's Bayou in the spiritual and geographic heart of Louisiana.
Deep in the Louisiana bayou country, voodoo casts an eerie spell that pulsates through the stillness of the majestic swampland, and connotes a sense of danger just a heartbeat away. In Eve's Bayou, written by first time director Kasi Lemmons and released by Trimark Pictures, magic has an aesthetic of its own, danger is as literal as an alligator waiting below the waterline, and as inscrutable as the family secrets that ultimately change the life of 10-year-old Eve Batiste (Jurnee Smollett). The story follows Eve over the course of a summer when her only problem appears to be a mild case of sibling rivalry. Her adoring, albeit womanizing father (Samuel L. Jackson), a successful doctor, prefers her older sister while her mother, who keeps the family peace by ignoring her husband's indiscretions, favors her young son. The colorful Batiste family includes Aunt Mozelle, (Debbi Morgan), whose husbands have an alarming habit of dying in freak accidents despite her supernatural powers, which she may have passed on to Eve.
Eve's Bayou evolved from a series of short stories Lemmons wrote about the main characters. As an actress, Lemmons appeared in Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs, John Woo's Hard Target, and Spike Lee's Drop Squad among others. She enjoyed the creative freedom that writing allowed, and began the script for Eve's Bayou without intending to shop it. "I just wanted to have it, so that if I wanted to make the film years down the line, I could." But the project came to fruition much sooner; Jackson was so impressed by the script he came on board as a producer with Caldecot Chubb (The Crow, To Sleep with Anger).
Lemmons found cinematographer Amy Vincent when the shooter was at AFI. Impressed by Vincent's short film Death in Venice, California, Lemmons responded to Vincent's "very emotional lighting, which evoked a strong sense of melancholy," says the director, who was looking for a shooter who could get more than a pretty shot. In Vincent, she found a cinematographer who could capture the dark secrets and painful beauty of the bayou country.
Lemmons and Vincent began to talk, "and there was a spark right away," says Lemmons. "We understood each other in a peculiar way. We had the same sense of space and rhythm. Amy frames exactly the way I would. We have a shared sensibility, and even though I have a particularly weird imagination, she totally gets it." Several sequences in Lemmons' script came to her through dreams, "which made the film that much more personal to me, and to find someone who shares that vision is truly amazing."
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