- I got given the novel written by Andrea Levy, and this novel was beautiful.
It was brilliant.
It was witty.
And it had told a side of a story I had never really read before.
- The story gives light to lots of different types of people in that time.
- These are stories that must be told.
How great that Andrea has written this book.
There are incredibly sad moments.
There are violent moments.
There are funny moments.
It's a very big, all encompassing story about something that happened, about something that's shocking, about something you perhaps didn't really know.
- I have to admit, I was like, wow, how on Earth are we gonna make this?
How on Earth can we tell this story properly?
And I knew I had to do it.
- [Narrator] The tale I have to tell is quite a different one.
- "The Long Song" means a lot to me because of the heritage that it taps into, which is also mine.
My mother is Jamaican.
My grandmother is Jamaican.
My mom came here at 17.
Stories like this really make me proud to be Jamaican, because even though it's fictional, the real rebellion did happen.
It's a really, really inspiring job.
- Think we learned a lot through the material, through talking about what it means to be a Black woman or a Black man.
And I think the actors themselves were engaging with that.
- Because of the subject matter, we knew that we sort of had a collective responsibility to tell the story and and take it seriously, but not take ourselves seriously at the same time.
- Familiarity is just, it's useful, 'cause you become kind of more comfortable with each other, just as yourselves.
- He does not want to see you.
- Certain things that Caroline does are so awful.
And when I was reading it, going, "I don't know how I'm gonna do this and not feel like my skin's crawling afterwards."
But because there's like a playfulness and a trust there, we know that it was all done for the love of wanting to share a great story with each other.
- People get a bit frightened about whether it's okay to represent how we were treated back in the day, but we say bring it on, show it, tell the stories.
It's important that people know.
- It's challenging material.
I think Andrea wanted it to be challenging.
I think we want it to be challenging, but we also want people to (laughs) love it, because it's important.
- It's really sad, but there's so much joy and humor and light in it, which kind of maybe gives, deceives people into taking it in a bit more.
And I hope people, it will hit, the motifs will hit and people will recognize that actually, the course of the world doesn't change by itself.
Radical moments that happen, that allow us to move forward.
- And I've heard people say, "Oh, we don't want to, it's too hard to watch.
These stories are too difficult to engage in.
It's other, it's such a terrible experience, it must belong over there."
And what Andrea, I think, wanted to do, and what we wanted to do was say, "No, humans experienced this," and remind people that people have lives outside of the trauma, and ways of surviving that, which is beautiful and brilliant, despite all the tragedy is, is a beautiful courage, is tenacity.
And that is a really exciting way of getting into a very challenging subject.
(soft orchestral music)