Today, my guest is filmmaker Charles Lane.
A lot of the guests on this season of Nobody’s Ever Asked Me That hold a special place in my life, and Charles Lane is no exception.
His 1989 debut feature Sidewalk Stories is one of my favorite films. A silent, black-and-white comedy drama, it’s about a destitute street artist (played by Lane himself) who takes a toddler into his care after her gambler father is killed. A funny, moving, deeply human piece of cinematic storytelling, Sidewalk Stories is a masterpiece, and a true landmark film in independent cinema.
After a rapturous reception at Cannes, Sidewalk Stories was released theatrically, receiving universal acclaim. The film’s success led to Lane becoming the first African-American director to make a movie for Disney, when the company hired him to helm the comedy thriller/race satire True Identity. However, that movie’s failure to connect particularly with audiences or critics hurt Lane’s career. His de facto third feature, Hallelujah, an episode of American Playhouse, followed in 1993 … but he has not made a film since.
I first met Charles Lane in 2017, when he was starting to plot his return to directing. He wrote a handful of pieces for Talkhouse, including a personal take on The Big Sick and interracial love, and an essay on his time making True Identity. During lockdown, he and I teamed up to do an online screening of Sidewalk Stories, followed by a Q&A led by Steve Buscemi, who first saw and fell in love with the film at its Cannes premiere. In 2024, when Talkhouse launched its own zine with a New York City issue, Lane wrote a beautiful piece looking back on his experiences during the 1977 blackout.
Charles Lane is a true mensch, and we’ve become quite friendly, but whenever he and I talk, he’s always self-deprecating and deferential, putting the focus on others, so in this conversation I wanted the spotlight fully on him, to really make sure I got to hear his stories.
Prepping for this episode, I watched all his work, starting with his heartbreaking short film A Place in Tim, a precursor to Sidewalk Stories which won him a Student Academy Award in 1977. I also read his latest feature script, Reel, a comedy horror with machine-gun-paced dialogue … that prominently features an aging reclusive artist reckoning with his place in the world.
As I talked with Lane and learned about what makes him tick, our conversation touched on such topics as: how to make high school love work (with some creative scheduling), being chased by street gangs and dinosaurs, how he copes with regret, his time as a pre-teen pyromaniac, the places one’s brain goes during a 12-minute standing ovation at Cannes, becoming a Jehovah’s Witness as an act of teenage rebellion … and much, much more.
Sidewalk Stories is available to stream on a bunch of major platforms. Please seek it out – you will not be disappointed. Also available to stream is the underrated True Identity ... and A Place in Time and Hallelujah are out there as well, if you know where to look!
This episode was produced by Myron Kaplan and the theme music is by The Range.
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Next week on Nobody’s Ever Asked Me That, my guest is documentary filmmaker Kirsten Johnson ...
