Charles Burnett on Finally Releasing ‘The Annihilation of Fish’

It’s not coming from a major studio, but there actually is a new romantic comedy getting a U.S. theatrical release this Valentine’s Day weekend — never mind that it was shot more than 25 years ago. The late James Earl Jones and Lynn Redgrave star as aging neighbors turned tender lovers in “The Annihilation of Fish,” newly restored in 4K from Kino Lorber and Milestone Films.

Playing New York now before expanding to Los Angeles and select cities, the film not only finds two terrific actors — three, including Margot Kidder — working at the top of their games, but also sees them united with director Charles Burnett. Once limited to laurels within the independent film community, Burnett’s name has been canonized in recent years, after the re-premiere of his UCLA thesis film “Killer of Sheep” — a funny, haunting and altogether ineffable slice of neorealism set in L.A.’s Watts neighborhood. So how, then, did his fifth feature, “The Annihilation of Fish,” go largely unseen for more than two decades?

According to the twisting, years-long saga recounted in the press notes for this restoration, a negative Variety review out of the Toronto International Film Festival in 1999 was enough to spook distributors from taking on Burnett’s feature. Then, even as the filmmaker’s reputation grew, rights to “The Annihilation of Fish” became hopelessly entangled in legal red tape, unspooled by the original producer’s bankruptcy.

“That’s the nature of film: hopefully time will make a difference. And it usually does. Maybe it doesn’t, but you live with it,” Burnett says, speaking from New York on Zoom. “As a filmmaker, you can’t be disappointed if people don’t appreciate what you’ve done. That’s one of the good things about film: it changes over time.”

Still, Burnett carries the woe that Redgrave, who died in 2010, “won’t get the response we had really wished she would get from the audiences.” Indeed, “The Annihilation of Fish” is a complete charmer: a masterwork of tonal control that deserves to be reckoned with as much more than an archival curiosity. Jones and Redgrave give delicate and rich performances as Fish and Poinsettia: two L.A. move-ins with their own individual delusions. He’s a Jamaican American who regularly wrestles a demon that plays dirty; she’s a Bay Area refugee going through a bad break-up with the long-deceased opera composer Giacomo Puccini. Each thinks the other is out of their mind at first, but their mutual affection blooms as they come to accept one another’s reality. Burnett’s filmmaking is equally accommodating, especially in one comic touch: a tree branch that rustles and shakes each time Fish pushes his invisible frenemy out the window.

“That was something we added on. We needed to see it from his point of view, to make it true in some sense. Maybe it isn’t bizarre. Maybe it is real,” Burnett says. “They have their own realities to confront, yet they still need each other to avoid loneliness. After all these walls are broken down, they realize what’s important is not their screwed-up dreams, but that there’s a lot of similarities in our existence.”

For Burnett, that compassion isn’t just romantic. It’s political: an extension of his beginnings as a student filmmaker looking to enact social change through his work. As “Killer of Sheep” offered a demystified look at family life in his community, “The Annihilation of Fish” nurtures a love story through its sympathetic portrait of mental illness.

“Every time I make a film, I have to have those elements in there,” Burnett says. “It’s not about making money. Yeah, pay these student loans, whatever it is, and all this kind of crap. We’re about a billion lightyears away from life. It’s crazy. And here we are, these people. It’s just madness. That’s what films are supposed to be about. The good ones show you what life is without adding to the difficulty.”

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This isn’t your first time having a films rediscovered by a wider audience. Your feature debut “Killer of Sheep” re-premiered in 2007 after clearing music rights. How does this experience releasing “The Annihilation of Fish” compare to that last one?

The thing with “Killer of Sheep” was it wasn’t made for theatrical distribution. It was a thesis film. You made it to get a grade. It was one of those things where, if it didn’t have a union seal on it, it wasn’t going to get released. And the film was made by minorities, so they had a disadvantage to begin with. But what happens is, sometimes you get the opportunity to be with your film when it’s shown in Europe, or wherever. There was this notion that, “Oh, Europeans don’t like African American films.” Then you go screen your film and they go, “How come we don’t see more films like this?”

Why don’t they?

The establishment didn’t want to address those issues. They look at things like “Birth of a Nation,” which is one of the most explicitly racist films you’ve ever seen, besides “The Searchers” and some other things, you know? But they looked at “Killer of Sheep” and said, “Well, why haven’t we seen more films like this? This is so different.” Certain people will appreciate it if given the opportunity. You see how negatively people can perceive people of color because of films. No wonder there’s this dichotomy of where people are in this country. You have people like Ron DeSantis — excuse me for bringing him up — who say, “You’re embarrassing white kids. They don’t need to see this,” trying to take everything that’s relevant that would make people understand who we are as people. They have all these false things — things that discourage people from looking at us as human beings, with Hollywood complicit in it. When we were making films, we were trying to tell stories that would serve the interest — not only of America, but of people in general. That’s what we were doing at UCLA at the time: be in a position where we can change people’s attitudes.

There were many casting permutations discussed in the development of “The Annihilation of Fish,” including Sidney Poitier and Danny Glover for Jones’ role and Anne Bancroft and Joan Plowright for Redgrave’s. How did you find Jones and Redgrave ultimately shaped the film from the plans you began with?

One of the things about independent film where you don’t pay the actor: it’s not what the agent wants. Agents don’t make any money on independent films. It’s not to the agent’s advantage to have actors work on a small film, and so they keep them away from it to some extent. You have to have an actor like James Earl Jones, which is that, in spite of what the agent wants, they want to work on a good film and so they will accept the role. We were lucky enough to get people like Lynn and James, Margot Kidder of course. I have nothing but positive things to say, because they demonstrated who they are. A great thing to have over the years is people who have faith in the film. We had this one really bad review.

In Variety…

Hey, c’est la vie. Those things happen all the time. So we lived through it and we’re lucky that we had support.

I think of you as a Los Angeles filmmaker, so I was surprised to learn you’re in New York right now for this interview.

I just took a plane up here for Kino Lorber and all those guys. We put this together to promote a film, so that’s how I ended up here for now. I come here every now and then for occasions. It’s good to come in and leave right after. New York is kind of like… It’s in your face all the time. You can’t go anywhere. But it has its moments.

I’m not sure what your relationship is these days, but “Killer of Sheep” star Henry G. Sanders lost his Altadena house in the Eaton Fire in January. Have you reached out to him at all?

Strangely enough, we were doing interviews for Kino Lorber and I was just talking to him. He was leaving to go back to Altadena that afternoon. We didn’t know then that his house had burned down. Ava DuVernay and a bunch of friends did a wonderful thing by raising funds to help rebuild it. So that was very good. That’s one of the good things about film, right? We do have sympathy. So we’re very happy about that.

Are there any other films of yours that are still seeking a way into the world?

Well, hopefully some other film I can do will come about. This business is so full of rejections, no matter how good the script is. It’s the nature of the game: when it’s someone else’s money they turn the screw. You just have to bear with it and be happy that you made some films and most of them turned out okay and some didn’t. You do a little bit more, no matter what you’ve done. Even the bad ones, you learn.

In a way, the bad ones can make those next ones better.

Mmm — that I don’t know!

Too optimistic?

I don’t know about that! Look, the thing about it is just the process itself. People come up to me and say, “Your film changed my life.” If someone can say, “This $10,000 film made a difference in my life,” I really can deal with all the other negative criticism. If there’s something you can’t take away, it works out.