“Nobody can tell you not to create. You have to create,” Academy Award nominee Colman Domingo told a crowd of Arkansas filmmakers and fans during Variety’s Southern Storytellers panel at the Filmland Festival and Conference in Little Rock.
Heavy as Cuban Linx (with Timothy Marley)
Filmland co-founder (and director of the 1960s motorcycle club saga “The Bikeriders”) Jeff Nichols presented Domingo with the event’s first Southern Storytellers Award, after which he and Variety chief film critic Peter Debruge moderated a wide-ranging conversation about the craft with Domingo and a half-dozen other writers, directors and producers.
In the prison-set, rehabilitation-through-art drama “Sing Sing,” which screened the same day, Domingo served as a producer alongside fellow panelists Clint Bentley and Monique Walton. All three recounted how their careers began and explained that storytelling may not be the most stable career, but that they’ve all learned to “hustle” to keep going.
"I don't like the word 'struggle,'" Domingo said, recalling a conversation in which someone told him, "I remember you were a struggling actor." The description caught him off guard. "I said, 'You are? Because I don't.' I never considered myself a struggling actor because I think that language sounds difficult," Domingo said. "I don't grind. I actually do the work, and it's exciting, and it's not negative." He identifies more with the word "hustle": "I've had a few jobs. I still have a few. The hustle hasn't left me."
