Mere weeks later and only one week into shooting, director Mary Lambert (who had been brought in to replace Ross) was also let go, in part because she was changing production details that Prince had already approved. Costume designer Marie France recalled one such instance when, days before shooting Mary Sharon’s birthday scene, Lambert directed France to replace the handmade cut-velvet gown worn by Kristin Scott Thomas with something else. When France sought Prince’s approval, he told her to disregard Lambert’s direction. “She was gone after that,” France told me. “That day or maybe that week. That might have been the last straw.” It was also the last straw for Lambert, whose statement explaining her departure was both diplomatic and incisive: “It’s just become quite apparent that Prince has such a strong vision of what this movie should be…that it makes no sense for me to stand between him and the film anymore.” Lisa Coleman, keyboardist for The Revolution and one of Prince’s closest musical collaborators, felt there was an incompatibility between how film directors expected to work and how Prince did. “The directors were trying to do what he was wanting,” she explained, “but they were under a lot of pressure because he was always like, ‘Let me do it myself.’” She remembered that sometimes when she was playing the piano, Prince would lean over her to play the chord the way he wanted it to be played. “I think film is a director’s medium,” she said. “That’s who’s driving it. That’s who’s holding the paintbrush. But Prince would reach over and take that paintbrush.” With no screenwriter, no director, and shooting already underway, there was no choice but for Prince to paint on his own.
Prince’s decision to take over as director has been widely seen as a disastrous move, one motivated by both hubris and desperation, which is not altogether untrue. The move incensed Hollywood, in part because it was a flagrant violation of union rules (unenforceable on overseas productions like Cherry Moon) that prevented anyone on a film from firing the director and then taking over their duties. But it was also a direct challenge to cultural hierarchies that Hollywood had a vested interest in maintaining. If the be-thonged author of pop smut like “Head” could direct a feature film, then all the cultural capital afforded to directors as auteurs was called into question. To be fair, directing Cherry Moon himself hadn’t been Prince’s first choice, but he also wasn’t entirely unprepared for the role when it became a necessity. He had been directing in one capacity or another for years: casting talent in roles he’d written, building narratives, coaching performances, and generally overseeing production. He’d also always intended to make films, and Purple Rain had allowed him to observe the process up close. Film was just another instrument for him to learn, and he set about learning it the same way he did any other: watching someone else play, picking it up himself, and then letting it rip.
Once Prince had complete control of Cherry Moon, it was no longer a feature film; it was a large-scale multimedia project that played in the spaces where music and cinema made contact. Since its inception in his earliest handwritten pages, the film’s narrative wrapped around a diegetic song that would also have a material life. In the film, Christopher chases a love like the one described in the popular ballad “Under the Cherry Moon,” but the song he’s referring to (Track 4 on Parade) was written by Prince about the love that Christopher chases, finds, and loses. Prince conceived of the film and the album as an integrated world before either entered production, but concept became reality when he took over the set.
Paces away from where cameras were rolling, Coleman and Wendy Melvoin (guitarist for The Revolution) were in a recording truck working on Parade. “Prince would come in sometimes between scenes, listen to what we were doing, maybe offer a suggestion, and then he’d run back to the set,” Coleman told me, remembering that he sometimes adjusted scenes that had yet to shoot so they better fit what Coleman and Melvoin had written. The recording truck also allowed Prince to reconnect with his primary creative language while he was learning another through trial by fire. “If he was on the set too long, he could get reinspired by coming in the truck for an hour and playing bass,” said Coleman. “I’d see his face change as he played.” Recording the album on set was partially a solution to a logistical issue, but Prince also needed to maintain contact with the music in order to sustain the creative clarity that directing the film required.
If Under the Cherry Moon was as much of a disaster as critics said it was in 1986, one couldn’t tell from its recent sold-out screenings in Los Angeles, where audiences recited dialogue, sported replicas of Mary Sharon’s iconic beaded headdress, and turned the theater into a dance party when the end credits rolled over “Mountains.” “When I saw the film for the first time,” Coleman told me, “I loved that Prince was letting out the side of him that I knew so well – the goofy guy, the prankster. In a way, Cherry Moon is more biographical than Purple Rain.” After one of the L.A. screenings, Johnston told me that she felt Prince’s often-mocked loverboy persona, in all its absurd pageantry, now seemed up to the minute. Whatever Prince did, he did it entirely, and he did it in a way that no one else would have imagined or dared. And whatever he was doing, his message – expressed so clearly in Cherry Moon’s exit music – was always the same: love will conquer all, if you just believe.
The love that went into this film has bloomed in the last forty years, providing us with uncomplicated pleasure and life-affirming joy at a time when we are most in need of them. Whatever one feels about his films, whatever the films’ charms or failures, Prince was a fascinating and original filmmaker. He would have turned 68 today, and next month his first feature film turns 40. This is the time to celebrate both.