Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise
Liane Buck: Rita and Bob Hercules, thank you for being here and giving us this opportunity to interview you. The movie is absolutely incredible. I had no idea that Maya Angelou was so multidimensional. Yeah. Since, of course, I’m from another country, I read some of her poetry, but I read in translation. But since I have been here in the United States, but I had no idea how incredible and iconic this woman was. And I want to thank you for making this movie.
Bob Hercules: Thank you so much.
Liane Buck: Yes. Please tell us what motivated you to create or recreate the story of Maya for this movie? What was the motivation behind it?
Bob Hercules: Well, I mean, for me, Rita and I did not actually know each other before making this film, so we came together because of the film. I guess my motivation was; I was always a fan of Dr. Angelou’s, and I thought she was an important voice in our culture. But, and I started to think about a film about her, because I discovered, in doing some research, that oddly, amazingly enough, nobody had ever made a film about her, which was shocking to me. So I started to do some research about her and the idea of making a film and maybe taking it to American Masters, the show on PBS that I’d worked on a few other films for. And then a mutual friend of ours, a mutual friend introduced me to Rita. And Rita had a similar thought going on about doing a film about Dr. Angelou. And that’s where Rita can pick up the story.
Rita Coburn Whack: Yes. I think that I ended up working with Maya Angelou for Oprah radio. So I had done a documentary, and television documentary was one of the preferred ways in which I wanted to do media storytelling through filmmaking. However, one of the things that I’ve always done is I’ve worked in both radio and television. So from 2006 to 2010, I worked for Oprah radio, and I had several hosts, and Maya Angelou was one of my hosts. During that period of time, Ms. Winfrey wanted me to go to her home and record her as she was getting older and she wanted to have four shows for the month. So I, out of her generosity, I would go to her home to do those recordings. Once there, out of Dr. Maya Angelou’s generosity, she insisted that I stay with. And so from 2006 to 2010, I would go to her home in either Harlem or Winston-Salem or with her on the road once a month and record four stories. During that period, I realized that I was listening to history and that the best form of telling this would be a documentary.
So I began to work on how that might look and ask her about it, and when she granted her permission, there was a point at which, working at HARPO, one of the people that I worked with knew Bob. They had been, I think they had been at the same college. And she knew that Bob was working on a similar idea, and so we got together and formed a group as co-directors to make the film.
