Filmmaker Courtney Glaude is Scary Good
The Houston native has some dark ideas to share with an audience. Tyler Perry Studios is the perfect gateway for his storytelling.
Courtney Glaude should be writing and directing comedy.
Dressed in a matte-black top and baseball cap, the writer-producer-director is asked to complete this statement: “The biggest misconception about Tyler Perry is…”
His response is confident, clear, and humorous as hell.
“All the shit,” says the Houston native. “Pick one. The greatest thing about him is he don’t care what people say about him.”
Glaude is Perry’s golden child, and the Hollywood mogul firmly believes in his storytelling talent. Perry has given him a rare overall deal for his film and television ideas. After catching Perry's attention with his BET Plus thriller, The Reading, starring Mo’Nique and executive produced by Lee Daniels, Glaude has infused his bombastic voice into Perry’s existing IP, including Zatima and Ruthless.
His next psychological thriller, Old Gray Mare, stars A Different World alumn Charnele Brown. The film follows a grandmother whose memory is fading due to dementia. Drawing from his own experiences, Glaude reflects on the time he spent with his grandmother, who also faced the challenges of the disease. With his father in prison and his mother struggling with her own troubles during his youth, Glaude was raised by his grandmother.
“She introduced me to what dementia possibly was,” he says. “[Her’s] was light. She would forget where she was — forget who we were at times.”
While the film’s trailer suggests this will be memorable cinema, Glaude, who cites M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (2002) as the film that had the most impact on him, has a mind full of thrillers to share with the world. But for now he sits with LEVEL to impart some words of wisdom.
His advice and perspective is noteworthy.
The job of a grandmother is to teach history and nurture. My grandmother raised me. One day I was waiting for my mother to come home to do something and she either came home really late from working or didn't come home that evening. I remember I was hungry and crying about it. My grandmother was like, “come here. I'm going to feed you but tomorrow when you come home, I'm going to teach you how to cook something for yourself.” For about a month, my grandmother taught me how to cook, clean, wash dishes, and sew. She taught me how to be self-sufficient.
Dementia can be prevented. One of the preventative things is we have to start going to the doctor with our parents and finding out what's going on with them. Be more attentive to it. Understand that dementia isn't something that they're trying to do. It's not their fault.
Vulnerability is a negative thing in our culture. We've been told that vulnerable means that you are open to be hurt or being taken advantage of. We are raised to believe that there is no part of us that can ever be soft or open in this world.
My writing style is very triggering. I am the filmmaker that you have to prep to watch his content because I'm going to hit you in your chest. I'm the person that doesn't turn the camera away.
What’s impressive about Mo’Nique is she attaches to the character and embodies that role to where now you can't see anything different other than the character that you're working with her and doing the dance with her on. It’s in how her eyes move, how her voice flickers, how she walks.
The biggest misconception about Tyler Perry is all of it. Pick one! People take his silence as, oh, he's this or he's that. Nah, that n***a don't care. He made a statement that really gets overlooked. He said he's made more black creative millionaires in the past two to three years than probably [anyone]. And he's absolutely right.
Fatherhood should be respected more and we shouldn't throw fathers away at any point.
The biggest misconception about Tyler Perry is all of it. Pick one!
The person who should play Beyonce in a biopic has to be new. Somebody we've never seen, because whoever that actress is we’ll never see her as anything else. If you do it well and get Antoine Fuqua to do it will never be seen as anything else. It's going to have to be two women. You’re going to have to start when she was a kid and then come to the Beyonce of now.
Houston deserves more credit for food; we are the mecca. Let me explain why. When [Hurricane] Katrina happened, all of the chefs from Louisiana to Florida moved to Houston because of cost of living. Back in that day when 911 happened [in New York City], all of the chefs moved to Houston as businesses shut down. When California shuts down, people move here. For some reason, chefs keep their businesses going by moving to Houston. You can't name a [kind of cuisine] that we don't have a block dedicated to.