Born in Mississippi and raised in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, Charles Burnett is an independent filmmaker whose work has been praised for its portrayal of the African-American experience. A 4K restoration of his first feature film, Killer of Sheep, which Burnett wrote, directed, produced, photographed, and edited in 1977, is now in theaters through Kino Lorber. Since then, the United States Library of Congress has declared the film a “national treasure,” as one of the first 50 films on the National Film Registry, and the National Society of Film Critics selected it as one of the “100 Essential Films” of all time. His other films include The Glass Shield, a groundbreaking narrative on police corruption and violence, My Brother’s Wedding, To Sleep With Anger (starring Danny Glover), and his lost 1999 film, The Annihilation of Fish starring James Earl Jones and Lynn Redgrave, which was finally released in early 2025. Burnett’s nonfiction work includes The Blues, produced by Martin Scorsese, Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, and the PBS documentary Power To Heal, on the painful history of segregation at southern U.S. Hospitals. (Photo courtesy Milestone Films and the Walker Art Center.)
Three Great Things is Talkhouse’s series in which artists tell us about three things they absolutely love. To mark the April 18 theatrical release of a new 4K restoration of Charles Burnett’s seminal work of American cinema, his 1977 debut feature Killer of Sheep, the legendary writer-director shared some of the things he loves most in life. — N.D.
Walking in My Neighborhood
I can’t get enough of walking in my neighborhood, whether it’s a good day or a rainy day. There’s a lot of nature where I live and you hear the birds all the time, so I can just walk down the street and drift away.
There’s a lot of greenery here, and I will sometimes see wild animals, like coyotes and raccoons, which are funny animals. There’s a big park that has a lake in it, which is really nice. I will sit there and have fun watching the Canada Geese that land near the lake. They make this honking noise and they’ve gotten so used to people that they don’t run as much as they used to.
There are a lot of undeveloped areas in my neighborhood, so you can see Red-tailed Hawks flying around, way up in the sky. Sometimes they have babies, young hawks flying around with them, and they make this really beautiful sound when they’re up in the air. It’s like a flute with reed that isn’t quite in tune. It’s a strange, lovely sound. I like listening to the hawks and watching them glide around; they don’t flap their wings, they just float on the thermals.
I used to love to ride my bike in Los Angeles. I used to go all over the place, but L.A.’s got too dangerous for that. There’s not very many people on the streets in my neighborhood, though, so I can walk around for two hours and maybe not see one person. It’s really unlike New York, where, good Lord, especially in downtown Manhattan, there’s so many people that I can’t even see myself!
When I go on a walk in my neighborhood, I usually have the intention of thinking about material for a script, and I end up drifting away, just walking and saying, “I gotta do this, I gotta do that …” On my walks, I’ll try to get all the knots out and just think of nothing but my script. It’s almost like a drug, because when you go for a walk on a beautiful day here, in certain areas you can look up and see the mountains in the distance. I love doing that here.
The Trumpet
When I was in junior high school, I started playing the trumpet. Every kid in the neighborhood was playing one instrument or another, because everyone thought they could become a famous musician. If you played the trumpet, you thought you were going to be Louis Armstrong or Miles Davis. I used to come home from school and drive people crazy blowing my trumpet, because I’d open the windows and just hit the wrong notes and spend hours and hours playing. But I enjoyed it!
I haven’t played in a while, but I’m going to get a French horn and start back up again, because I really like to play. I so enjoy learning how to play the trumpet and just generally appreciate it as an instrument. I’ve always been a big fan of Louis Armstrong, and I wanted to play like him, because he was so creative and imaginative. I love a lot of his early work, like “West End Blues.” There was a jazz station I used to listen to called Immortals and they would play great music. I remember one Sunday evening turning on this jazz station and listening to Billie Holiday. It was so memorable to listen to her in the afternoon and late evenings, because she had such a voice.
Something I don’t like about playing the trumpet is that when you play for a long time, you get this awful droop on your lip that hangs down like a turkey, and you also get calluses that form on your lips. But one of the reasons I want to go back to playing an instrument is because it allows you to create without having a lot of money. You don’t have producers giving you rejection notices or making life difficult for you, you just play for yourself and no one has to like it. You’re not competing with anyone.
Westerns
There are several Westerns I still watch over and over again. There is a movie called Ramrod which I like a lot, with Joel McCrea, Veronica Lake and Donald Crisp. I also like Shane and Blood on the Moon, and The Yellow Sky with Gregory Peck is another good one. Blood on the Moon and Ramrod are the kind of Westerns that I like, because you can relate to the characters. They are about people who are struggling for the kind of things you find in today’s society. Ramrod, to some extent, is about capitalism, as there’s a guy trying to take control of everything in the town. It’s a very well made film and it’s a Western, but it’s really a film noir too, and I like it a lot because of that. And I just think Shane is a very simple film, but beautifully made; visually it’s really striking and it has really interesting characters. Ramrod has great characters, too.
Westerns were not what got me interested in cinema, though. That happened when I worked in the magazine pool at a library downtown, and I used to look at photojournalism by the great photographers in old bound magazines. I wanted to be a photographer first, and then I saw some documentary films that I really liked, and that’s how I got my interest in cinema. At school, I took a writing class by a wonderful lady called Isabelle Ziegler, who made me aware of a lot of great writers, and so I switched over from electronics to English. The way she taught the class, I just gravitated toward these great stories. And that’s when I said, “This is what I’d like to do.”
