At the end of “The Final Conflict,” the third “Omen” movie from 1981, Damien the Antichrist croaks out the words, “Nazarene, you have won … nothing,” then collapses.
When Jeymes Samuel saw that scene as a kid, growing up in West London, he thought it was so cool that Damien referred to Jesus Christ as “Nazarene.” So when Samuel wrote and directed his own biblical-era epic — “The Book of Clarence,” now streaming on Netflix — he wanted to draw the curtain on his seriocomic (but ultimately quite earnest) movie with the same word.
“In me saying ‘Nazarene,’ it makes the song less preachy, less religious,” Samuel explains on a recent afternoon in West Hollywood. “Whatever that element is, it’s crying for all of us. But I think the song is about the hope that Clarence hopefully has at the end of the movie.”
In the film, Clarence — played by LaKeith Stanfield in a predominantly Black cast — navigates the oppressive world of Roman-ruled Jerusalem during the time of Christ. He refuses to believe in Jesus and instead starts to perform faux miracles of his own, only to have his life threatened in a way similar to Jesus — and his disbelief challenged.
The song “Nazarene,” which plays over the end titles, is both a ballad and a kind of prayer. Samuel, performing the vocals on his own original composition, sings about an approaching storm (“Gale force winds from the east I see”) and an aging man: “Old man time and his weathered hands / Must keep working for his tethered plans / Years fly by all too rapidly / Absent time with his family …”
When Samuel hears that verse, even now, he gets emotional.
“It’s about the life we all lead,” Samuel says. “Clarence leads this life of desires and dream fulfillment, but his flaw is he doesn’t recognize the things around him that are most important. And I feel that’s all of us.”
The artist, 45, is thinking specifically about his 9-year-old son back in the U.K.
“We work for today, and Clarence strives for today,” he says, “but it’s a double-edged sword. Because he knows he can fly — we know we can do these things — but at what cost?”
Samuel is a man who knows he can fly: He is a multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, composer, screenwriter and director with an all-star hip-hop album (under his moniker The Bullitts) and two feature films under his belt — and a million ideas glowing over his head like one of the literal lightbulbs that hover over Clarence in the film.
When he wrote and directed his debut feature, renegade western “The Harder They Fall,” Netflix was reluctant to let him also score it; under pressure, he met with several “established” Hollywood composers about collaborating. In the end, partly due to pandemic delays, he did the job himself — along with writing several original songs — and the result was one of the most daringly original yet lovingly retro orchestral scores in recent memory.
For Samuel, music is a vital organ of the whole storytelling body; he dreams up character themes as he’s writing the script, and his characters even hum those tunes onscreen. His singular artistic voice — he’s an old-fashioned movie-loving nerd who is also an encyclopedia of all musical genres as well as a close friend of Jay-Z and other hip-hop luminaries — is in the dialogue on the page, it’s in the liquid and crackling camera movements, and it’s in the notes on the soundtrack.
In “Clarence,” when John the Baptist utters a prayer, Samuel has a flute ghosting every syllable. He wrote different themes for Clarence and his twin brother, Thomas (also played by Stanfield), and he already knew how he was going to accompany various shots with lyrical orchestral swells that would pay homage to epics like “Ben-Hur.”
He radically chose to sprinkle the sound of an analog Moog synthesizer throughout the score and on every song — he composed no fewer than 11 original songs for “Clarence” — as his “sneaky hot sauce for the movie,” as he puts it.
He also wanted the same musicians’ fingerprints on each song, even though they hop from nouveau dub to R&B ballad to folk.
“The scale, the memory, the voices and all the musicians are the same — it’s all the same language,” he says. “It’s all, for me, the language of Clarence, of this story.”
“Nazarene” opens with a chorus of voices (all Samuel), and the song is carried by acoustic guitars — Samuel on one, Marcus Eaton on the other — and electric keys by James Poyser of the Roots, who also plays a Moog Sub 37 melody on the track. Andre “Dre” Harris, a veteran producer and drummer, keeps time, and the passionate, lyrical strings were arranged and conducted by Ben Foster.
In the film, characters get high and crack jokes, Christian history gets remixed in surprising and contemporary ways — but at its heart, “Clarence” is a sincere and emotional story about family and faith in an often unforgiving world. It’s a unique blend of vintage cinema and modern soul.
So, in a way, “Nazarene” is the whole movie — and the whole Jeymes Samuel — in a nutshell.
