Gina Prince-Bythewood says The Woman King is the movie she’s always wanted to make. The director whose earlier efforts were more personal dramas (like, of course, Love & Basketball) has, with her last two films, veered into all-out action with 2020’s The Old Guard and, now, premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, The Woman King. As a huge fan of movies like Gladiator and Braveheart, and an admirer of directors like Kathryn Bigalow, these are the movies she’s been wanting to make but, until recently, couldn’t even get into a room to make her case.
The Woman King stars Viola Davis as General Nanisca who leads an all-woman elite fighting force that protects her kingdom from outside invaders. A rival kingdom reveals its intentions to not only attack, but has also made a deal with slave traders. Nanisca must train a whole new group of warriors in an effort to protect the kingdom. And Nanisca pays special attention to one of her young future warriors, Nawi (Thuso Mbedu).
The idea of The Woman King has been floating around for a while and it kind of seems like fate the Prince-Bythewood would wind up directing after the success of The Old Guard. But it’s not just a movie of epic battles (those are there), but Prince-Bythewood explains ahead how she put her own experiences into the film. Namely, the relationship between a young woman given up for adoption reuniting with her birth mother. Something Prince-Bythewood has experienced that did not go the way she had hoped, so she got to play that situation out again in The Woman King with a different resolution.
It does seem like you’ve had a shift in the kind of movies you make? Was action something you always wanted to do? Or does that just happen?
You know what it is? The industry made a shift. I mean, I’ve always loved these movies. I love action movies. I love historical epics. Braveheart is one of my favorite movies…
I saw you mentioned The Last of the Mohicans, too.
I love that film. It holds up. It holds up. So I’ve always wanted to be in that bigger sandbox, but women were shut out of it and it wasn’t until Wonder Woman and Patty Jenkins and the success that she had, that suddenly cracked open that door and led to more opportunities. It was certainly Skydance wanting a woman for The Old Guard.
Kathryn Bigelow had a lot of success, but it didn’t seem to have the ripple effects. There’s Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact, stuff like that, but with Patty Jenkins it did seem to spread out.
And trust me, Kathryn Bigelow was my hero coming out of film school. She was doing the type of films like I wanted to do. And then just continued to do great work. But yeah, the door just wasn’t open, so I had the desire, but not the opportunity. So I just kept making these personal films that I wanted to make in hopes that it would eventually lead to something bigger.
So did you have to really convince someone for The Old Guard?
I couldn’t get in the room. Nobody could get in the room until you’ve done some sort of action. But how do you get that experience if you’re not let into the room? So it was this constant block, but it was Skydance wanting a woman for The Old Guard. And it was Love & Basketball and Beyond the Lights that got me in the room, because they wanted someone who was really good with story and character for that piece, and that’s the first time that that happened.
So if you don’t do The Old Guard, do you get to do The Woman King?
Yeah, that’s a good question. I absolutely do feel like all my work up, until this point, including The Old Guard, made me ready to take on The Woman King. I learned a lot with Silver & Black, even though it didn’t go, which made going to The Old Guard feel more like a step than a leap. And then from Old Guard to this? I learned so much in terms of action shooting, action choreographing, and training the actors for action, it made this just a side movement.
Before the pandemic was The Old Guard supposed to get a theatrical run?
It was supposed to get both.
I’m sure that was disappointing not to have the theaters, but at the same time, at that point in 2020, people were really excited for a new action movie coming to their houses.
No, it was interesting when I first got the gig, it was going to be theatrical and then they came to me and said, “Netflix wants this film and will give you dramatically more money than a studio would have.” It was interesting; the studios were like, “Ah, it’s two women at the head of it, maybe…” Where Netflix was like, “We want this.” And that’s pretty hard to turn down. And the difference in budget was substantial, but I just didn’t know what that was going to feel like. What does it feel like to come out on Netflix? Is it going to have the bigness? Am I going to feel the energy? And then it was, okay, well, you’ll have both, so I could feel it. But then the pandemic hit.
But everyone saw that movie.
I know…
That has to mean something, right?
No, it’s amazing. Don Granger, at Skydance, his final argument to me was, we make movies for an audience and this will give you the biggest audience and so I was like, “Okay, cool.” But then to actually have a film that drops in 190 countries on the same day, on the same moment, I’ve never… As a black artist, you were told, and I’ve been told my entire career, “Your films don’t travel,” so to suddenly have that type of feeling…
Not only traveling, it was everywhere.
Every country, everyone has access to it, I mean, whether you’re paying for it or not…
Right…
It was a beautiful, kind of seismic feeling that definitely changed my career.
A lot of movies today with all the CGI have a tendency to look sometimes like cartoons. Then Top Gun: Maverick comes out and everyone’s like, “Oh yeah, that’s how movies used to look. That’s real.” Anyway, your movie looks incredible. It also looks real. I think that’s what people want right now.
Oh, 100 percent. And again, I love Marvel movies.
Yeah, oh I do too. Don’t get me wrong.
But there’s something… I mean, again, my references were Braveheart and Gladiator, these movies that came out back in the day that don’t get made very often today. I mean, that are visceral and raw and real and I never wanted to get away from that. These are real women; this is a real story. I never want an audience to forget that and that was a big part of shooting in South Africa as well. I wanted the scope and the epic feel to it. I didn’t want it to feel like a green-screen movie. And I wanted the actors to have a 360 environment to play in so that when they’re walking around in the clothes that they’re wearing, they’re not looking over and seeing a car or an airplane up ahead. It was just, this is the world that we’ve created for you.
I couldn’t help but notice there’s an important plot point in this movie of an adopted daughter meeting her birth mother. And this is something you went through personally and, from what I understand, it wasn’t the greatest experience when you met her. How much of that goes into this movie? Is that too personal, a bad question?
No, it’s not. That’s what I love about being a director and a writer, is to be able to put myself into stories and it the incredible conversations that I was able to have with Viola and Thuso about the storyline, because some of the dialogue is what I wish I had heard.
That’s what it felt like, but I also thought maybe I was reading too much into that…
No, it’s interesting because there were some arguments that, at times, about this film, specific things and dialogue… but it is that thing, what is a filmmaker in their vision? What did they bring to it? And there could be a hundred filmmakers that would’ve made this film a little differently, or maybe just focused on the fact that these women are badass fighters and that’s what this movie is. For me, as a filmmaker and my vision, this is the movie I wanted to tell: both intimate and epic and have that personal story weaved in. And to be able to tell the story of these two women, and obviously don’t want to give it away, but it was important to me to have this story but also have it be truthful because I know the truth. I could talk to Thuso about the depth of what she would feel in that moment, and Viola as well, so…
There’s a moment you could have easily ended the movie, but then there’s great care taken to really have more dialogue between the mother and daughter and that’s when it hit me. I’m like, okay, there’s some real emotion coming out here from you, at least I think.
Yeah, that’s the thing. If I ended where you are talking about, that’s like, yes you could technically. But that’s not the end of the story. That’s, on the surface, the end of the story, but there are two women who had a profound connection and there has to be some closure to that. It wasn’t the true ending of the story in their story until they could say those words to each other.
Right. Well yeah, it hit me. It’s like, well this is the story. The story is between these two, and especially coming from your perspective, I’m like, yeah, if I’m you, of course this is the story. And it’s like it really hit me when that almost coda of after all the action is over and I was like, this is, especially with people who know your story. This is actually really lovely, and it was really emotional when you just said, “I wish this is what I had heard,” and that’s a very beautiful thing to say. I don’t know if that makes sense.
I am curious why you’re not doing The Old Guard 2. Was that your choice?
Yeah. There’s something about sequels for me. When I do a film, I put everything into it and even if I haven’t written the original script, I’m still writing on it and putting myself into it and it’s like, this is what I wanted to say. And I always knew that The Old Guard, I always knew that it was a trilogy and I loved where it was going, but I said what I wanted to say and The Woman King came and this just trumped everything. This was the movie that I’d been waiting probably my whole life to do.
So you wouldn’t consider more of The Woman King story? I know we’re a day before eve the premiere of the first one…
[Laughs] It’s like, whoa! No, but if somebody else wants to take on this story, because there are a thousand stories that haven’t been told within this world? And it is my hope, certainly, that this film and its hopeful success will inspire others. And studios, honestly, to fund these type of movies because, again, this is one that’s never happened in the history of cinema. How is that possible in 2022?
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