AV Club: Watch Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje open up about his painful autobiography ‘Farming’
His directorial debut is a painful autobiography
His directorial debut is a painful autobiography
Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje was working on his feature directorial debut ‘Farming’ for nearly 15 years prior to its release. The British-Nigerian actor is one of the industry’s biggest exports, as he’s best known for his role in ‘Bourne Identity’ and as Malko in the final season of ‘Game of Thrones’. Now, he’s bringing his talents back home with his directorial debut, ‘Farming’ which was premiered last week.
In a recent interview, the British-Nigerian actor narrates how he did not think the world was ready for the seriousness of the film’s subject matter—looking at Britain through black eyes—which inevitably delayed his story.
Akinnuoye-Agbaje chose ‘Farming’ as his directorial debut because of how deeply personal the story is to him, as it’s based on his own experiences as a teenage member of a 1980s white skinhead gang in Tilbury, Essex. The film was a deeply cathartic project for him and many others, as he recalls many Nigerians reaching out to him to recount their personal experiences with farming.
He explains he first heard the term farming from British social workers who coined the phrase to describe the practice of Nigerians coming over from to Britain in the 60s to ‘farm’ their children out to white working class families.
‘Farming’ is the story of Femi (played by Akinnuoye-Agbaje) and Tolu (played by Genevieve Nnaji) who farm their young son, Enitan out to a white working class family living in Tilbury. Enitan is bullied in this white neighbourhood as a child, causing him to hate his black skin; this leads him to join a blackskin head gang in his teenage years.
The African premiere of ‘Farming’ was held earlier this week at Filmhouse Cinema in Lekki. The film will be available to watch in select cinemas across Lagos and Abuja from today.
Featured image credits/Angus Young/Momentum Pictures
Tami is a lover of astrology, music and women. Tweet your fave female artistes at her @tamimak_
Ms. Kanyin explores the urban legend of Ms Koi Koi via a revenge horror thriller story that's keen to bring...
Nigerian boarding houses are replete with folklore of scary figures with vendettas against schools or students. Sometimes, they are just stories senior students tell to scare new boys as part of the initiation ritual into boarding life.
One that was common in my time at a boarding house was that of the bush baby. It made my mates and I scared of the little bush outside our dorm that we thought was a forest. It didn’t help that we once had a wild dog problem, which hunted our housemaster’s cattle and evoked fear throughout the school. The injuries and death of livestock solidified the myth of the bush baby, leaving everyone worried and scared. If my memory serves me correctly, a few children were withdrawn from school while the school attempted to resolve the issue.
Eventually, it was just a local dog with a peculiar energy and taste.
That nightmare is nothing compared to the ones supposedly unleashed in Ikechuckwu Jerry Ossai’s Ms. Kanyin, Nemsia’s latest release from their Prime Video deal, which explores the urban legend of Ms. Koi Koi—a maleficent female spirit whose steps in clacking shoes are enshrined in the ears of every boarder.
Ms. Kanyin, like Netflix’s Lady Koi Koi, tries to tell this myth via a revenge horror thriller story, which makes sense given that teenagers, especially boarders who grow up in formative years without parental guidance, can be mischievously wicked and are the film’s villains. The story centers on Ms. Kanyin, the school’s French teacher, who is a 90s chic: stockings in her heels, floral gowns with hair well packed retro-style in a nice front bun.
The film makes sure we notice her stilettos; after all, the Ms. Koi Koi legend is about the distinct sound pointed heels make as women beautifully stride in them, except at night, of course, when such sounds suddenly evoke fear. It also presents her worries and fears, especially her extreme case of cynophobia, which is outlandish but necessary for a crucial part of the third act. We are also informed that she’s kind and cares about her work, right and wrong, and students, almost too much to the point that the principal thinks she’s too good for the school, and some of her colleagues hate her uprightness.
Not Mustapha, though, the dashing, slim Agricultural Science teacher who likes everything about her and courts her publicly.
Amongst the students, we have the prominent six: Chisom, the principal’s dutiful daughter; Lami, who dreams of life as a model in New York; Amara, the good-girl-turned-bad who hopes to go to Harvard. Then the siblings Finditae and Fiona, and her dummy boyfriend, Uti, who’s chasing a swimming record.
We meet them after their WAEC mock result is released, and everyone is worried about Amara getting a C in French. She needs an A in her final exams to get into Harvard. As they comfort her, we learn Finditae fancies her and is also the school’s resident bad boy.
Amara and Chisom decided to take French classes to save Ms. Kanyin from being sacked, as her role would be redundant without enough French students. But that good deed has become a bottleneck as she must pass French to achieve her dreams of going to Harvard. However, she fails the subject during the mock exams. Even in her private practice, she does not hit the mark. Then one day, she notices that the actual exam papers were handed to Ms. Kanyin, who never wanted them, by the way.
She approached her teacher quite audaciously to ask for an expo. The honorable Ms. Kanyin refuses, but not with the authority of a teacher setting her student aright. Instead, she does so feebly, to bolster her victim arc and cast these teenage students as aggressors. It’s the first warning: this film already knows its end and is going to get there however it can.
Amara informs her friends about the papers and tells them she wants to get them. They all have reasons to pass their WAEC, but Finditae in particular is hesitant. A public spat between him and Ms. Kanyin changes his mind. So they plan a heist to get into Ms. Kanyin’s room. There’s a lovely segment heavy in classic heist tropes as they lay out their plans, with guns and violent strategy replaced by teenage mischief.
Ms. Kanyin goes on a date with Mustapha on the planned night but returns early.
However, Amara, in her determination to get the papers, stays back while her friends flee the scene. A scared Ms. Kanyin sees her house ransacked and feels the presence of someone in her house. She grabs a knife and approaches Amara, and just as she is about to reach Amara, Chisom throws a rock onto her window to distract her and help Amara escape.
Ms. Kanyin steps outside to check what’s going on and meets her worst nightmare: a dog. Fueled by fear, she runs and runs as far as she can into the forest that hugs the school, with the dog chasing relentlessly after her until she trips, hits her head on a tree and dies. Her blood splashes all over a tree that we first see in the film’s beginning, which brings forth evil when it tastes blood. In that forest, Ms. Kanyin transforms into the malevolent Ms. Koi Koi. It is a convenient way to create a monster, but that’s what we are working with.
There’s something to say about how Ms. Kanyin captures the nostalgic feeling of secondary school and boarding house, escaping the trappings of most Nollywood films that want to replicate American high school in our films. It’s also beautifully shot and set thanks to the lush scenery of the Adesoye College in Offa, where the film was shot. But it doesn’t fail to follow Nollywood’s casting of clearly older people in teenagers’ roles. It’s not just that they are older, the true problem is they do look older, and you never truly believe they are secondary school students.
When you forgive that because a film this beautiful and a story this crucial must be watched and enjoyed, you’re burdened with the lack of creative ideas to tell an origin story without a cheap escape route. The legend of Ms. Koi Koi here is attributed to a special tree deep in the forest that’s awakened by blood, and a poor teacher who’s forced out of character by her students.
It’s too convenient, too easy, that you don’t believe the characters and their motivation. There are interesting ways to establish the legend of Ms. Koi Koi that could even define how we see the legend or what we believe. But this film has no interest in establishing such a lasting legacy. It’s a film in a rush to get to its third act, where blood splashes and the Ms. Koi Koi spirit emerges to exact revenge that’s not earned. She goes after the aforementioned six who ransacked her home and caused her death and serves revenge in not-particularly creative (or local) ways, but as established, this is a film in a rush.
The question now—not just in Benue, but in Plateau, Kaduna, Nasarawa, Zamfara, and Borno—is what are...
Carl Terver Reflects On Benue, the Yelewata Killings, and the Politics Of Naming In An Earnest Op-Ed.
1.
These days, I hardly remember I am a poet. Only in momentary phases do I recall I am one. My thoughts constantly betray me, taking the form of essays. These phases, when I recall I am a poet, come because of the emotions of love or of war. When I speak of war, there are the wars every man faces within himself. And then there is the war Nigeria brings to your doorstep: the kind that inspires sad, grief-laden poems or such that, through the numbness of it, makes you find ways to understand what is going on in your country. It is this second war that inspired me to write, in 2019, in a poem titled “This Blood,” that “My country has an alternative Stock Exchange / that counts dead bodies, / the more the bodies / the shares bought, / that raised Patience’s Cry: / This blood we are sharing!” It was a response, months later, to the killings of 73 persons in Benue on the New Year’s Eve of 2018, whose victims were interred in a state-organised mass burial that came to be known as Black Thursday.
2.
In 2015, I wrote my first short story, which, after several re-titling (and editing), would become “Once Upon A Time in Jato-Aka,” now published in The Stockholm Review of Literature. It was inspired by a beautiful experience of my visit that year to Jato-Aka, a town in Kwande LGA, Benue, which borders Cameroon in the Mandara Mountain range. Jato-Aka is a small, sleepy agrarian town, and the road that leads into it suddenly stops in the town square.
With an artistic eye, I imagined the arrival of something extraordinary to spice up the people’s lives, or the town itself, and the idea of a retired general came to mind. I drafted this into the story and painted the picture of what such slow, border towns looked like, having once lived the life of a farm boy in the countryside myself, depicting the sedentary, the communal, the calm, and the peacefulness. Then I ended the story with a cliffhanger that even I didn’t know was an apt example of the artistic unconscious at work: “Then one day, it happened again, the pestilence of locusts that struck every year, unexpectedly. In the time the old General was back, it had not happened. The Fulanis came.”
3.
For years, I was disturbed by this ending. It felt incomplete. It felt prejudiced. It felt phobic and eager to misrepresent and profile the entire Fulani ethnic group as a plague, as aggressors, when I was supposed to believe in the pluralistic multi-ethnicity of the so-called Nigerian project. Not only that, I judged that being Nigerian means living among other ethnicities and respecting them. But I was also aware of the fact that I have friends; I know and have met a good number who are as human as I am, with the daily worries of life, as feeding their children, paying school fees, and affording transportation.
I struggled with whatever justification I could contrive to make the story work, to make it not look like, “Oh, here is a Tiv writer who has written to paint the Fulanis bad.” Eventually, I let go, refusing to be held back by what, in retrospect, I feel was simply too much correctness in the face of confronting a real problem that was not simply a short story. And I used a character in it to ask a question which remains baffling: “Why should one man have more right to kill another?” In an earlier version of the story, the question was, “Why should a group of Nigerians have more right to kill other Nigerians?”
4.
The question now, away from fiction, but to the crisis of what is now becoming the daily barbaric killings of Nigerians—not just in Benue, but in Plateau, Kaduna, Nasarawa, Zamfara, Borno, and wherever pleases the homicidal urges of these terrorists—is what are these killings for? But it is another question rendered meaningless by the indifferent climate that has become Nigeria for more than a decade now. Because the government has refused to fight insecurity, creating a loophole for further insecurity, which now appears glaringly to us (not that we never suspected it) to be a deliberate ploy to cause confusion and artificial helplessness. To solve a security crisis of this nature, the state has to identify it, classify it for what it is, before setting the right apparatus to combat it. This has not been done, and in the years these killings have continued, it has been misidentified as herdsmen-farmers clashes. News outlets, without on-the-ground investigations, have peddled this narrative whenever there’s another case of killings where, often, the victims are unarmed Nigerians, sometimes killed in their beds.
The mistake so far, I believe, was the Benue state government’s tolerance in not naming the problem until past governor Samuel Ortom’s accusations of a Fulani expansionist threat in the state, which led him in 2017 to enact an anti-open grazing legislation known as the Open Grazing Prohibition and Ranches Establishment Law. But to some of us, even if this addressed the problem at some scale, it was merely reactionary; a band-aid to what we think is a larger conundrum. It was like sending rice—the typical Nigerian politician’s answer to a crisis.
The attacks never stopped. Not only so, they began to assume a recognisable M.O. of displacing and occupying, as people flee and abandon their indigenous homes. Even more, there appears to be a desire to instill terror and intent to harm: on 8 April 2023, as the country waited to inaugurate Bola Tinubu as president, after what seemed to have been a sham election, Channels TV reported: “Many feared killed as suspected herdsmen attack Benue IDPs.”
These were people who had fled homes where their farms were. What was such an attack for? What farmlands of these displaced persons were the attackers after? Or in recent Yelwata, on 14 June 2025, where a hecatomb of deaths was orchestrated in a very cold and methodical execution? The police station had been attacked first, to cripple any armed resistance, the villagers report, before a door-to-door, family-by-family execution began, going on for three unholy hours, in a community less than an hour’s drive from the state capital, Makurdi; with another attack orchestrated a few hours apart at the other exit of the capital, in Mbaivur, near the Air Force Base in Makurdi.
Sending the herdsmen away, which Benue citizens have cried for in the past, it seems, doesn’t end the problem. And if there have been fears this is beyond conflicts about grazing, these scenarios only intensify, if not to confirm them.
5.
The first time I drank kindirmo, fresh cow milk hawked in colourful calabashes by Fulani women, was in my secondary school, perhaps in 2003 or 2004. I remember it was after closing, and the sun was high. My female classmate who made me try it said the women had tied ice blocks in a nylon and placed them in the calabash to chill the milk. Thirst had driven me, rather than curiosity. But it tasted wonderful, so that after that day I always looked forward to it whenever I had small change to spare.
This was deep in Ukum LGA. On the way to the farm with my grandma, or returning, we’d sometimes meet Fulanis on the road walking together in a group, men (who looked more like boys, too young), women, and children. They were nomadic Fulanis, who often, to us, appeared to come out of nowhere as they lived in very interior settlements, and sometimes went to the local markets to buy goods and trade.
I do not recall any bad blood existing between them and us, or maybe I was too innocent to notice. They simply existed as a curious exotic to us: their slim men carrying staffs and looking like women, sometimes wearing make-up. Unimaginably, there was such understanding that they would often have an agreement with farmers to bring their cattle after a harvest to graze the pasture from stalks of maize and other harvested plants.
I am not being romantic about such a past, nor do I wish to patronise anyone. Because once in a while, we heard of cattle destroying farms. But I can tell you that Nigeria was once like this. That Benue was once like this. There was no need for fighting because the herder Fulanis were under the protection of the communities they lived in, and mutual understanding was established. So what happened? Why did herdsmen start using machetes on people? And when did guns come? Why are so-called herdsmen, who do not have cattle—because you need a herd of livestock to be a herdsman—but instead ride on motorcycles, invading and attacking villages with assault rifles?
It is not just Benue under attack by such barbarians, but Nigeria. It is not just about usurping authority anywhere they can, stoking tensions, or causing confusion and political instability. It is the fact that children are burned alive by criminals who will never meet justice, or worse, who know no one is going after them, and that they will emerge again to continue their terror. And that we are caught in a trap where the Nigerian government, with the strongest military force in West Africa, pretends to be helpless.
6.
What we are dealing with, not only in Benue, but nationwide, is a successful plan of confusion sown by a group with their plans. Surely, these killers take orders from someone. Possessing arms is strictly regulated in Nigeria, but these killers have no problem accessing not mere guns but assault rifles. In Yelwata, the killings were executed like an operation. Two days after this attack, a list of the families killed was published in Daily Post (courtesy of a Franc Utoo, a lawyer and native of Yelewata “who lost over 33 members of his extended family”). There were the Adam family, Ajah family, Akpen family, Amaki family, Anya family, Aondona family, Aondovihi family, Asom family, and so on, numbering up to 47 families, like a roster. What is to say that one day it won’t become more targeted, as genocidal killings are often planned to take out specific persons?
Finally, perhaps, the misinformation about this simply being herdsmen attacks or internal clashes, as the news ignorantly reports, is now evident. And this was why the Tor Tiv, Professor James Ayatse, the number one Tiv citizen and perhaps an authority on Tiv matters, at the president’s visit to Benue state on June 18, unequivocally stated, that:
“We do have grave concerns about the misinformation and misrepresentation of the security crisis in Benue State. It’s not herders-farmers clashes. It’s not communal clashes. It’s not reprisal attacks or skirmishes. It is this misinformation that has led to suggestions such as ‘remain tolerant, negotiate for peace, learn to live with your neighbours’. What we are dealing with in Benue is a calculated, well-planned, full-scale genocidal invasion and land-grabbing campaign by herder terrorists and bandits, which has been going on for decades and is worsening every year. Wrong diagnosis will always lead to wrong treatment. So, we are dealing with something far more sinister than we think about. It’s not learning to live with your neighbours; it is dealing with war.”
For many who do not know, historically, this is not the first time foreigners (whom the Tivs call “Uke”) have attempted to suppress the Tiv people, such that there’s even a song about this. The “Myam ciem er uke hide” song, translated as “I had a nightmare that the foreigner has returned.” Centuries later, the song remains true. The history of the Benue Valley during the 1700s through the 1800s is mired in conflicts over land among the different groups that had migrated and come to settle in the region. But the Tiv ancestors fought with their lives to defend the home they’d made for themselves in this valley.
It was because of this consciousness to defend themselves that subjugation by the British colonial forces in the early 1900s didn’t happen so easily for the latter. It is on record that the Tivs were the last ethnic nation in colonial Nigeria to be penetrated by the British, who afterwards ignorantly tried to govern them indirectly through proxies under their colonial government—a situation that was exploited by the Caliphate in northern Nigeria at the time to exert dominance southwards.
It is a known history that has been amply written about, with one of the more insightful works being Moses E. Ochonu’s ‘Colonialism by Proxy: Hausa Imperial Agents and Middle Belt Consciousness in Nigeria.’ There were pushbacks and unrelenting resistance, of course, by the Tiv nation. It is the history of this conflict that eventually led to the creation of Benue State. I am not a historian; I have only brought this up because history is all too familiar whenever it rears its head again. Many theories, histories, or causes of the terrorism going on in Benue will be spread. And sadly, the truth is we can’t say what it is; we are not security experts and have no concrete intel, so we talk about what we see: that we are being attacked by terrorists who come for our heads, and our land. And whoever they are, they are enemies of Nigeria.
When the musician 2Baba Idibia made a video responding to the Yelwata killings, his words were “I don’t even know what to say.” Truly, there aren’t any words for such madness other than Yelwata was indeed one of the darkest days for many of us. But for how long must this go on?
“I know how to speak to women and I know what they care
For many viewers, Amazon Prime’s After 30 will register as the latest sexy Lagos-based romance to hit streaming services, and one that gives a fresh voice (and look) to that beloved four-girls-just-trying-to-survive-in-a-big-city motif. But for the film’s director, Momo Spaine, and the legions of fans who have been clamoring for a follow-up to the original series that the film is based on, this project has been a long time coming.
Spaine first cut her teeth in filmmaking on After 30’s predecessor, Before 30. Released in 2016, Before 30 was a series that followed the love lives of four young women navigating the well-known, uniquely Nigerian pressures to settle down and get married before they hit 30. Now, armed with nearly a decade’s worth of experience and a sweet Amazon production budget, Spaine has brought the four women’s stories to the big screen, picking up eight years after viewers last saw them. And while there’s no shortage of stories about women navigating love and career life in Nigeria — think hit series like Unmarried, Smart Money Woman and Skinny girl in transit — Spaine brings an attention to detail that radiates as you watch its four lead actresses, Dami Adegbite, Beverly Naya, Ane Ocha and Meg Otanwa, reprise their starring roles.
From carefully curated color palettes to meticulous costume design to hair and makeup, the pages of sketches and decks that Spaine shows me on our late-May Zoom call are nothing short of a creative shrine to a very personal story. “I had hours of conversations with my [director of photography] and with our makeup artist, Lillian,” she says. “Talking about [things like] light reflecting makeup, what kind of underpainting we’re doing under the foundation so that when the light hits their skin it just glows and pops.”
Spaine’s filmmaking journey began when she was attending university in South Africa in the early 2010s. Back then, she’d assist her close family friend and veteran rapper, Sasha P, whenever she came to South Africa to shoot music videos. “That was like my first proper exposure to filmmaking, and I just fell in love,” Spaine recalls.
It was toward the end of her time in South Africa that Spaine received a script for the pilot episode of what would become Before 30. Soon after, she started an internship with the show’s producers, Nemsia Productions, who produced After 30, as well as other projects like Soft Love and the AMVCA-award-winning Breath of Life. Spaine worked with Nemsia over the roughly four years it took to make Before 30, and helped build the story and the audience that helped make its follow-up, After 30, possible.
”People loved the characters, they loved that the story was relatable,” she said of the positive response to the show. “It felt different. It felt like something that was slightly more elevated in terms of the storytelling, [and] the character development.”
Spaine also attributes the show’s success to the fact that it took risks with the kinds of stories it told. “Back then, you were talking about a Muslim couple bringing women into their marriage for sex, about a sexually free character in Nkem. We’re also talking about a born-again virgin who wanted to use spirituality to reverse her past sexual relations. So it was a lot of edge for that time as well, that I think we got feedback on being very successful.”
Before 30 was re-released on Netflix in 2019, and then saw a resurgence during the COVID-19-necessitated lockdowns in 2020 that brought a broader audience. After two years on Netflix, Amazon commissioned After 30 to continue the women’s story with a look at where they are now. Spaine spoke to us about how her personal experiences helped shape the film, how she’s continuing to push the envelope in terms of what kinds of Nigerian stories are being told, and what she hopes
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I’m assuming there are parts of you that are in this movie. Can you tell me about that?
I struggle to think of a part of the film that does not have a piece of me in it. But starting with the characters, I’ve always had my favorites. I fancy myself a [Temi] in some ways, which is the lead character. I love fashion, I have that legal background, and I have almost the same relationship with my mom. But Nkem (played by Beverly Naya) is who I would like to be: that level of confidence, sexiness, just being this powerful woman that does what she wants and is unapologetic about it, but is still soft and honest at heart. Ama, for me, is an expression of who I think we should all aspire to be. The kind of good, pure-hearted, well-intentioned person, — that youthful, naive energy. And then for Aisha, it’s just that strength; she already has the security, but you also kind of have to show that being married does not mean all your problems are solved.
All these years after making the original show, how do you think the ways that you have grown as a person show up in the way that these characters have changed?
For [Temi], I don’t know, [Temi] pisses me off. She’s very confused. I don’t agree with how she runs her dating life. Like, I could not stand Carrie Bradshaw, and I love Sex and the City, but all she does is make bad decisions. And that’s kind of what makes a complex and dynamic character. With [Ama], I wanted to do a storyline where a character had to contend with their sexual identity, but from a very respectful place, from a true place that was not going to make fun of or minimize that experience. And for Aisha, the biggest thing with her is the conflicts that she has with Nkem. In the last eight to 10 years of my life, I’ve fallen out with friends that I thought we would die together. That kind of devastating friendship fight where you don’t think you can come back from.
Talk to me about the music for the show, Before 30. How did you put that together, and what decisions went into that process?
The music on this show makes me so proud. I was not as involved in the music of season one. We had no budget for music, so all we could do was approach people. After begging and pleading, maybe two people collected money; the other people just gave us permission. Bez, I think, just gave us permission because he was close with someone on the team at the time.I begged TeeZee for “Toyin” – we were just going around asking family members who had made music. But then there are ones that were chosen because they were so perfect, like Temi Dollface and Blackmagic. So half of it was just using our community, music from our existing community. And the other half of it was just begging, and everybody was upcoming at that time. Everyone was so willing back then to do things as a favor or to do things because they liked the idea.
What was it like securing music this time around for the film?
I’m really happy that the industry has boomed now, but even with what we thought was a comfortable budget, we could not get all the artists [we wanted] for the film.
Kaline [our music supervisor and the composer on the film], did a good job of going back to the drawing board like we did in season one, and just using our community. So, Kaline was able to pull together a bunch of songs from artists [who were willing to work with our budgets]. Everybody got paid, but it wasn’t a massive life-changing amount. They just did it because they believed in the story, and they wanted their music to be attached to the film.
What was your favourite part of making Before 30?
My favorite part was just getting to direct. Honestly, I spent seven years of my life producing thinking, “Okay, this is what I’m good at,” and I feel like I have a natural flair for producing, but I wouldn’t say I ever enjoyed it. It’s just something I knew I could do. Directing makes me so happy. I’m just like, “Why have I been wasting my life producing?” Every time I’m directing, I’m at my best professionally. I get to be creative, I get to tell people what to do because that is my favorite thing in life. So, just getting to direct in itself was a blessing and a journey of self-discovery. I realized: this is what I’m supposed to be doing with my life, this is what makes me happy.
This film was produced by Nemsia, but you have your own production company called Blush and Slate. Can you tell us about that?
Now that Before 30 is out in the ether, I am just excited to continue building a company that centers stories about women, because I really think those are the stories that I am best placed to tell. I know how to speak to women, and I know what they care about. I care that they come off looking the way that they want to look. Whether it’s commercial, reality, documentary, or scripted [stuff], I gravitate towards content that either centers women or is targeting female audiences. So, just continuing to be able to build my own style, my own company, and my repertoire of films with Blush and State is what I am most excited about. Blush and Slate is a vehicle that allows me to express myself fully creatively,
For people who have a story and don’t know where to start, what is your advice?
First of all, call Blush and Slate. If you don’t know where to start, hire a production company or a producer who sees your vision and believes in it and is willing to help you move it to the end. If you are that person and you have the time and resources, and energy to produce it yourself, then just get started. If it’s a documentary, book your first interview.
You don’t have to film the interview. Just figure out who the first person you want to talk to in your documentary is. Call them and have a conversation with them. Ask them if they would even be interested in featuring in a documentary. You just have to start. If it’s a scripted thing, write the first page of the script. You don’t have to write the whole script. Just write the first thing. For people who want to produce things, it’s very overwhelming because there are 2000 things that you need to do at the same time to really kick off a production. But there’s only one way to eat an elephant, and that’s bite by bite. So you still have to do the first thing that you can do and then build the momentum from there. Ideas in your head don’t do anyone any good.