Concluding part of Aquila Njamah’s exclusive interview…
International Award Winning Film maker, Aquila Njamah discusses his enigmatic success story, how cabals and clicks have affected the industry and more with Theresa Moses.
Tell us about the turning points in your career, basically how did you get from there to here?
The turning point in my career is more of remuneration, been appreciated for doing something good. That was my first international award in 2007 for a movie I shot, ‘The Rivals’. It was in New York Initiative Independent Film Festival. It was ok for me to get a review of my work in the New York Times, a full page review. That was basically ok knowing that it’s the first time in Africa, these people are accepting an African movie and it was my film. That just showed me that there’s so much we can do. It was history and it was not just a nomination, I went ahead to win best drama director, 2007. For me at that point was wow. As at that time, I haven’t won any local award and my first award came from the United States. It just made me realise that you’re in the spotlight and people are expecting the tide to go higher. It was a turning point in my life.
After that time, I just decided that I need to up my game. If you go through my movies, I don’t do epic that the use rice sack to sew clothes and all that. As young as I was as a film maker, I got thousands and one scripts but I turn all of them down because I believe if you should tell our stories, you should tell it as original as possible. We have researchers, research. We never used to dress like that. We never used to wear such tattoos; we never used to do graphite’s on our walls. We actually wore clothes even before the white man came. They may not be as fancy as the ones we wear now but we did wear clothes, we never dressed in raffia like want to depict Adam and Eve. It was a turning point of my life… I realise I needed to do better than what I was doing and my journey has just been like that. I’ve always tried to be disciple as possible by saying no to some certain things. If it’s not right, it’s not right. Am not in a hurry to do just any movie, am not in a hurry to have a thousand movies to my credit. I rather have just 50 and they are impactful to the creative world.
How much does it cost to produce a movie in Nigeria?
The reason why they call it a director’s movie; an Aquila Njamah Film, Kunle Afolayan Film, The Quentin Tarantino Film etc it actually takes a director to do a great movie. The director is the demi-god of the movie; he breathes life into the script. For instance; this movie – ‘Boys in the Hood’ by John Singleton was shot in 1991 and the budget was $6 million dollars. ‘Terminator 2’ was shot at about that same time with hundreds of million dollars. Now they gross virtually the same amount in the box office. It’s not necessary about your budget, I can have a small budget movie and you have a larger budget movie but my creative intuition in my approach matters. While you spend all the millions doing special effects, am just telling a drama stories. What are the content of your script and how do you bring it to life. ‘Boys in the Hood’ was a regular Brooklyn story like the drugs and the street etc. it had a message, its either you’re doing a movie to entertain people, educate people or inform people. So whatever aspect it is, it takes a director to actually assimilate the context of the script into a feature movie. ‘Desperado’, the budget was so low, they couldn’t afford to rent tracks, and the DP actually was placed on a wheelchair. That’s creativity and the pictures came out well. But you can have a movie that have all the tracks like from here to the end of West Africa and it’s still won’t come out right. In a nutshell, to answer your question, it’s basically having the right set of people, a director especially, a fantastic crew that understands how to work with budget and times to be very creative. They will come out with something better, that’s how you tell a good story from the eyes of a good director. A good cinematographer is not necessary the budget. They say better soup na money kill am but am not of that school of thought.
What advice do you have for budding film directors?
I understand how difficult it is for these young lads to get a breakthrough these days; which is one of the reasons I ‘fought’ against what we as a guild wanted to do some years back. By having internship, apprentice coming under you for such a long time. I said no, it was unfair. You could have some of these guys that are more talented than us. More creative than us but don’t have a platform to showcase themselves like an umbrella. So, my advice for them is off course is good for them to be a member of the guild, be part of the guild because the guild protects you. We also run an insurance scheme that will take care of you in case of any issue. But it’s not necessary; it’s good but not mandatory. Some people might say I just want to be a freelancer, yes but you stand a chance of losing out on some certain packages like when the guild is been invited, you’re not a member so you can’t be there. When the government wants to have something to do but you can’t be part of it. You can go and peach your movie independently for a loan scheme but it’s advisable you’re a member of a body. It gives you leverage, a platform to operate.
My advice is try to join the guild, study, read, read, read books. The industry, film making is evolving everyday which is why sometimes you just find out that for those that are not ready to make what I call a switch-flow with time. You see them as obsolete, it till shows in their works. Short description has changed now. Back in the days it was more like a taboo for your pictures to be shaking but these days we have mobile pictures, head cam shot etc. Things are changing, so you need to change with time. How do you do that? You update yourself as a film maker, watch movies, and have mentors. Growing up as a film maker, I had mentors like Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Steven Spielberg; Antoine Fuqua etc watch their movie, broaden your ideas and never be afraid to take risk. The most successful film makers on the surface of this earth are people that have ventured and dared to take risk. It might just make you for the chance you take but guess what…all the biggest millionaires we have in the world today are once risk takers. What’s the essence not striving to take a risk; it just might turn your whole life around. Take risk, be very daring and the sky is just your starting point.
How has cabals and politics affected the industry?
I’m a one man squad, I don’t believe in cabals. Yes there are cabals but I try not to get involve. When I make an appearance, I make an appearance. Once am done, am done. What matters to me is what I do and how it gets to the people out there-the final consumer. I don’t want to play politics with my career; I don’t have to choose some certain people over some certain people. I am a friend to all, colleague to all. I endeavour not to mingle in cabals, clicks, politics etc. If I want to vote for the president of my guild, I go there, cast my vote and am out. How it’s affecting the industry negatively is when you have a cabal or click so to speak and we have government funding. It’s easier for your click to come together and say let’s split it within ourselves. That way it won’t get to the right film makers, people that can actually justify that fund. It just goes to a group of people that haven’t shot a movie in the past ten years. We have fantastic film makers who are good at what they do, who are not part of the guild but they are probably not interested in being part of the guild because of politics they see going on inside the guild. Where we have private investor, or people coming in or international grant coming in, they should look for us and not streamline it to only guild members so that other people can actually peach and it goes around and everybody is happy. That’s how it affects the industry negatively.
With so many factors shaping a film’s success or failure, so much is required, what can be done so it doesn’t feel like it’s not worth the effort?
We have thousands, thousands and thousands of untold stories. Our international counterpart have seen these, they have told every story they need to tell about themselves, they have shot sci-fix movies in spaces, told all the space stories, told fiction, horrors, American history, emancipation etc. They have exhausted but now they want to come here and we are not even done telling our own stories. Which is why am saying we need to start telling our own stories before they come and start telling our own stories for us. Our government needs to make collaborative effort easier for these people to come. The last time I remember they were about filming ‘Critical Assignment’, the policies on ground was difficult. Yes I understand if you say you must have 15% of your crew must be Nigerian, good. That’s you creating jobs but the envelopes they ask for is too much. You need to settle this, pay here, pay there etc. it’s going to scare the away. What did they do with the ‘Tears of the Sun’ with Bruce Willis? Our policies were too tight for them, they sent a researcher here to research pidgin English and went to shot the movie in Kenya or somewhere else pretending to be in Nigeria. When you make tight policies for these people and you make it too expensive for them to come in, you are not encouraging the industry.
It’s about time we start doing collaborative effort with our foreign counterpart. Even at that we by ourselves for ourselves can still tell our own stories. We have over 300 plus tribes, ethnic groups, languages etc. We’ve not started, we’ve not tell the story of Queen Amina, Usman Dan Fodio, Olusegun Obasanjo etc. We have a lot of legendary stories, Ameh Oboni, Ovonramwen Nogbaisi, Aba Women Riot etc. It’s about time we look inwards and say we can do it. Nothing stops us from doing internal collaborative effort. My company Eagle Eye Multimedia and Global Entertainment Limited (EEMGEL) can say want to work with Royal Arts Academy, to do something in collaboration with Gabosky Films. Come put resources together but everybody want to do it by itself and get the profit by myself. When you do collaboration, you tend to be more creative. You’re bringing experts from different angle of the entertainment industry to do something and you share the risk and profits. TriStar Pictures or Columbia Pictures, Universal Pictures, Dream Works Pictures, Jerry Bruckheimer or more in one project. What that means is that, Universal can actually be in like 10 to 15 different productions at the same time and going to make profit from of it. But in a case where one somehow flops or doesn’t meet up with requirement in terms of financial returns, you have something else to fall back on. So it’s about time we start thinking in that light. Thinking not just film makers but business minded people is not shooting ourselves in the leg by saying somebody will say take 2 million naire, go and shot a film because you want to make N100, 000 out of it. It’s sad for me to say but most of what we have on our screens right now that people watch are high level of substandard. They are far below what we can do, our capacity as film maker because we are settling for less. The quest to survive is there, there’s hunger in the land. Somebody just wants to feed and say give me that money, I will do it. We need to really change our mentality.
For years I didn’t shot a movie, for me at that point in time was me protesting against the system; vied into politics. I had protested, has done several interviews but it’s not a collective thing, it’s an individual thing. So no matter how hard you try to protest or say, there are some people that will never listen to you. They will just keep doing what they are doing. So I challenge myself to say, ok, am going to take my stakes a little higher and am going to do something different. I believe in putting your money where your mouth is. Am not settling for less; I rather not take that’s script or money just because I need to survive. I rather do one movie that can actually feed me for over ten years. Do one good movie that can take care of you as long as it can than do hand to mouth kind of project. First you diminish your name. The industry is basically about recommendations. They see your works and someone in Hollywood want to do collaboration with you. Why, because of what the person has seen. The movie is crazily good, who did the movie, that’s it, that’s how you survive.
You’re churning out movies every now and then but you’re going nowhere. What have you done with your work? With your N100, 000 stuffs you’ve sold us out to the world that we are horrible film makers. We need to up our game, collectively together and find a way to have a way of people taking advantage of the industry. I don’t want to mention names but you can’t say you’re giving people N3 million naira to do a movie just because you want content. It’s affecting the industry. Now they have known us a room and parlour film makers. That’s not who we are. Yea we may not be able to do the trend stunts but who say we can’t start it. We’re in a generation where we can actuality use CG (Computer-Generated) Imagery, Green screen; we can do some of those things. People just been afraid like I said earlier, don’t be afraid to take risk. I commended my friend and brother, Jeta Amata years ago when he did the movie-‘Alien Attack’. He used albinos as the aliens. To me that was creative. A lot of people laughed about it but that was creative. It’s easy for you to laugh but what have you done. Have you attempted that? You’ve not attempted it but Jeta Amata did it. As young as he was then, he was already thinking futuristically. That’s what we need to do, other than say we can’t do action movies, we are not ripe enough to do action movies, says who, who says we can’t use strings. Basically I think we need to change our mindset, we need to start thinking positively other than hiding under our shells and saying we can’t, we can’t. Am sick and tired of we can’t. There’s a whole lots of we can, we can and this can only happen if we go out there and start taking the necessary risk we need to take. Like Hollywood has taken it in the past to be where they are. We should do likewise and do even more.
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