From Love & Basketball to The Woman King, Gina Prince-Bythewood aims to see herself reflected on screen

Just a glimpse of The Woman King is enough to show that Viola Davis and her co-stars did the kind of fight training you can’t fake. (Those aren’t CGI biceps Davis is sporting.) The film’s director, Gina Prince-Bythewood, joined her cast for hours of lifting, running, combat, and stunt work every day for weeks. It’s all in the name of authentically capturing 1820s West Africa and its all-female Agojie warriors (upon which the Dora Milaje are based), and that commitment shows on screen, where Davis plays the hardened general Nanisca, with Lashana Lynch, Thuso Mbedu, Sheila Atim, Adrienne Warren as her kick-ass soldiers. They’re all swinging knives and spears, wearing the traditional 19th-century garb, and even dancing and singing in Fon, the native language of what is now Benin.

Prince-Bythewood joined The A.V. Club to reflect on how The Woman King echoes and extends her artistic legacy, which stretches from 2000’s award-winning indie debut Love & Basketball to 2020’s big-budget action flick The Old Guard. “What makes great action,” she says, “is when you’re character-based and story-based.” The same goes for stories told by and about complex women, another throughline that you can bet will continue in Prince-Bythewood’s work.

Gina Prince-Bythewood: I was sent the script after it had been developed for six years, and [producer] Cathy Schulman was really fighting to get it set up at the studio. I had just come off of The Old Guard and said I was taking a break. And then the script came and within five pages I was like, “Oh, shoot, this is my next movie.” I just felt like it was something I had to do. And that’s how I make my choices, because there’s a thousand things I would love to do or want to do, but this was a “had to.” I saw myself in these women. I saw the women that we hadn’t seen before, our story we hadn’t seen before, and I wanted to put these real women, this history, up on screen in this way. I love the genre historical epics. Braveheart, one of my favorite films, Gladiator, The Last Of The Mohicans. Those types of films have such a beautiful bigness and that cultural specificity and bringing us into worlds that we’re unfamiliar with, but you still connect with the characters and you’re rooting for them. I wanted that for us. We hadn’t gotten that opportunity yet.

And then Viola Davis was attached. I mean, everybody wants to work with Viola. She is greatness personified… We have the same mentality, of work ethic and integrity and authenticity and wanting to get this right. It’s been a beautiful, beautiful collaboration.

AVC: This film certainly follows in the footsteps of Braveheart and Gladiator, but as you say, it centers on women and African people. When did you recognize that these kinds of stories could and should feature more than just white men?

GPB: That started happening out of film school, once I really knew this is what I wanted to do. I guess [I also thought] I would love to do that. But being within Hollywood, certainly at that time and really even just a couple of years ago, it didn’t seem like a reality because Hollywood was not putting money into that. There was no belief in the value of our stories or even characters that look like me. But Black Panther changed the game, it absolutely changed perception, changed culture, and showed the value. I’m forever grateful to Ryan Coogler for making such a great movie because it absolutely opened the door for this.

AVC: You’ve mentioned you want to play in the “big sandbox,” as a director who happens to be a woman. You’ve said “Once you’re in there, you tend to stay there in this industry.” Is Hollywood still that kind of meritocracy?

GPB: Oh, it absolutely is. It’s so hard as a woman to get into that big sandbox. You can literally count on one hand who gets those opportunities. I say it often, but Patty Jenkins, the pressure she had to make Wonder Woman good? That absolutely opened the door. Because a couple of years later—that year that The Old Guard came out, we had like four other big films directed by women coming out, and that was exciting. So there is a shift happening, but it’s incremental, but we have to just keep pushing. We have to keep making good films and proving ourselves. We have to lift up the next generation and be inspiring to them, but also help them navigate this because it’s tough. It is a tough sandbox to play in. Way more money means way more voices, which means way more fighting for your vision. But the same fight I had when I had $7 million is the same fight I have at a $70 million budget.

AVC: One of the most thrilling parts of this film are the musical pieces. Can we call them numbers? The language, harmonies, and dancing all felt so authentic.

GPB: Yeah, absolutely. The musical pieces within that are part of the storytelling, which is what’s exciting to me. I brought on Lebo M., who is an incredible musical composer obviously best known for Lion King, and I had him come and do the songs, while Terence Blanchard did the score. I remember the first song that he sent was for a battle dance. I was so hyped about that. They were absolutely authentic; I wanted the songs to be in the language of these women, which is Fon, the only time we really use the actual language, as everything else is accented English. I did want that element within the film because it’s a beautiful language, it’s cultural, and it just sounds cool. And the work that he did to give the film, those musical numbers that were organic to the story, set within the story, was exciting. And then the actors had to learn that too.

AVC: Then there’s the sets and costumes and all these other period-specific details. How did you all go about researching the culture of 1820s Dahomey?

GPB: We did such a tremendous amount of research, but [the question] was, what type of research are we doing? Because there aren’t a lot of books written about this and most of the books are written from the wrong point of view: people who were there to diminish the kingdom, to make us feel like savages. Some of the photos that we looked at, they actually were recreated for the world fair, so they weren’t even accurate. When you go online and you look this up you’ll see these costumes, and that’s actually not what they looked like.

What we had the benefit of is our production designer. Akin McKenzie is so brilliant, he did such a deep dive. And it was like connecting the dots: getting a paragraph of one person describing the way that they dressed or a paragraph in another tome that talks about the cowry shells being in the hair. It was about starting to connect all those pieces. And then with the dances, what was beautiful is these dances are traditional and they’ve been passed on from generation to generation. So we found some video from the ’60s of some women in Benin doing the dances, and our choreographers used these as the base to create these dances. And then the descriptions of their battle dance, they talked about these dances of great aggression, a lot of, [miming stabbing] you know, throat slashing and stabbing within it. It was like a puzzle, but a really beautiful puzzle.

AVC: One of the biggest stories leading up to this movie is that intense fight training. Why did you participate in that alongside your cast?

GPB: It’s a couple of things. I feel as a director, if I’m asking an actor to do something, I have to be willing to do it myself. The level of training they had to do, I grew up doing that. I know what it takes. They don’t. It’s funny, too, because I literally said, “You’re going to go online and you’re going to find these videos of actors who have trained before, and it’s cut to music and it seems really cool and it’s not. It is going to be hell.” And now we have a cool video cut to music that looks really cool that other people are going to watch. [Laughs] But you have to go through that. I also joined in because it’s part of the rehearsal process, it’s part of building character. It was part of the bonding of these women together. And I, as the director, have to build a trust with my actors. That’s how I get the performances that I do. And so the more I could be with them and go through what they were going through together, it bonded all of us.

AVC: And who took to that training naturally? There were some actors who’ve never done anything like this before. Do they approach something like this as more actor than athlete?

GPB: I think you’re trying to get me in trouble. [Laughs] The absolute truth is—it’s funny, people have asked me, “Viola, how did she keep up with these younger folk?” When we all started training together, Viola had been training for a couple of months before. They came into that room and saw the intensity that she was bringing and they were like, “Oh, that’s what we’re doing.” It just changed the energy. Certainly Lashana, coming into this, had the most experience with stunts as she’d just come off of 007 [No Time To Die]. We were able to give her a lot, and she kept wanting more, like, “Make it hard for me, give me more, more.” Thuso, who had never done anything like this whatsoever, her work ethic was insane and she wanted to do everything. The fact that I could give her and [Daniel Hernandez], our incredible stunt and fight coordinator, the rope, the machete—I trusted her because I knew that she would do it. She literally worked every single day on that. Sheila Atim was in her apartment with that spear every day. That’s who they were. This is on top of the three hours they were doing with the trainers, on top of the hour and a half with [Gabriela Mclain] in the morning doing weights, on top of the running. Because for any type of action film, if people can’t run, it takes you out of it! So it was like, “Y’all are going to learn how to run and look good running.”

AVC: Going back to your earliest days, Monica in Love And Basketball feels like the beginning of your pioneering effort to tell nontraditional stories about complex women. What’s the throughline between that and The Woman King and all your work?

GPB: As a director, I write what I want to see, and I direct what I want to see. And Monica is me. I wanted to see myself reflected. I know growing up, playing sports my whole life, how often I was told that something was wrong with me, that I was too different. Why do I want to have a ball in my hand? Why don’t I like wearing dresses? So to be able to put a character on screen that girls and young women can look at and say, “Oh, she’s okay, I’m okay.” But even more than that, the thing I love is how many men now find Monica the ideal. I was never anybody’s ideal growing up. And this woman who was athletic and tough and feisty and fought back, but there was also beauty to that, that really set a tone for me. Certainly the acceptance of that, you can absolutely draw a line to The Woman King and these women celebrating their athleticism and their skill and their athletic bodies and also finding the great beauty in all of that. The more I can put that up on screen and normalize that, I feel like my job is done.