Over a weekend visit in Los Angeles, two-first generation Sierra Leonean American brothers navigate the changing dynamic | dG1fdjhWUU45SnlpYnc
Category
🎥
Short filmTranscript
00:00How much of African Giants is autobiographical?
00:04Unfortunately, 95% of it.
00:08Especially those conversations, a lot of those conversations is actual dialogue
00:12that I've had with my brother or with someone else in my family.
00:24What was the most important thing you learned at AFI?
00:28These people here, well, I'm kind of getting a little emotional because they're like my family.
00:32I'm from Virginia, and I didn't know anyone here, and I was scared.
00:36And these people came around me, and we made films together,
00:39and they believed in me at a time where I didn't believe in myself.
00:42I loved everything about AFI. It taught me my sensibilities.
00:45It taught me craft. It gave me my family.
00:47And so I learned the tools of the craft and then could learn the things I wanted to change about the craft.
00:52Going to AFI and learning how to do things the right way, really hammering that in,
00:57I think this is a great challenge to test it out in the market on a bigger scale.
01:02But it was really just trying to apply what we've learned here to a future
01:05and really trying to see like, oh, how do we do this thing the right way?
01:08Let's do it with the permits and SAG and do it the right way.
01:13All department heads and all that.
01:15You learn to appreciate your collaborators and sort of follow them and work with them
01:22and not be shy about voicing your own opinions.
01:26And I feel like that's what I learned most at AFI is kind of honing my own sensibilities
01:32and knowing what I even can do and want to do and like to do.
01:43We always start with a tone meeting, but we go just beat by beat through the script.
01:48And he walks me through any super specific things editorially.
01:54Like if he's like, I need to start the scene on the wide, I just know it, things like that.
01:57But sometimes it'll be like he'll just walk me through emotionally what he pictures for the scene.
02:03And that tells me what I need to know to go into the first cut.
02:05So it's kind of whatever he can throw at me in that meeting is super helpful for me
02:10because I always, I want that first cut to be the best that it can be.
02:15And so that's kind of the purpose of the tone meeting for me.
02:24But when he tears his self-tape area down and he's like,
02:28they don't give a shit about diversity, they don't give a shit what you want to do, da-da-da,
02:31is actually verbatim, line by line, what I said to my writing partner
02:36when I was very frustrated with his industry and it was the moment I decided I was going to make a feature
02:41and stop going on generals and stop writing specs and stop having all these, to me, useless conversations
02:46that don't actually lead to making something.
02:48And I said that to him and we got into this big fight.
02:51I remember he left my apartment and I wrote the entire thing down
02:55and I just copied and pasted and put it in the screen,
02:57but literally copied and pasted my notes into my final draft.
03:00So a lot of it is autobiographical.
03:09This has been the greatest thing for me.
03:12There was a Nigerian woman who came up to me after the screening at Slamdance
03:16and she told me something very similar.
03:18She told me that she was like, I have never seen us on a screen like this.
03:22And when I wrote it, I remember watching Blue Valentine and all these films
03:26and I love these films, performance-based, dialogue-based,
03:28but I'm like, that's not my experience.
03:30I want to do this with Africans.
03:32I want to do this talking about my stuff.
03:34And that's why I made the film.
03:36And so to get to the point where you're at a premiere
03:39and to have strangers walk up to you and tell you something like that,
03:42that me sharing my story connected with you in that way,
03:46it is the reason I want to be a filmmaker
03:48and you just gave me the greatest compliment and I really appreciate it.