Emelonye is known for directing award-winning films such as Last Flight to Abuja, The Mirror Boy, and Onye Ozi. He is a self-taught writer, director and producer with a multi-disciplinary approach to filmmaking. Now his is about to make history with a UK first for independent Black British cinema as his latest feature BLACK MAIL will receive a UK wide release across 100 cinema screens, making it the largest ever release by an independently produced and distributed Black British film to-date. The film which was made in the UK during the 2020 Lockdown is already attracting award nominations being nominated in 2021 at BUFF for Best Feature.
The story: ALT managed to view the film and it is definitely one to see this summer Emelonye takes a dive into the seedy world of blackmailers and those they prey upon: some great all round performances, prepare to grit your teeth as Chinda decides whether to fight or give in. The action thriller follows the story of Chinda (O.C Ukeje) – a renowned London actor who becomes entangled in a sextortion case against him by the criminal oligarch and digital scammer Igor. Cases of mistaken identity, webcam hacking and threats of violence puts Chinda’s family in jeopardy, as he desperately tries to find the perpetrators. Alt caught up with OBI to talk about being a filmmaker, shooting during a pandemic and all things BLACK MAIL which will get UK theatrical and digital release nationwide on 26th August 2022.
ALT A
What was the inspiration to become a film director, how did this journey start?
OBI:
How many hours have you got? I have been around the block and back? I would say that when I was growing up, I never set out to be a filmmaker. In fact, I’ve been a lot of things. I wanted to be a medical doctor, I eventually became a lawyer. I studied, theatre arts and practiced theatre for a little while, I played professional football. I think everything that I have been, everything that I am goes into everything that I do. So there are elements of me being a lawyer in what I do. There are elements of me being a professional sports person. But I think sometimes you create a path for yourself without intending to do so. Life happens and you are pulled from different directions and you end up somewhere. And even though it wasn’t part of the long strategic plan, but you have earned your right to be there. So in a way, I never set out to be a filmmaker, but I, was born into a very artistic, very creative family. I was nurtured and I allowed myself to absorb everything around me. And it’s beginning to flourish in the stories that I tell because they become very rounded and shows every aspect of my development as a human being.
ALT A
What do you like about, directing and what kind of stories do you like to tell?
OBI:
I would say that the director’s job is a dog’s body job. It is essentially being able to do everything in the process of filmmaking. Being able to write, being able to act, being able to manage people, manage fat egos, being able to manage resources, being able to manage expectations and artistic ideas, being realistic at the same time as being a dreamer, being able to edit. So I would say in trying to hone my skills as a director I’ve had to learn every aspect of filmmaking. I’m able to carry out every process of filmmaking I don’t have to do it all the time. But I write most of the time I direct, I produce and sometimes I edit. So every story idea has to touch you as a director, in a special way, to want to birth it, to want to give it life, to want to spend the next few months, waking up in hot flashes in the middle of the night and Eureka moments, not sleeping at all and trying to find the balance between the ideas that you have, which are very lofty and nice and the reality of having a very small budget. And that is a very difficult balance to strike, which is why independent filmmakers are more resourceful and more creative than the ones who are given very fat projects. So if a story touches me, touches my soul, and I feel that in telling it, I will talk to other people’s souls, then I will take it on. And with small budgets or no budgets or big budgets, I try and bring it to the world and give it the best possible chance to be seen by as many people as possible.
ALT A:
When I was doing research, your name came up as a Nollywood film director. Is that how you define yourself. And, in terms of Nollywood, how has that evolved on the bigger stage. Obviously there has been some, massive, players, coming out of what we call the Nollywood film industry like the late Biyi?
OBI:
Identity is a very fleeting thing. At one stage you are somebody’s daughter, the next stage you are somebody’s wife, and then you are somebody’s mother and you have to evolve constantly to embrace whatever phase you are in. And I would say that I have embraced, my Nigerianness my Africanness. I would say that there are very few people that can be more African than I am, but what I have also done in the last 29 years of living in the UK is contextualize my Africanness diluted it in some kind of way that I’m able to tell stories that resonate with people, whether they’re green, black, yellow doesn’t matter so long as they’ve got a soul. So, in a way, even though I live in the UK, I have set my store to telling African stories and unashamedly so.
When I got employed as a lecturer in filmmaking, at the University of Huddersfield it wasn’t because I was making mainstream films. It was because I was making African films, Nollywood films, and I think my appointment as a Lecturer at Huddersfield is the validation of that school of thought in film making called Nollywood. We are essentially telling stories just like everybody else. We might have a different visual take, we might have a different aesthetics, essentially it’s about communicating an idea, to an audience. And the beginnings of Nollywood were not really auspicious. It started as a very entrepreneurial, filmmaking, industry, and gradually over the years with globalization, with the democratization of equipment and knowledge, it has grown in leaps and bounds. So much so that the Netflixs of this world and the Amazons of this world are falling over themselves trying to get a piece of the action in Nollywood, they have created bouquets on their platforms, especially for Nigerian content and I am proud to say I have content on those platforms as a Nollywood filmmaker. So I have chosen to out of a level of intentionality to say that I am a black filmmaker of Nigerian extraction. And the stories that I tell would resonance primarily with Nigerians, with Africans, with black people and with anybody else who bothers to lower their bias and accept the diversity of storytelling that is coming. It has started already with South Korea, making in roads into Hollywood, as they look for inspiration to get them out of this creative bottleneck that they find themselves in. Maybe the next frontier is Nigeria.
ALT A:
We can’t talk about Nollywood without talking about Biyi Bandele what would you say his legacy is, he was just making leaps and bounds and was a prolific teller, preserver of African stories?
OBI:
Bless him Biyi wasn’t personally known to me, but in a small industry our paths have crossed a few times. I consider him to be a compatriot as a Nigerian living in London and trying to go home to affect what’s going on there and to be counted because usually when I go to Nigeria, they ask me when I’m leaving. If I come back to London, they say, when did you come? So, I think Biyi strides those two worlds as much as I did. I wouldn’t call him prolific in Nollywood terms because he’s not shooting every day like, some of us are but he has made some really, historic memorable projects. His first being Half of a Yellow Sun which announced him into Nollywood and then he topped that with Fifty, then he was burning up the air waves on Netflix with Blood Sisters, which he co-directed and then The Kings Horseman, which is an adaptation of Wole Soyinka’s work. And as life would sometimes imitate art he’s now looking for a horseman to accompany him to the other side. And I hope he finds one who’s not as earthly and worldly as Elesin Oba, who failed in his duty. As artists, we leave pieces of ourselves scattered around the world so that we never die. So Biyi would never die, his works would always, keep him present in our minds and in our thoughts, and may his soul rest in peace.
ALT A:
So let’s talk about, BLACK MAIL, it comes from a real life event. Can you elaborate on that a bit? <laugh>
OBI:
I believe sometimes when a writer has a personal experience of the story they’re writing, there would be some authenticity that you probably will not find in somebody who’s been commissioned to write something. And I feel the reason, the majority of the works that I direct are written by me is not because I’m greedy or I do not want to pay somebody else. It’s simply because there’s a passion, a unique understanding of the story that comes from it being your baby. So as the lockdown started, and everybody was trying to come to terms with the new world that we were facing at the time. I got an email as you do, on a regular basis. This came from one Mr. Black, and I because of the work that I do, because of the kind of people that would reach out to you from nowhere, unsolicited, I open stuff that I really shouldn’t open if you know what I mean, emails. But I don’t click on links, but I would open the email.
So I opened this email and it said, we have compromised your email security and we have installed a camera in your laptop and we have been watching you for the past 90 days. We have footage of you doing all sorts and unless you pay 2000 pounds in Bitcoin in 24 hours, we would release it to the world and blah, blah. The most important part of that message is that it started with my password. So it started with your password is so, so, so and so, and they got my password right. Incidentally, I had changed it like three months before so I called my wife and I said, this is what I got. And she said, oh, there’s cameras, I should forget about it, but I couldn’t not because I had anything to hide, but I kind of felt vulnerable, felt violated like somebody broke into my home.
And then I started going through all my bank details and I started changing my passwords, all the email passwords, all the social media passwords. And by 2am I was still awake. And I said, why am I worried? Really? I was really convinced that this was a scam. I was really convinced they didn’t know anything about me, but the fact that they had my password, be it an old password, got me really flustered. So I said, what? And I went online. I asked myself has there been a story told about this? I discovered that there was a film, a TV series called Black Mirror, it had an episode called Shut up and Dance that dealt with sextortion. It’s all over the news, all over the internet. The police, the metropolitan police has advisory on it. They have a special department dealing with it, but there hasn’t been a story in the mainstream told about it.
So I watched Shut up and Dance and I saw it was a kind of a post-apocalyptic treatment of the story. It wasn’t like today. It wasn’t like you and I, it was somewhere set in the future when things were falling apart. And I thought what if we took that story and told it as a contemporary story, because everything is happening in the now. Then there was a spike in some of those, fraudulent activities during the lockdown, a real spike and people were killing themselves once they were compromised. So that night I started writing BLACK MAIL, fast forward a few months later I got some people to believe in the project. And in October of the same year, this was sometime in April, so in October of 2020, we made the film. It was the middle of lockdown.
So we had to bubble up together, stayed in hotels so that we can create our bubbles and be able to shoot. We didn’t have access to a lot of places so we built a set to recreate some of the places that we needed to be that we couldn’t have. So it was a really challenging project and but that’s how it came about. It came from that personal experience of how I felt, even though I hadn’t done anything wrong, what more, what if somebody who has done something wrong who has a lot to lose, how would they react? You know, as different cases of big stars, who’s had lived videos released, how would they deal with that? How would they come to terms with all of those things that trauma that the fear, the dread in their heads and the sleepless nights, trying to get their heads around being exposed. I felt that is a story for now. That is a very contemporary story that really, anybody that has an email will relate to and that’s how Black Mail came about.
ALT A:
You cast O.C Ukeje in the lead, why did you cast him and what was it like working with him?
OBI:
I was in this unique position where I’m telling African stories with what I call a universal soul. So you are constantly aware of the fact that the stories that you are telling are not only for Africans, you’re telling a story that anybody can relate to. And that is reflected in the casting, are you going to put on somebody who’s going to give you the quintessential Nollywood ceramics, or are you going to put an actor who’s going to be more digestible, more palatable to Western audiences who are used to more visual storytelling, more subtle acting techniques. O.C has been at the forefront of a generation of very great actors coming out of Nollywood and then he moved to Canada. Naturally when you migrate, you slow down a little bit, and that made him a bit scarce that also worked in our favour.
I didn’t want somebody who’s been in every film. I wanted somebody who would be new and fresh, but somebody with the charisma and the skills to carry this international film that we’re making. And I believe O.C ticked all the boxes. So we invited him from Canada. It was a tough ask to get him to come down during lockdown but he did. I think there’s something about casting, an actor who does more than acting. He interrogated the story, not just his part as most actors would do, because that’s all they see is their part. He interrogated every aspect of the story. How can we make this better? Why did this happen? Can we, that is the conversation I had with him every morning while we were shooting to just find a way to better the project without necessarily spending a billion pounds. So that’s what he brought to the table, killing his own parts, killing it to death, I would say and helping others. There were a few people who were not very experienced on the set and he helped carry them through. And yes, he was, it was with the benefit of hindsight, probably the best person to play that role.
ALT A:
What was it like shooting during lockdown, obviously resources were sparse. what were some of the techniques you used like camera-wise, etc?
OBI:
Every film is built from a set of circumstances that is particular to it. So the lockdown, forced a certain aesthetics on Black Mail. And while I could not tell you exactly what it is and say what compromises we had to make, obviously we didn’t find the crowds to shoot crowds. So we had to find a way to be creative, about shooting, to represent a crowd when none exists. We couldn’t shoot in a hospital so we had to be creative about creating our own hospital, to make it believable. We might not have everything we need in the hospital, but it’s at least suggestive of a hospital situation. Some of those compromises now forced a certain aesthetics on the film. We had difficulties casting some of the roles because some of the actors were not willing to work during lockdown.
They felt unsafe so we had to make do with people that were available and willing to work that were not necessarily of the class we wanted. So we had to spend time in rehearsals, trashing things out, trying to make them understand the importance of the scene, trying to make them understand, some of them didn’t have what I call the geography of a film set, which is where the camera goes and how you react to the camera when it moves. So we had to do all of that. I think looking back, the fact that we were constrained by the difficulties of lockdown forced us to be creative, to be spontaneous, to be and to find fresh ideas where we would’ve maybe been lazy and done it the simple way. And I think, if you watch the film, you would see that little bit of creative brinkmanship. I call it in trying to make sure that the story is told, even though you have all the odds against you.
ALT A:
Saying that obviously it paid off because you’ve already been nominated for awards and now the film is about get a 100 cinema wide UK release how does that feel?
OBI:
II don’t know. Sometimes you have to pinch yourself. I said, in one of my social media posts, every film starts it starts its journey as a simple idea, nothing is given. Nobody’s going to tell you that Nikki from (PR ) is going to work on your film from when it’s an idea. You have to go ahead and make it. So it’s really refreshing when you see your idea come together. It’s been challenging because it was made two years ago. The promises I made my investors was to turn this around in one year. I haven’t been able to do that, but sometimes things happen for a reason. And it’s about going on that journey, not being in a hurry, not being driven by money. The project becomes the leader and you just follow and eventually it will lead you to the right places. So we’ve done a few film festivals, It’s also going to screen at the Smithsonian museum in Washington, DC next month, it’s screening in many London boroughs as a Black, History Month film, including Kensington and Chelsea. It’s supposed to release in Nigeria. It’s been optioned by one of the streaming platforms. So you could say that it’s been a successful film, but success was not written all over it at the beginning. it took a lot of hard work, blood sweat and tears to get it this far, but I’m just grateful.
ALT A:
So where do you call home
OBI:
Chelsea? London <laugh>.
ALT A:
What would be your takeaway for what would you want the audience to take away from this story?
OBI:
So, there are two aspects, one of them is what I call the philosophical aspect of the film. So in terms of what the film represents, it tells us that every story is valid. Every dream is valid. That in our quest to diversify cinema voices in the UK, every story, whether it is Chinese, Indian, South Korean, it’s valid. I wish that young filmmakers or young creatives, even if they don’t know themselves right now will be inspired by this to say that if I tell the story that I want with soul and heart and everything that I’ve got, that there is an audience out there for it that it could compete with the big blockbusters in big multiplexes like Black Mail is doing. . The second one, which I think is, I don’t really force people to take ideas from my film and I let them take whatever they want based on their unique circumstances.
But I think one of the things to learn about Black Mail is that we are vulnerable. We are in the world that is evolving in front of us. We are going to lose more of our privacy. We need to be more careful about what we do otherwise we’ll just be living in a fishbowl. So be careful, watch your back and try look at the settings on your phone and your laptops because the defacto settings or the normal settings leave you really vulnerable. But once you watch the film, you begin to see that we should take responsibility for our own safety online.
ALT A:
Wonderful. Thank you so much for talking to ALT A
Black Mail (2022): Directed by Obi Emelonye. With O.C. Ukeje, Alessandro Babalola, Julia Holden, Judy Akuta.
BLACK MAIL is released in UK cinemas on 26th August, click here for cinema listings and screenings – https://www.blackmailmovie.com/screenings
