Film-maker Gina Prince-Bythewood: ‘I made The Woman King to be watched among a cheering crowd’

Few people are as happy as the maker of a hit movie, and The Woman King is certainly that. A historical action epic set in 19th-century west Africa, it stars Viola Davis as the fictional general of the real Agojie: a cadre of women soldiers who safeguarded the Dahomey kingdom from the predatory Oyo empire. Critical praise has flowed. More importantly, the film has already all but made back its $50mn budget after just three weeks on US release.

Director Gina Prince-Bythewood now sits in London’s Corinthia Hotel with a certain blissed-out air. Success must be especially sweet for a movie carrying the weight this one has. “I never thought of it as a risk,” she says. “But it always was for Hollywood.”

Studios distrust a break from the norm. And here, for all the lavish brilliance of countless kinetic battle scenes, is a cast of black women in a genre long devoted to Vikings, Romans and medieval Scots. The director, 53, first saw her confidence justified on the film’s opening night. Influential market research firm CinemaScore polled audiences for a graded response. The result was a rare A+. The last movie to achieve that had been the all-conquering Top Gun: Maverick.

“CinemaScore was a big deal. It meant everyone — male, female, white, black — was loving the film. And they were going to tell their friends.” At a time when the movie business seems to be less than booming, will studios have noted the popularity of a new model of action hero? She pauses for a wry smile. “You would hope.”

But Prince-Bythewood is not here to tear Hollywood down. The Woman King is her fifth film. Her first, Love & Basketball, was made in 2000. In between, she has travelled into the heart of the system, both to better effect change and make giant crowd-pleasers. “I always wanted to be in the big sandbox,” she says. But the business typecasts film-makers as well as actors. No black woman has ever made a Bond movie or a Mission: Impossible. “That’s the Catch 22. You can’t get in the room to make a major action movie unless you’ve made a major action movie. So I took deliberate steps to address that.” 

Directors sometimes claim their choices are guided by an indefinable muse. Prince-Bythewood says she took recent jobs like the Marvel serial Cloak and Dagger in a targeted effort to prove she was ready for a film like The Woman King. “Once Marvel is next to your name, it helps. A lot.” 

A halfway house was The Old Guard, a 2020 female-led superhero yarn starring Charlize Theron. The movie was made by Netflix, another hit, albeit one subject to the streamer’s opaque reporting of audience numbers. But cinema is Prince-Bythewood’s true love: the only venue for the maximal scale and fine technical detail her eyes light up discussing, and the shared experience that is also key. “I made The Woman King to be watched among a cheering crowd.”

As a template for the film’s spectacular fight scenes, she obsessively rewatched Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. Aiming for the mainstream, much thought was given to how to be believably bloody without incurring a rating that would bar young audiences. (“You have to be mindful about impaling.”) 

Defining her vision ahead of time nudged the film towards the green light from backers Sony. Alongside Davis, the actors eventually included John Boyega and Lashana Lynch, then freshly cast in No Time to Die. The goal was a package that would leave Sony no reason to pass. “Getting a studio to say yes is hard. They will find a hundred excuses to say no.”

The Woman King moved forward with Davis among the producers. For Prince-Bythewood, it meant the star before the camera was also a crucial power behind it. “Truthfully, some actor-producers don’t put the movie first,” the director says. “Viola does.”

Davis stepped into a shoot loaded with physical demands. Prince-Bythewood is hard to picture as a tyrant, but she does have the clear-eyed focus of a woman who will ask for multiple takes if necessary. On The Woman King, packed with acrobatic scenes of enemies being eviscerated, this could be exhausting. Another smile. When the shot is finally nailed, she says, you hear the same whoop of delight from cast and crew you do in the cinema.

Filming took place in South Africa. “We needed to be on the continent. The actors’ feet had to be in the soil.” A similar urge for authenticity fuelled the research supporting the film.

But that, she says, was complicated. Western histories of Dahomey dated back to the colonial era. In response, a “deep dive” began into primary sources, working with Princeton professor Leonard Wantchekon. The process unearthed a wealth of detail that ended up on screen. It also evidenced the story’s account of a kingdom breaking ties with the slave trade. The movie is not presented as documentary, yet a small corner of social media has still accused it of glossing over Dahomey’s past.

Prince-Bythewood is unflustered. “You can’t win arguments on Twitter. In reality, what we did is absolutely accurate based on the period the film takes place in. I didn’t just make this stuff up.”

A thread from the director’s earliest career to The Woman King is athleticism. Studying film at UCLA, she also competed as a triple jumper. Love & Basketball, co-produced by Spike Lee, was a romance that doubled as a sports movie, drawing on her own experience on the court. What she calls an “athlete mentality” still shapes her approach. “I never look at a scene like: well, it’s only women so let’s make it good enough. The bar doesn’t drop.”

After her debut, she made other well-liked if slightly under-the-radar movies: 1960s fable The Secret Life of Bees; music business melodrama Beyond the Lights. She also felt a mounting frustration at not securing bigger projects. “I never gave myself a ceiling, but Hollywood did.” 

The turning point came in the 2010s. Her eldest son, then a 13-year-old Marvel devotee, asked her why there were no black superheroes. Black Panther was still unmade. “That shook me. It shifted my thinking. I thought: OK, let me stop saying ‘I wish I could’, and change that to ‘I’m going to’.”

Her reinvention aligned with overdue changes in the wider industry. Prince-Bythewood credits the example of Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman in her being hired to direct The Old Guard. And, in 2018, the $1.3bn box office of Black Panther cleared the way for The Woman King. “We quickly went from being in development to ‘OK, let’s figure out a way to do this’.” The picture she paints is of an industry whose commitment to inclusion has been driven by the numbers. “That’s Hollywood. Success begets success.” 

Which also has a flipside. Had The Woman King not done so well, the traditional studio response would have been to quietly write off the whole experiment. “If we’d failed, it would be years before you saw black women in another action movie.” That pressure, Prince-Bythewood says, was constant. Yet earlier, she also said she never saw the film as a risk. “Oh, I never did. Actually, it was clarifying. It just meant I couldn’t fail.”

In US cinemas now and UK cinemas from October 7