How a Woman Director Found Her Voice
I met Amma Asante, the director of Belle and winner of this year’s Women's Media Center award for Directorial Excellence, on Twitter. We had just secured her film to open the fourth Athena Film Festival, of which I’m the cofounder, and I thought I’d try and reach out to see if I could get her to come to New York from Europe for our festival. Amazingly, our Twitter exchange turned into a Skype call, and that turned into Asante getting on a plane and wowing our audience.
This story is a testament to the generosity of this woman who burst onto the US film scene this earlier this year. Her film had the odds stacked against it. It was a small indie from an unknown female director starring an unknown British woman of color. Belle tells the true story of Dido Elizabeth Belle (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a young woman of mixed race raised by her uncle William Murray, the Earl of Mansfield and the Lord Chief Justice of the UK. It touched audiences and became one of the indie box office stories of the summer, grossing over $10 million.
While many in the US have just learned about Asante, she's had a long—and varied—career in the UK. She was born to Ghanaian parents who settled in Streatham, South London. Her father enrolled her in professional theatre school to help enhance her creativity and overcome her shyness. She became a professional actor and appeared on BBC’s Grange Hill, but even at an early age she knew that she wasn’t cut out for acting. “I never loved it—I was just too self-aware,” she said. “That was the shy part of me.” She was never comfortable in front of the camera.
So at 21, after being a successful child actor, Asante stopped. But she had no idea what she was going to do next. Her mom insisted she take typing classes to have something to fall back on. As she learned to type, she started creating her own stories and discovered the writer within her.
The script Asante created while learning to type became her calling card. It was passed around and got her meetings in Los Angles with development executives at Fox. But it took Asante, at 22, quite a while to believe that she had something to say. She was too nervous to put her own name on the script, and so this script that was making the rounds and getting attention actually had her mother's maiden name on it. When a producer called requesting a meeting, she knew the jig was up and came clean.
From that script, she got commissions at the BBC and Film 4, and at 26 she had her first series on the air—Brothers and Sisters. It was then she finally admitted that she was a writer.
Her next adventure in writing turned out to be her first movie—the BAFTA award-winning A Way of Life, which is a story of poverty and a young woman trying to survive under dire circumstances. While she now embraced being a writer, she never imagined she could be a director—she had never seen a director who looked like her. “It never crossed my mind because it was so simple. Directors were men,” she said. “When you get that message when you are a child like I did, you just don't question it, and I had never stopped to think to question it.”
However, The UK Film Council told Asante that it would finance the film only if she directed it. The council even offered to give her training, but, terrified of ruining her script (which, she said, “was the best thing I had ever written”), Asante said no. “I was afraid to fail.” Finally, she was strong-armed into it by friends and colleagues who told her what an amazing opportunity this was and assured her that she could do it. For all her fears, once she was behind the camera, she was at home. “I thought, ‘Oh my god, this makes sense to me.’ It was just like writing on the screen—it was finishing the job. That's what it felt like for me.”
The results showed that investing in her was worth it. In 2004 she was honored with the first Alfred Dunhill UK Talent Award at the London Film Festival, and the BAFTA Carl Foreman Award for Special Achievement by a British writer, director, or producer for their first feature film.
But then Asante suffered something all too common for women directors—the sophomore curse. After the success and recognition she received for her first film, she had several commissions and was readying three different projects, but they all collapsed in the financial crisis of 2007-2008. Asante suffered a massive crisis of faith in herself and in her future.
While she may have been down, she certainly was not out. In the midst of her crisis, she received an email from producer Damian Jones. Jones had spent some time working on trying to get the story of Belle to the screen, and he pursued Asante with great zeal, not taking no for an answer. In his first email he included an image of the now-famous portrait of Dido Belle and her cousin, Lady Elizabeth Murray. Seeing the portrait had a great impact on Asante. As she said to the Guardian this past May: “I looked at that portrait and thought: oh my god—look how Elizabeth loves her! I have never seen a person of color in a painting from this period not being treated as a pet.” She was intrigued but still gun-shy from her past disappointments. Once Jones, as well as the UK Film Council, convinced her they were behind her vision for the film, she was fully on board.
The film had its world premiere at the 2013 Toronto Film Festival and opened in the US in May 2014 and the UK in the summer to wide acclaim. Asante recently signed on to direct Unforgettable for Warner Brothers, making her one of the few female directors working on a studio film.
Asante knows she's a role model in a world with very few women in her position who look like her. She said, “Belle gave me an audience, and I feel a responsibility particularly to those young women who tweet and who are looking at the Ava's [DuVernay—the director Selma, the upcoming biopic of Martin Luther King Jr.], looking at myself—they are looking at the other women out there who look like they are defying the odds. We are making their world just a bit bigger."
This is how Amma Asante has harnessed the power of the movies. To make our worlds bigger and to make all our experiences count.
Listen to Amma Asante's recent interview on Women's Media Center Live With Robin Morgan, or download it from iTunes.