REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK: Jon Miller
I've been trying to figure out how to make sense of my impressions of Lancelot Oduwa Imasuen and his world, and the idea that keeps coming back is "big picture versus small picture."
The big picture is that, from a standing start in the early 1990s, the Nigerian film industry has become the third most productive on the planet. The small picture is that it's not really film (the movies are shot on videotape and go straight to the home video market) and it's hardly an "industry," but rather an agglomeration of hundreds of informal, short-term alliances between artists and entrepreneurs.
The big picture is that Lancelot is at the vanguard of a cultural revolution, in which African stories, told by Africans, are suddenly reaching tens of millions of people around the world. The small picture is that "Nollywood" actors, writers, directors, and producers are struggling each day to find fresh ways to tell those stories in the face of countless financial and technical barriers.
The big picture is that Lancelot, born in 1971 into a poor family in a provincial city, has, by dint of uncommon talent and energy, become an international celebrity. The small picture is that he lives in a nondescript rowhouse with broken windows and balky plumbing, where the roar of generators is as constant as the drone of mosquitoes.
The big picture is that these are exhilarating times. The small picture is that daily life can be a slog.
One of Lancelot Imasuen's greatest skills, it seems to me, is never to lose sight of the big picture, no matter how much static clouds the screen.
I spent several days with Lancelot as he shot a film called "Let's Dance Again." It was work for hire, a tie-in with a reality TV show called "Next Movie Star," with the female lead played by a novice actress who was voted in by viewers. I joined the shoot on about day ten, and things were not going well. The dancers they had hired couldn't act. The real actors didn't always show up. The power kept failing. The location scouts would disappear without telling anyone where the next day's shoot would be.
Through it all, Lancelot's cell phone kept ringing. He was trying to coax the next payment out of the financiers. He was giving instructions to the editor of a movie he had in post-production. He was organizing a trip to Los Angeles to meet with potential investors. He was conferring with the screenwriter of an upcoming film.
When the cameras were rolling, though, Lancelot was there. He sat the actors down to talk about their characters' motivations, about the meaning of the scenes. He made changes to the script, and tried out the new lines himself. He called for take after take. Shooting a scene at a roadside carwash, he danced in the street, clapping his hands above his head, to the bemusement of passing motorists. Each time he bellowed "Action!" it was clear that his heart was in it.
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“Through the Nigerian films, we tell our stories, by ourselves, for ourselves. And our people have come to fall in love with this!” — Lancelot Oduwa Imasuen, Movie Director
One hot day, as production stalled and Lancelot fielded phone calls, I sat on a concrete patio with Desmond Elliot, the leading man in "Let's Dance Again" and one of Nollywood's most popular actors. I asked him about himself ("I am the Denzel of Africa," he laughed), then I asked him about Lancelot. "Oh, he's one of the best," he said. "He moves the actors to do more than they think they can do. But we love it. For an industry that is just growing, we need people like him."
Nollywood is growing, by leaps and bounds. It was born out of the ashes of Nigerian state television in the late 1980s, and was helped along by a crime wave that made trips to the cinema too dangerous. There was talent, there was demand, there was technology. And, importantly, there was no one giving orders. Today dozens of directors crank out hundreds of films per year (some estimates put the number over 1,000) on budgets as low as $10,000. Many debut on cable TV (Nollywood movies are a staple on Africa Magic, a pan-African network based in Johannesburg); most are sold at tiny video shops all over the continent, and abroad wherever Africans live.
Early one morning I visited Lancelot Imasuen in his hotel room (he had been married a few weeks earlier, but he preferred to sleep near the shoot rather than fight the horrid Lagos traffic) and we talked about his professional life. His background is as an actor, not a businessman, but he's trying to get better on the money side of things. His goal is not to get rich, he said, but to realize his artistic vision. Although he's one of Nollywood's most successful directors, his films are normally shot on extremely tight budgets, with just one camera, without dollies or cranes, and with inferior microphones and lights.
I asked him if he ever got fed up. "Oh my God," he said, rolling his eyes. "A producer comes up with a fantastic idea. It's written like literature. And you get on the set and you see that you don't have the materials you need. The script calls for a car and you can't even find a tricycle!"
Lancelot has grand plans — to build a modern studio in his hometown, Benin City; to entice foreign crews to come work with him (he shot a movie in Hollywood and still marvels at the professionalism); to focus on films in Edo, his native language (English is Nollywood's global meal ticket, but Lancelot says the truly great African movies have been shot in the vernacular).
And he wants to get more thematically ambitious. While most of his output (more than 150 titles!) has been genre films (family dramas, romances, gangster movies), he has dealt with many serious issues — the maltreatment of widows, female genital mutilation, rape, child soldiers. He'd like to go further. He's itching to direct epics about African history and little-known African heroes.
"In a distant time I want my films to compete in the foreign films category of the Oscars, and I am working assiduously towards that," he said. "I have the creativity to get there. I don't want to make American films. I want to tell my kind of story to the world, on the world stage."
In a small-picture business, that's a decidedly big-picture dream.
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