Hollywood catching up to director Prince-Bythewood
Gina Prince-Bythewood knows what good fighting looks like. The director has been an athlete her entire life, but she also just loves action movies. So when she started dreaming up the template for a bareknuckle clash between Charlize Theron and KiKi Layne in the Netflix film “The Old Guard,” her bar was high: the bathroom fight from “Mission: Impossible — Fallout.”
“It’s a perfect fight scene. I wanted ours to be as dope as that,” PrinceBythewood said. “We wanted the audience to feel like they were in the fight, to feel the slams into the wall.”
For her, that meant not cheating by having “flyaway walls” in the aircraft that would make it easier to move the camera around or relying too heavily on stunt doubles.
The pressure was enormous. It was the first scene she shot on her first-ever big-budget action pic. She only had five days to do it, where the “Mission: Impossible” team had a month. And it was an historic moment: Before “The Old Guard,” a Black woman had never directed a comic book film.
“The fact that we’re still having firsts is ridiculous,” Prince-Bythewood said. “I knew I could do it. Hollywood just hasn’t caught up to me yet.”
She’s getting the biggest audience of her career as “The Old Guard” streams on Netflix to subscribers in 190 countries. Although “Love & Basketball” and “Beyond the Lights” are beloved by critics and audiences, neither have exactly been runaway hits at the box office, hampered by limited distribution plans informed by incorrect assumptions about the reach of films with Black leads. The Netflix scope feels like a victory that’s been a long time coming.
“After all these years of fighting for any sort of distribution and being told these stories, these characters don’t travel? And now, 190 countries? I can’t get over that,” she said.
Skydance Media approached Prince-Bythewood to direct “The Old Guard,” an adaptation of Greg Rucka’s comic book about mercenary immortals. She’s picky about her projects and writes most of them. But this struck a chord with her: It was an action-drama, the leads were women, and one was Black. And she was being asked to infuse the action with character-driven drama.
Prince-Bythewood is used to fighting for herself. It goes back to childhood when she wanted to play sports. “There were no girls’ leagues,” she said. “Boys often didn’t want me and my sisters out there.”
She was undaunted and became the first girl to play kickball at her school.
Not taking an initial
“no” is how she got into UCLA’s prestigious directing program, landed her first writing gig on the television show “A Different World,” and the only reason “Love & Basketball” and “Beyond the Lights” exist. Her drive, she thinks, stems from being an athlete.
“It’s so much about ambition and stamina and outworking everybody,” she said. “That mentality drives who I am as a director. And this industry early on was constantly telling me that my stories weren’t worthy or valid. I kept having to fight for my space.”
She feels like she’s finally in a good place, however, thanks in part to the enduring affection for “Love & Basketball” and “Beyond the Lights.”
But she still feels immense pressure to succeed with “The Old Guard.” Opportunities are rare for female directors on the blockbuster level, and even rarer for women of color.
“It is really hard making a film like this. It’s 63 days of shooting and nine and a half months overseas in hard prep. And you’re reminded every day that you cannot fail,” she said.
“Because if I fail, I kill it for the next group of Black women who want this opportunity.”