The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
A fresh mix
Netflix drama ‘The Old Guard’ defies conventions of superhero movies and the people who make them
The new Netflix adaptation of graphic novel “The Old Guard” might be the most radical superhero movie so far.
Sure, the plot doesn’t immediately signal this: The story follows four immortal soldiers who for centuries have fought the good fight for humanity, and just as they take on a new recruit, they come under fresh attack from powerful forces.
But look a little closer: The team’s commander is a woman, Andromache of Scythia — Andy, for short — played by Charlize Theron. And the newly recruited immortal Nile is a young Black woman Marine played by Kiki Layne. Two men, a Christian and Muslim, provide the romance, having fallen in love after killing each other (repeatedly) during the Crusades.
Then there’s the production itself, led by director Gina Prince-Bythewood. The first Black woman director of a superhero or comic book movie, PrinceBythewood hired many talented women filmmakers for her team — including her longtime editor, Terilyn A. Shropshire — to give more women a shot.
“The crew I put around me were who I felt was best for the job and would impact the film positively,” Prince-Bythewood says by phone from her home in Los Angeles recently. “It’s not a politically correct thing at all; it is that these women were incredible.
“The reality of our industry is that their resumes are not as long as their male counterparts, but it’s not about talent: It’s strictly about opportunity,” she says.
What Prince-Bythewood did with the opportunity when Skydance Media hired her to direct was make a movie that’s as thrilling as any superhero movie — and more human than most.
“Part of my pitch to Skydance and then Netflix was that for this film, it is an action-drama,” she says. “And the quiet parts are as important as the big set pieces, because without the audience investing in the characters, the action can feel monotonous.
“If everything is tied together, for me, that’s when I get most invested. So it was really about starting there.”
A new direction
Before “The Old Guard,” Prince-Bythewood had directed mostly smaller budget dramas and romances like “Love & Basketball,” “Beyond the Lights” and “The Secret Life of Bees.”
But she’d been wanting to move into the action side of things, directing the pilot of the Marvel series “Cloak & Dagger” and spending nearly two years on the Spider-Man related comic-book movie “Silver & Black” before it stalled out.
“So it was kind of that perfect moment,” PrinceBythewood says of the day she received Greg Rucka’s screenplay for “The Old Guard,” the comic book he’d created in 2017. “I started reading and I fell in love so quickly with it. I just thought the story was so interesting.
“It kept surprising me. The immortality of it, yet it was about the tragedy of immortality, which I felt was different and real and true.
“And love the fact that it was this group of warriors from different cultures and sexual orientations and genders that have come together to save humanity,” she says. “I mean, that’s the world that I — when I look out — that’s what I see, that organic diversity.”
Landing Charlize Theron as Andy was a casting dream come true.
“Charlize is one of the few women that really rock this space,” Prince-Bythewood says of the Oscar winner whose action film credits include such fare as “Mad Max: Fury Road” and “Atomic Blonde.” “I knew going in that she knew what it would take.
“With Nile, I had been auditioning a lot of women, but there was just that thing missing for me, the believability that they were a Marine, that they had toughness,” she says. “And Kiki (Layne) came and auditioned, and literally five seconds, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’m seeing Nile.’ “
The Marvel pilot and aborted “Silver & Black” project taught her a lot about making an action movie, and the budget those movies receive gave her all the tools she needed.
“I’m not going to lie, it’s going to be hard to go back to having the resources I had before, but with those resources, with that bigger budget, comes a lot more pressure, a lot more voices,” Prince-Bythewood says.
“So you just ignore the pressure and focus on telling a good story, because at the end of the day, whether you have $7 million or 10 times that, you have to start by telling a good story.”
Making the cut
For Shropshire, editing a film for a woman director wasn’t unusual. In addition to working on all of PrinceBythewood’s projects, she also worked multiple times for Kasi Lemmons on films such as “Eve’s Bayou” and Ava DuVernay for the miniseries “When They See Us.” (Duvernay is also at work on a superhero movie, an adaptation of Jack Kirby’s “New Gods.”)
Still, Shropshire is the first Black woman to edit a superhero film, and the rare editor to cut one by herself, without a co-editor or two to handle the voluminous frames of footage these movies produce.
“It’s definitely a gauntlet to be thrown down to take a project like this on,” she says. “But again, what’s great is that I too love these movies. And when your director gets to flex their muscles, so do you. You get to kind of use different tools in your toolbox.”
Prince-Bythewood focused on making the characters fully realized, and Shropshire emphasized this in the editing of “The Old Guard.” Unlike some movies in the genre, the action sequences allowed for the emotions of each punch or gunshot to be apparent on the characters’ faces.
“It was very important for Gina that some scenes, which again, typically are so fast-paced to the point where you can’t even keep track of what’s going on, she wanted to keep things grounded in a kind of reality,” Shropshire says. “Yes, these people have extraordinary gifts, which might be considered a curse at times, but she wanted to feel like they moved through life in a very grounded way.
“Editing is a craft you can hone and continue to master, and then you just wait for the opportunity, for someone to give you a project like this so that you can truly show your work,” she says. “Unfortunately, in this business those opportunities are rare.
“I cannot tell you that if Gina had not asked me to do this, I could have walked into an interview with someone who’s never worked with me before and, you know, I would have been the obvious choice.”
The next adventure
Prince-Bythewood says that as she was wrapping up “The Old Guard,” she’d convinced herself she wanted to return to a smaller project next, another love story perhaps.
“And then an opportunity came that will be announced very soon, and I’m like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t turn this down,’ “she says.
“So I’m going back into the sandbox, the bigger sandbox, but I still hope, absolutely, that I can bounce between both worlds. “What I’m most excited about is proving myself in that world so that there’s never that question any more of, ‘Can she do it?’ “Prince Bythewood says.