Tom Rowlands-Rees: What’s a British scientist doing in Nollywood?

That led to the budding filmmaker going to the Berlinale festival, ultimately meeting then-young Nigerian movie director Kenneth Gyang Rowlands-Rees’ second film, which he wrote, directed and acted in, was called B.E.S.T. and won the Oxford University student film competition in 2006. It was also chosen by YouTube to be one of their featured films, […]

That led to the budding filmmaker going to the Berlinale festival, ultimately meeting then-young Nigerian movie director Kenneth Gyang Rowlands-Rees’ second film, which he wrote, directed and acted in, was called B.E.S.T. and won the Oxford University student film competition in 2006. It was also chosen by YouTube to be one of their featured films, meaning it picked up approximately 150,000 views in about 24 hours. Although he was selected to write and perform in a BBC radio comedy show called Play and Record, he tried a stand-up comedy stint which he admits went wrong. Back to the young movie-maker’s meeting with Gyang, a close friendship followed and they, along with ace cinematographer Yinka Edward formed a collective called Cinema Kpatakpata in 2010. Soon after, Rowlands-Rees co-wrote ‘Confusion Na Wa’ with Gyang, going on to produce it into an AMAA-winning film.
Why did you decide to get involved with a Nigerian movie?
Before I met [co-producer] Kenneth Gyang, I had various connections with Nigeria going way back. My family used to live in Zaria when I was a kid so I was exposed to the country from an early age. At university in the UK I had a serious relationship with a British-Nigerian girl and I would try and read up on Nigerian stuff as much as I could to try and impress her. In retrospect I realise that this is quite a clumsy form of romance and it didn’t particularly work but I accumulated all this ‘Naija’ knowledge that was just going to go to waste after we broke up.
Before starting my PhD I made a short animated comedy film in my bedroom for fun which, against all my expectations, won a competition that got me a place on the 2006 Berlinale Talent Campus in Germany. That’s where I met a fast-talking young man called Kenneth Gyang. I don’t know how it happened but Kenneth and I just clicked. I think he was pretty impressed by that ‘Naija’ knowledge I mentioned earlier. I said “Sannu” and was dropping all kinds of knowledge like “the president of Nigeria is Olusegun Obasanjo”, “estimates place the population of Nigeria between 150 and 200 million people” and “Kaduna, that’s in Kaduna State” and so on. With gems like that, he knew I was a white man that deeply understood the Nigerian condition and I guess that’s how we became friends.
Somehow Kenneth managed to convince me to come to Nigeria in 2007 which gave me my first taste of Nigerian film-making. By 2009 I had opened up two creative paths for myself – one was trying to get somewhere as a comedy writer for BBC radio where I had just clambered onto the bottom rungs of the ladder and the other was working on these scripts and bits and pieces with Kenneth. So I figured I should go and visit him again in Nigeria and it was on that trip that we worked on the script for ‘Confusion Na Wa’ and formed Cinema Kpatakpata with our friend, the fantastic cinematographer Yinka Edward. When I came back, I started a new job to pay the bills but we kept the momentum going.
What’s the extent of your involvement in ‘Confusion Na Wa’?
I am writer/producer. Originally I was just involved in a writing capacity. I guess one thing that people often wonder about is how I can be so arrogant (to put it politely) to think I can write stories about African characters for an African audience when I’m not myself from Africa (irrespective of my expatriate childhood). I think it’s a fair question to ask, particularly since there have been quite a few outsiders that have done a pretty bad job of describing an Africa that Africans find engaging.
I suppose the thing to remember is that filmmaking is inherently a team exercise, so during the writing process I’d be running ideas past Kenneth constantly and of course as the director he turned down a fair number of my suggestions just because they wouldn’t be cool with the audience that he knows better than me. He’d also be rewriting some of the parts I’d written to add his own flavour and nuance. The other is that writing a screenplay is not like writing a book, it’s not the finished product. It’s about providing a skeleton on which the director and actors can add their interpretation, which is where a lot of the cultural nuance comes in to play.
On the producing side, I never set out to be a producer, it just happened. I also consider Kenneth to be as much the producer of this movie as me, even though he is also the director. Producing is just getting stuff done and keeping things moving and at different times we’ve each been handling that to differing degrees. Generally people classify us as a Director-Producer partnership but in my view we’re a Writer-Director partnership where we both produce. The reason I’ve loved working with Kenneth is that he is a lot more than a writer-director. It was him that really made me see the bigger picture in terms of the business side and its artistic implications.
What’s the budget you had had to work with and how did you raise the cash?
The total amount of money actually outlaid was EUR20,000, which is about 4 million Naira. This was provided from the Rotterdam Film Festival’s Hubert Bals Fund. They give out grants to filmmakers all over the world so we sent them a script and a vision for what we wanted to do and they liked it enough to throw some financial support our way. This really enabled the whole thing.
However, when people ask what the budget is, we don’t say it was 4 million Naira because just counting the cash spent ignores the contributions and sacrifices made by the cast and crew who came and did their thing. These people believed in the project, even though we could not afford industry rates and their time and effort is worth something that is not captured within the super-modest budget. So, perhaps we’re looking more at 6 million Naira or more.
Can you please tell us about your childhood in Nigeria?
Between the ages of 10 and 12 (roughly) my Dad’s career took him to living in Zaria. Because my parents move to a new country every few years (we had just come from Kinshasa before Zaria) I was at a boarding school in England and every school holiday I would come ‘home’ (that is what I called it) to Nigeria. This was the early nineties. There was a small expatriate community in Zaria. I remember there being a core of Lebanese that were there to stay and a revolving door of British, Americans, Pakistani, Germans, Greeks and Italians who would on the whole come and go. Often when people think of expatriates in Africa they think of lavish parties at some country club with servants dressed in white serving cocktails by the swimming pool but Zaria was nothing like that at all: what ex colonial infrastructure there was seemed pretty decrepit.
Looking back on my childhood memories as an adult it seems like the expatriate scene was very insular. Some people saw that small community as their whole world. I remember shortly after we started living in Zaria my Mum getting an anonymous phone call in the middle of the night from some woman asking about why she’d been hanging around with this Greek lady that had invited her around to hang out that day. When the caller didn’t like my Mum’s answers she blew up and started swearing at her – you won’t be able to print the language used so I won’t say it here.  It wouldn’t be fair to say that this normal behaviour, but it shows how small the community was that someone could feel threatened enough by the idea of a newcomer coming and stealing her only friend away.
My parents would lecture me and my brother about how lucky we were to be exposed to a different culture and how we should make more of an effort to appreciate the rich Nigerian heritage that was in front of us. Imagine you are ten years old, it is the school holidays and you can either: A. Watch cartoons; B. Sit around playing SuperMarioLand on the Game Boy; C. Go to Zaria old city to find out about the traditional northern Nigerian construction techniques. Or clothes-dyeing methods. Or leather-working artisans. As described by whichever random Hausa person my Mum had most recently befriended. Of course I’m grateful now for the fascinating cultural exchange, but back then me and my brother had to be dragged along kicking and screaming, this stuff was at the bottom of our list.
One thing I remember so distinctly was getting into the middle of Zaria old city and it being like another world, then turning a corner and seeing on the wall in front of us in huge letters the words “KENNY DALGLISH”. I remember thinking, ‘Wow Liverpool really does have committed fans to come all the way from England just to write that’.
This was the early 90s and I don’t think Nollywood was big enough then to impact our lives, but I do remember there being an appetite for films in Nigeria. My Mum used to operate a bakery out of our kitchen making bread and all kinds of British buns that she’d sell to expats and a few Nigerians looking for something different. I remember one Nigerian guy used to have this huge film library on VHS, and to pay for a batch of Chelsea buns he’d brought us movies to watch from his collection, mainly Hollywood stuff. That guy could tell you about any film, he must have been watching them all the time.
It’s difficult to say how much these experiences led to my involvement with Nigerian film. Sometimes I think not at all and then other times I think quite a lot. When I met Kenneth it broke the ice and let us get to know each other and discover shared interests. One other thing that’s funny if I allow myself to be a little superstitious: it was during that time I first had to create a computer password and I thought it would be easy to use the name of where I lived – and nobody in England would be able to guess it. But Zaria didn’t have enough letters so I chose the nearest big town, Kaduna. After we left Nigeria I carried on using that as my default password. I typed the word “Kaduna” multiple times every single day for about twenty years, I estimate I must have written it at least 30,000 times in that period. And it was just a word, I had no connection to the place at all, it didn’t have any meaning to me other than being necessary to check my email or open my computer. And then, one day I ended up making a film in Kaduna – that’s destiny! My only regret is that my password wasn’t “Los Angeles” – I would be rich by now!
Do you intend to take off the Executive Producer’s cap and strictly be a director someday?
Do I want to direct? When I first met Kenneth we were both at the Talent Campus based on films we had written and directed, so we were both writer/directors. In working together I have drifted more into the writing side and Kenneth has emphasised more the directing (though of course he has also contributed as a writer). This seems to have worked for us so far.
Getting back to directing is something I’d love to do one day, but it’s not something that I have immediate ambitions for. I’m enjoying writing, I like the way Kenneth directs and for where we’re at right now I think it’s better if he handles that role. Perhaps a natural next step would be to co-direct something with Kenneth to see how that twist on our creative collaboration plays out. I am conscious of my strengths and the things I can offer creatively, but I am also conscious of my limitations especially when playing away from home.
For the time being, I’ll leave directing to him. If things go well, then in the future maybe I’ll get in on the act. As long as I’m not smoking cigars and crushing people’s dreams by then.
 What are your distribution plans for ‘Confusion Na Wa’?
The best thing about winning an AMAA gong was all of the excitement and expectation it has created for ‘Confusion Na Wa’ but the worst thing about winning was all of the excitement and expectation it has created for ‘Confusion Na Wa’! Of course I’m joking, there was no downside to winning AMAA, it was always the award that we prized above all others. But now that it’s happened people want us to just hurry up and release the film and we’re not quite ready yet. There are a lot of things, like paperwork that needs to be put in place and we are a small operation doing all of this for the first time. Our hope is to premiere in late July and then distribute from then onwards.