Amma Asante first made a name for herself as one of the cast members in the popular children’s drama Grange Hill, before making appearances in The Bill, Desmond’s and Birds of a Feather. She was the head writer on Brothers & Sisters before moving into directing. A Way of Life (2004) was one of the first films to look at teenage and young adult life in Britain in the new millennium. This hard-hitting drama set in South Wales examines racism, economic inequality and the ramifications of an entire community deprived of a voice in contemporary society. At the BAFTAs that year Asante received the Carl Foreman Award for Special Achievement by a British Writer, Director or Producer in their First Feature Film.
Belle (2013) is an imaginative, visually lustrous account of the life of Dido Elizabeth Belle, the illegitimate mixed-race daughter of Maria Belle, an enslaved African woman, and Captain John Lindsay. At a young age, she was entrusted to the care of William Murray, the first Earl of Mansfield, who became Lord Chief Justice. The story focuses on Belle and Mansfield at a time when the subject of slavery and its abolition lay at the heart of British politics. Asante’s film is a fascinating study of attitudes to race, class and gender during this era.
Was acting a way into film for you?
It was the way in, although I didn’t realise that at the time. I was a very shy child and my father decided to send me to stage school at the age of ten. He thought it could be a way of bringing me out of myself and also nurturing my creativity. He realised that I was a creative kid and this would be a good route for me. He was quite progressive in this way. If you’re the child of an African father for whom formal education is important, there’s normally a pressure to be a lawyer or a doctor. My father was very good at looking at what the three of us – I have a brother and sister – were interested in, or showed a talent for, and then encouraging us in that direction. So I ended up in stage school not really knowing what it was and what it was going to mean to the rest of my life.
After acting in a number of TV series, was writing Brothers & Sisters a stepping stone towards directing for you?
At the time, no. Directing just didn’t seem to be an option for me, for someone like me. I didn’t even know it was something that I would enjoy. By the end of my teens, I realised that acting just wasn’t for me. Mainly because I realised that I wasn’t good at it. However, I was fascinated with television’s ability to connect with its audience – I was enamoured with storytelling.
Around this time my mum insisted that I went to secretarial college. That gave me the ability to type. At first, I was just intent on getting my typing speed up so that I could temp. I really thought I was going to leave the industry. However, I realised I had this story in me. And because the script format was the one I was most familiar with, I just started to type out my story in the form of a screenplay.
Has your experience as an actor informed you as a director?
What really made a difference was working on Grange Hill, more than anything else. We had two scripts a week and were turning over two episodes a month. Doing that for three years meant everything. I was constantly surrounded by actors and crew, and the language of film and storytelling. So I guess Grange Hill and learning to type were key. I know that sounds crazy but being able to type allowed me to get my ideas out really quickly.
Directing was thrust on me when I was forced by one of my financiers at the BFI to direct my first feature. I wasn’t keen because I didn’t want to ruin it. I thought the script was the best thing I had written at that point and I wanted a great director to take it on. The Film Council felt that I was the one person who knew this material inside out and was the best placed to direct it. In the end they were right.
Why did you choose to set the film in Wales?
I met the producer Peter Edwards – the head of drama at what was then HTV Wales – at a BAFTA event and we started talking about the difference between parts of Wales and London, where I was living at the time. I was fascinated by the fact that Wales has some of the oldest black communities in Europe and was convinced that Wales had something to show the rest of the UK in terms of diversity. Peter, who would become the producer on the film, immediately disabused me of that notion, and it was after this that he contacted me with an idea about a drama set in Wales.
Peter originally ring-fenced money for me to do a TV piece, which eventually evolved into a feature. That’s how Wales became the location for the drama. But it was also fortuitous. I wanted to explore race, class and status, and this was perfect for it.
You seemed keen on exploring various facets of racism – from outright bigotry and prejudice as a by-product of ignorance to an aggression that grows out of frustration, often economic.
Absolutely. Frustration is key because I wanted to explore the idea of racism as a symptom of something else. I don’t believe that we’re born racist.
That same frustration is also present in Belle, albeit witnessed through a very different section of society.
With both films, I wanted to look at the idea of society defining you and whether you allow society to do that or not. A Way of Life looks at what happens when you let society define you – when you let society tell you who you are. Whereas Belle shows the flipside of that coin. It looks at what happens when you say, ‘No. I define myself. I will not let society tell me who I am.’ In both cases, the two lead characters go through various stages of frustration, but one comes out the other side whereas the other doesn’t.
You could have created characters who were completely dislikeable or victims. Instead, they are complex and challenge our sympathies.
Yes. I think that when you’re creating characters you’re working in grey areas. That’s where the interesting drama lies. An audience is going to identify what feels true or authentic to them. The story has to resonate with them. Dido Belle has her faults. She’s pompous, she’s status-driven early on. She looks down on John Davinier. And Leigh-Anne clearly has her faults in A Way of Life. Huge faults. When I create characters I have to love them for better or worse. I have to understand them and walk in their shoes. But I have to be absolutely honest about who they are. And in that process it generally means me being honest about who I am and where I’m coming from with this.
You chose to present A Way of Life from the point of view of a racist. Was this a stumbling block during the project’s development?
Being female and a woman of colour probably made it easier for this film to get made – to convince financiers to let me tell the story from this particular perspective. The more traditional viewpoint would have been Leigh-Anne’s neighbour, who is killed. Or to see it from his daughter’s perspective, where she witnesses the murder. But I wanted to explore what racism is from the inside out. That allowed me to explore the cause and, as the film shows, it’s all about class and exclusion. It makes clear that when you don’t let members of society contribute to the world they live in, however small or great that world may be, you’re creating problems for that society.
The bigger problem, which the financiers were concerned about, was how to get audiences to stay in their seats. How do we encourage them to go on this journey with Leigh-Anne, when she’s so reprehensible in so many ways? That was a challenge, and there were a lot of elements in the script that I had to work on. It comes back to this idea of my associating with that character, ensuring that her vulnerabilities are as visible as the negative aspects of her personality.
How difficult was the casting for A Way of Life?
It was really tough and took a long time. It lasted around a year. I didn’t find Stephanie James, who plays Leigh-Anne brilliantly, until quite late in the process. I found Nathan Jones, who plays Gavin, almost immediately. I shot a pilot the year before for the BFI, which was part of the process of them trying to convince me that I could actually direct the film. Nathan was on board for that. But as far as the remaining cast is concerned, I ended up seeing over a thousand kids.
Gary Howe, my Welsh casting director, knew where to go in order to find the right kids, so we spent a lot of time in the Valleys in South Wales. We set up Saturday morning classes and had open auditions. Gary would also bring in people he’d seen in drama schools. In the end, all the kids were non-drama school because I wanted something authentic.
Nathan was my lynchpin. He was used throughout the casting process. After the open auditions, I formed teams and started to shoot them, with Nathan acting against them. We matched everybody against him. Stephanie was in one of those Saturday morning classes, around six months before we began filming. She was funny at the beginning because she didn’t want to say the swear words or act out any violence – even kicking a chair. But there was something about her.
There was a long gap between A Way of Life and Belle. You were caught up in development with projects that never materialised. Was it difficult to keep going?
Like a lot of film-makers, I fell foul of the financial crisis in 2008. I had three projects on the go. After winning the BAFTA, I took everyone’s advice and didn’t just put all my energies into one film. There were three that were quite far along and they all collapsed. But I don’t believe in this idea of ‘development hell’. These all fed into future projects, and without the experience they gave me I wouldn’t have had the experience that allowed me to create Belle.
How did Belle come about?
The producer Damian Jones had been trying to get a movie off the ground around the story of Belle. He had secured money from HBO for what was going to be a TV drama, but it didn’t come to fruition. Misan Sagay was on board as the writer and was exploring the history. The role of the painting in the story came and went with various drafts. The same went for Belle. Sometimes she was in it from the beginning and then in other versions she didn’t appear until very late. As a result of that, Misan received a WGA [Writers Guild of America] contract.
Shortly after that, Damian came back to the UK and the BFI were interested in a film based around the picture, but felt that a new vision had to come on board for it. The BFI have developed every project bar one, and so they were very aware of my writing. I was working on a 1940s drama at the time, which became one of the ones that fell through, and to which I’ve now returned and will shoot in late 2015. That story centres on the experiences of a young woman in 1940s Berlin, who is an outsider but wants to belong. So the BFI suggested to Damian that he meet with me and talk about the project.
When I saw the postcard of this painting I immediately saw a combination of politics, class and history. It was a gift of an image, and I had yet to explore the full history but I felt there were themes that I wanted to explore and ones that an audience would connect with.
I tend to do several months of research on each project, so looking into this period and what history there was about Belle took some time. Aside from being an extraordinary character herself, she was associated with Lord Mansfield, who fascinated me completely. He reminded me of my father. Here was a progressive man who bucked against the system in terms of what he thought and yet was also stuck within this system of order. So there were these two elements within him that were always in conflict. From there, it was about incorporating the love story between Belle and John, and the paternal love story between Belle and Lord Mansfield.
The film raises interesting questions relating to history as a factual text. Can we really discuss the past in such concrete and definite terms, or must we accept that everything is interpretation and so it’s better to try to capture the spirit of the past?
I had two motives in mind when writing. Firstly, I knew that I was aiming for an emotional truth. Beyond that, I wanted to be clear that I was presenting my interpretation of who Dido might have been and how the relationship with her great-uncle might have developed. Alongside this, we decided to commission an accompanying book, laying out the actual facts of her life, should anyone wish to read it.
It was important for me to tell people that this woman existed. However, to ensure that it was very clear to audiences that this was an interpretation and not a factual retelling of her life, I decided that we wouldn’t use the real painting of Dido and Elizabeth during the film, but would show it at the very end.
Both films grapple with balancing heightened emotions and the issues that lie at the heart of the stories.
That’s something there at the beginning of the process and stays all the way to the end. You have to be sure that balance is right. I am sentimental and I have to be careful. In the case of David Gray and Rachel Portman, who composed the music for the films, it’s ensuring that I don’t go too far – finding the right balance. And you never really know until a film reaches an audience.
Richard Ayoade (photo: Dean Rogers)