But with Meshell, that was just absolute luck, because we were at the end of editing, heading toward the mix, and I did not have a song for that really crucial scene where Monica tells Quincy that she’ll play him for his heart. It was fun to put together the soundtrack, because I had all my mixtape cassettes from college, and that’s where a lot of the songs came from. So our budget was $14 million, which was not a ton, but for a film about a black girl, that felt good to me.
That never, ever, ever happens now, that a studio volunteers to give you more money than you asked for. I’d never done a film before, but I said $10 million. When I went into that first meeting with Mike De Luca, he said, “How much money do you need for this film?” And I didn’t know. The music in “Love and Basketball” - I remember Meshell Ndegeocello’s “Full of Me,” Maxwell’s “Woman’s Work,” some MC Lyte tracks, and other popular music of the time. Those are the hardest movies to get made. But what has always been discriminated against are my choices, and that is to focus on black women’s stories. People always ask, “Do you feel discriminated against as a black filmmaker?” And given the projects that I’m offered today, I don’t feel that. And when it came out on video, it did really well. It is tough, because it was a success at the theaters. But I was not getting a bunch of scripts, the way I am now. There were two projects that I had developed that didn’t happen during that eight-year gap, so it wasn’t as if I was just sitting around. I’ll just say this, “Love and Basketball” came out in 2000, and my next film was “The Secret Life of Bees” in 2008, so that should tell you something. Really? You know how it has worked historically for us. Everybody was just hungry, and were in it because they dug the script.ĭid the floodgates open up after that for you? Was every studio head calling you to make your next film?Ĭome on now, Tambay, you know what the deal was. But it was a really cool group of people. He said, “If you get Omar, then you can cast an unknown for Monica.” And thankfully, Omar was my first choice for Quincy, so there was zero compromise there. That was the deal that Mike De Luca gave me. They allowed me to cast an unknown, so to speak, in Sanaa. So the only two stars in the film, at that time, were Omar and Alfre, and they really anchored it. It turned out that Sanaa and Regina were friends, so that fueled their sister relationship on screen. I always laugh about this, because I saw “The Best Man,” and I was like, “Wow, that woman is really good, but I can’t believe Malcolm found a stripper who could act.” So I ended up casting her, which is great. You pretty much had most of young black Hollywood at the time, in the film. Gabrielle Union, Regina Hall, Monica Calhoun, and Boris Kodjoe. I watched it yesterday for the first time in many years, and I forgot all the folks that were in it. And I wish that was still in there, so that at the end when he chooses Sanaa over Tyra’s character, there’s zero question why that happened. They were in this apartment on Venice Beach, and he was trying to talk to her about quitting the NBA and going back to school, and she did not want to hear it. The only change I made, that I wish I hadn’t made, was that I cut a scene at the end of the film between Tyra Banks’ character and Omar’s character. I’ve been craving that kind of freedom ever since. You’d think it would get easier as you do more work.
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I’m on my fifth movie now, and I have never had the kind of freedom I had on “Love and Basketball,” which is weird. The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.ĭid you get to make exactly the film that you wanted to make, especially as a first feature?Ībsolutely. “I want to do another love story,” she said, “but now I’ve proved myself in this big-budget action space, so that no one can wonder, ‘Can she do it?'” And from here, she said, her stories will only get bigger. She’s just wrapped post production on her fourth film, “The Old Guard,” Netflix’s big-budget adaptation of the Image Comic about immortal mercenary soldiers that stars Charlize Theron, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and KiKi Layne.
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