The Old Guard might be Gina Prince-Bythewood’s first foray into the action genre proper, but the writer-director has always been a fighter of sorts. She made her feature debut in 2000 with Love & Basketball, a romance based partly on her own high-school sporting career, growing up in a middle-class California suburb. “Everything sport teaches you is so apropos to this industry,” she says. “Aggression is good, stamina, the ability to fight … I bring the same passion to film-making – except for the tears. There’s no crying in directing.”
Speaking over Zoom from her Los Angeles home, the walls behind her decorated with framed photographs, she seems relaxed and happy to reminisce about the varied career that led to here. She jokes that her love of storytelling “came from tragedy”, in that her parents opted not to replace a broken television set. “So for seven years all I could do was read.” It wasn’t until she got to UCLA, however, that she realised she could direct: “I think it came that late because I just didn’t have any role models.”
Eight years after Love & Basketball, she made the civil rights-era coming-of-age drama The Secret Life of Bees, followed six years later by Beyond the Lights, with Gugu Mbatha-Raw as a troubled pop star. In the gaps between, she worked on TV projects and raised two sons, whose questioning helped compel her towards her latest project: “I remember my boys saying, before Black Panther: ‘How come we never get to see ourselves up on screen in these movies?’”
Adapted from Greg Rucka’s graphic novel series, The Old Guard stars Charlize Theron as Andromache of Scythia –– “Andy” for short –– the leader of an immortal warrior crew that has been secretly saving humanity from itself for centuries. Then, young US marine Nile (KiKi Layne) becomes aware of her own immortality, and it falls to Andy to bring her into the fold.
The very first day of production involved a gritty Andy v Nile fight scene. “From the get-go I said they’re never gonna be fighting in heels. That’s not them. Nile is a marine and Andy is the greatest warrior of all time.” Again, Prince-Bythewood’s athletic background served her well. “I did kickbox for a couple of years. I know what good fighting is, I know what it feels like. It was fun because I got to talk to our fight coordinator, Danny Hernandez, fighter to fighter. I got his respect really early on and that’s integral. You hear horror stories about stunt folks, when they work with female directors … ”
Otherwise, she made it a point to hire female heads of department where possible, for practical reasons: “Résumés of female department heads are not usually as extensive as those of male, but it’s not because of talent; it’s because of opportunity. I feel lucky I’m getting these dope people that others are not utilising.”
Taking this approach has also made Prince-Bythewood a serial launcher of Hollywood careers. In 2006, for instance, she hired a graduate fresh out of Chicago’s Columbia College as her postproduction assistant on The Secret Life of Bees. That graduate was Lena Waithe, who went on to become the first black woman to win a comedy writing Emmy. Earlier this year, Oscar-nominated Ava DuVernay tweeted to mark Love & Basketball’s 20th anniversary (“a film that captured the hearts of black folks and we’ve never let go”), and also paid tribute to Prince-Bythewood as “an early role model for me”.
She sees holding the door open behind her as a responsibility. “It’s not something to celebrate to be the only one in the room. It’s frickin’ lonely and hard!” One person who’s always had her back, since they met working on the college sitcom A Different World, is her husband and fellow film-maker Reggie Rock Bythewood. Among their most powerful collaborations is Shots Fired, a 2017 miniseries about a racially charged police shooting that is as topical today as it was then. That, however, is as close as Prince-Bythewood’s varied back catalogue gets to the kind of serious historical subject matter –– Selma, Harriet, 13th –– for which female African-American directors are most often celebrated. As recently as last year, DuVernay told the Guardian about the subtle sort of pigeonholing that can result: “I’m not getting John Wick 3, even though I’d love to make it.”
That is another reason why The Old Guard feels like a triumph. While the recently published industry stats on representation in screenwriting and directing are “still dismal”, says Prince-Bythewood, she is excited about the diversity of content: “It’s not all one thing, y’know?” Putting out a stereotype-subverting, shamelessly entertaining comic-book movie is part of that, but the revolution continues: “I don’t feel discriminated against personally; but my choices are. Films which focus on black women are absolutely the hardest films to get made.”
In The Old Guard, Theron and Layne have a roughly equal share of screen time. “I give all props to Greg Rucka, who wrote the original graphic novel,” Prince-Bythewood says. “When I came aboard, the thing he and I worked on was filling out her character, giving her more agency. So often, especially movies like this, you look up and the black character is comic relief or a sidekick. I didn’t want that for Nile.”
One of the film’s most strikingly soulful moments comes when, amid the mayhem, Nile centres herself by slipping earbuds in and closing her eyes. As Frank Ocean’s Godspeed fills the audio track, we’re fleetingly enveloped in Nile’s inner world. It’s an unusually interior mood for an action film, but it’s typical of Prince-Bythewood’s work. It’s this sense of responsibility to the characters that gives her films a kind of political heft, regardless of genre.
Putting these stories out into the world is one way of affirming “Black Lives Matter” but that doesn’t mean there aren’t still plenty of difficult conversations to be had in Hollywood. “I’ve been incredibly blunt with people that I’ve worked with,” Prince-Bythewood says. “Just a couple days ago, I said: ‘Hey, when I walk into your building for a meeting, I don’t see one person, not even an assistant, who looks like me. Like, how is that possible?’ And there wasn’t defensiveness, y’know? So I love that and I hope that sustains itself.” The previously common scenario of meeting to discuss a script and being asked to recast black characters as white is also thankfully rarer: “What I am excited about is the fact that my next two projects, I have not had anyone mention anything like that … I hope I’m not naive, but it does feel different.”
She cannot say much about these projects yet, but neither of them is the Mbatha-Raw-starring adaptation of Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State, announced to much excitement back in 2016. “I love that book so much but where we had it set up, they got scared of it … we’re in a little bit of limbo there.” It remains on the long-term list, as does Prince-Bythewood’s “dream project”, a biopic of Toussaint Louverture, leader of the Haitian uprising and abolisher of the slave trade. “It’s our Braveheart and I’m going to make it.” Going on past performance, only a fool would doubt her.
The Old Guard is on Netflix from Friday 10 July
