Chiwetel Ejiofor didn’t got down to make “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind” his function movie directorial debut. Instead the choice happened progressively as he began to visualise how the story ought to look. But directing the movie, Ejiofor says, modified how he approaches performing.
“Directing, and moving into that I think changes me as an actor, which I’ve started to notice — that I’m evolving as an actor in a slightly different way,” Ejiofor advised TheWrap editor in chief Sharon Waxman following TheWrap’s Awards Screening Series.
“The sort of microscopic nature of looking at this film making all of these choices and really examining a film and breaking a film down and creating the film does inform the way that I look at character and the way that I look at physical production now and the idea of giving an editor choices and, or limiting choices if you want, but certainly thinking about that process much more whilst acting,” he continued.
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Ejiofor tailored the screenplay for “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,” from the bestselling e book by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer and primarily based on Kamkwamba’s real-life story. Now streaming on Netflix, the movie follows 13-year-old William Kamkwamba (performed by newcomer Maxwell Simba), who’s thrown out of the college he loves when his household can now not afford tuition. After sneaking again into the college library, he finds a manner, utilizing the bones of the bicycle belonging to his father Trywell (Ejiofor), to construct a windmill as a way to save his Malawian village from famine.
Ejiofor, who’s of Nigerian descent, mentioned that one of many causes he was drawn to put in writing after which direct the movie was as a way to present audiences an genuine illustration of African life.
“When I was reading William Kamkwamba’s book, one of the things I really felt was just that real sense of the authentic representation of village life and African village life,” Ejiofor mentioned. “There’s not a generic Africa, so Nigerian villages are different to Malawian villages, though, there are certain similarities. But I felt that actually trying to tell the story of William Kamkwamba and represent that village life on the screen as authentically as I could was something that was quite powerful because it was something that I hadn’t really seen represented in cinema quite as accurately as I would like.”
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For that cause the “12 Years a Slave” actor mentioned it was necessary to him to not simply shoot the movie in Malawi, however within the precise village the place Kamkwamba, who after the occasions depicted within the movie would go on to attend Dartmouth and turn into an engineer, constructed the windmill.
The movie delves into the social and political lifetime of Malawi and Kamkwamba’s village, and whereas the movie is considerably vital of the Malawi authorities, Ejiofor mentioned they have been really OK with the movie and there weren’t actually any points throughout manufacturing.
Though a few of Ejiofor’s extra outstanding roles have been in movies that discover some side of African and, or African-American life, in addition to the trauma — “12 Years a Slave” and “Amistad” — and that’s necessary, it doesn’t dictate the sorts of tales he’ll look to direct or star in sooner or later. Though he’s glad for the chance to inform these tales.
“I don’t have a oeuvre, really… I feel like films can be serious and they can be meaningful, and they can also be entertaining and they can be frivolous, and they can be all sorts of things,” he mentioned. “[I enjoyed] having the chance to inform a narrative like this, to really feel that there was a way of partaking an viewers and fascinating an viewers, hopefully, in numerous international locations and individuals who didn’t have any relationship to this place, and relating a way of…
