Gina Prince-Bythewood’s first entertainment job was as a writer on A Different World, but the screenwriter and director’s summoning into the industry came much earlier in life. “I feel like my journey began when I saw Claudine,” she says. “I’ve never forgotten the way I felt watching it and seeing myself reflected for the first time. I literally can feel the same way I did that day and I felt like I want to give that feeling to other people because I had felt so invisible for so long.”
The UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television graduate has done just that, from her 2000 feature directorial debut Love & Basketball to 2022’s historical epic The Woman King. Within that 22-year span she’s written and/or directed just three additional feature films–intentionally so. “The hardest fight, and the reason why there’s so much space between my projects, is because of the type of stories that I want to tell, and that’s centering us, centering Black women, telling Black stories, Prince-Bythewood says. “Those are absolutely the hardest films to get made and absolutely take the most fight.”
Here, the 2023 Black Women in Hollywood honoree shares why she’ll never give up that fight.
Did you always know you’d be a filmmaker?
Gina Prince-Bythewood (GPB): I knew I wanted to be a writer, ever since literally six years old. I was writing short stories, putting on little plays for my family, concerts. And then I got obsessed with soap operas and I read an article that told me that people write that and get paid to write it and that was the first time it connected. But it wasn’t until I got to film school that I realized I wanted to be a director. And I think it was the same thing that for the first time I understood, Oh, the director’s the one that’s in charge and the one that’s making all the decisions and the one…
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