“What I want to focus on are people of color in my films, and specifically women,” Beyond the Lights writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood told BuzzFeed News. “They’re never an easy sell.”
Gina Prince-Bythewood on the set of Beyond the Lights.
Suzanne Tenner/Relativity Media
There's a moment in Beyond the Lights where burgeoning pop star Noni (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) opens her eyes and looks fixedly at her would-be savior, who is gripping her hand, trying to botch her attempt to jump off of a Los Angeles hotel balcony.
Desperate not to let her go, Kaz (Nate Parker) utters the words she most needs to hear: "I see you… I see you... I see you..." In that split second, it's as if he understands that in spite of Noni wielding this perceived power — and having the kind of lifestyle that Instagram addicts and fame-curious wannabes covet — no one is listening to the woman everyone says they want to hear from.
In Beyond the Lights, writer and director Gina Prince-Bythewood, who was behind 2000's cult classic Love & Basketball, exposes her own vulnerabilities. Setting this romantic drama in the hyper-sexed world of pop music, she makes one hell of a statement about young women and self-esteem.
But there's a larger message here, one that perhaps only a small group of Hollywood's elite will notice immediately. Dramatized in that hotel balcony scene, this entire film is actually about filmmaker Prince-Bythewood's fight to maintain her own voice, demanding to be seen and heard in Hollywood.
It took five years to get Beyond the Lights made. Even though Prince-Bythewood's coming-of-age film Love & Basketball was an instant classic in black households and made stars out of Omar Epps and Sanaa Lathan, and her 2008 adaptation of The Secret Life of Bees was critically acclaimed, she heard "no" or "yes, but…" more times that she cares to recount.
Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Nate Parker in Beyond the Lights.
Suzanne Tenner/Relativity Media
Prince-Bythewood was passionate about making a film focusing on a young woman pushing to find her authentic self and trying to appreciate who she really is, all while finding true love for the first time. And she wanted this love story to feature two black main characters. But Hollywood had other plans. When she pitched the film, executives loved the idea that Noni's British, biracial background made her a bit more complex than what we normally see, but they wanted to tweak her story and change her love interest to a white male.
According to Prince-Bythewood, studios were having a difficult time finding the marketability in black-on-black love.
"I could be working constantly," Prince-Bythewood told BuzzFeed News. "I get scripts sent to me all the time, across the board — all types of stories, all different genres, all different actors. I can be working if I want to be working. So I don't feel me, as a black female director, is discriminated against. But what I want to focus on are people of color in my films, and specifically women. They're never an easy sell."
What that usually means for Prince-Bythewood is waiting it out — and sweating it out — and hoping that eventually someone will take the bait. With Love & Basketball, for example, it took a year and a half of shopping it around before someone said yes. Beyond the Lights took far longer — "Everybody turned it down! Twice!" — and often the Greek chorus was the same: "We love you, but how do we sell and market this?" She relied heavily on a backing from BET Networks, which also helped deliver cameos from Chaka Khan, Big Sean, BET's CEO Debra Lee, and journalists Gayle King and Don Lemon. (Scenes also were shot on location during the 2013 BET Awards.)
But her effort is about more than just making a movie, says Prince-Bythewood's husband and producing partner, Reggie Bythewood. It's about making a statement.
"The cause was not to make a movie. That's not what it's about," Bythewood told BuzzFeed News. "The cause was to tell a black love story. And she felt a need for that in the community. [She was constantly asked,] 'Is there a more mainstream, commercial guy or woman that would make the film quote-unquote more marketable?' But she didn't compromise the integrity of the vision. ... The challenge is maintaining your level of idealism."
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