Visionaries Envisioned

“There are 14 different love stories in Origin. Romantic love, familial love, love of self, love of culture, love with a best friend, a cousin, maternal love—all of these. These stories swirl around within this tough subject matter. And the love pulls you through from scene to scene. That’s how I constructed it. That was my anchor as I built the movie.”

“My earliest memory of cinema is watching
The Last Temptation of Christ in a football park in Ghana. It was organized by evangelicals looking to convert the locals. I later found out that the film was directed by Martin Scorsese. Well, the evangelicals succeeded in converting me to cinema for sure.”

“Every woman that I know understands that [mirror] scene [in May December]and has been there. Yes, Gracie is playing games with power and marking her territory around Elizabeth, but it’s a modeling thing about femininity and how it gets passed on from mothers to daughters. I wanted to try to let that all play out in the mirrors that the two women are speaking into and starting to observe each other through.”

“Some of the satire is taken from the book, but a lot of it is taken from my direct experience working in creative industries and the expectations that people had when they saw me as a Black writer. The subtext of all those conversations is an inability to see Black life as being as complex and dynamic and broad and deep as anybody else’s life. That was something that I was always trying to push back against, sometimes unsuccessfully.”