Beyond Visible: Gina Prince-Bythewood on the Necessity of Black Women’s Cinema

There is a gloriously unaffected vibe about Gina Prince-Bythewood. Cerebral and sublime, casually beautiful and laser-focused, she has written and directed impressive television and film for the past twenty-plus years with equal parts rigor and joy. And she has achieved all this without losing her sense of self as a Black woman in America, and while continuing to fight to get personal projects made in Hollywood.

Prince-Bythewood has recently reached new heights by becoming the first Black woman to direct a major comic-book movie. That film—The Old Guard, starring KiKi Layne and Charlize Theron—premiered on Netflix in the summer of 2020, at the peak of the pandemic, to widely favorable reviews. Prince-Bythewood, though, is still best known for writing and directing her 2001 feature debut, Love & Basketball, which tells the indelibly original story of a young Black woman ballplayer. The film is not just a love letter to basketball but a paean to the complexity, ambition, and perseverance of Black womanhood. After writing for shows like A Different World and Felicity, Prince-Bythewood went on to direct for TV, including episodes of Girlfriends and Everybody Hates Chris. She returned to the big screen in 2008 with The Secret Life of Bees, and again in 2014 with Beyond the Lights, which is when we first met.

I had known and admired Gina’s work; I don’t know a single Black woman who did not obsess over the love scene in Love & Basketball set to Maxwell’s “This Woman’s Work.” But Beyond the Lights, from the opening scene, hit different. Here was the story of a young Black girl with a white mother who couldn’t see her daughter outside of her own white gaze. It echoed my own experience. I reviewed the film for an online blog and then requested an interview with Gina, which very quickly turned into a conversation that felt uncannily familiar. We were born within a month of each other, in 1969, and were both adopted into white families three weeks after being born. We had both spent our youth navigating all-white environments, desperately in search of a reflection of ourselves. We both turned to storytelling as a career path and a way to make sense of that experience.

Gina has written herself into the narrative—in the movies she’s brought to the screen, the family she’s made, and the world she’s created around her. In celebration of the new Criterion edition of Love & Basketball, we got together to catch up, reflect, and get into it.

Among the many things I admire about you is the way in which you have managed a career in Hollywood without getting into Hollywood mess. This is especially remarkable in light of how relentless and prevalent an impact social media has in your industry now. How do you decide what to take in, and how do you stay focused without getting into the mess?: That is a great question. Obviously, as a filmmaker you do work for an audience, so to be able to get that immediate feedback is a beautiful thing. Beyond the Lights was the first film where social media played a part in the audience response, and to be able to talk to people directly was great. But I also realized you cannot win an argument on Twitter. There’s no nuance to it, and you’re arguing with a faceless person who most likely would not say any of this if they were standing in front of you. There’s a boldness to anonymity.

I do think initially there was this sense that social media would democratize the playing field for people who might not otherwise be heard. Now, do some people abuse that? Of course. But at the same time, that’s where the cultural conversations are happening.: Yes, there is absolute value in it when it’s an actual dialogue. One person during the promotion for Beyond the Lights had said [on Twitter] that she liked the trailer, but because of the suicide element, she said, “I bet they’re gonna fuck it up and make a joke of mental health.” So I responded, and we had a great dialogue. When people don’t want to have a dialogue, and they just want to attack you, that’s when I think it’s damaging. I don’t mind criticism if it can improve the work—does it make me think about something I hadn’t thought about?

When I say that you’ve stayed out of the mess, I also mean, why aren’t paparazzi in front of your house waiting to see what’s going on with [your husband] Reggie [Bythewood]? Issa [Rae], who actually does a very good job of staying clear of the mess, can’t say “boo” without people talking about it on social media. Why is that not your experience?: Because I have always put the work first, as opposed to me first. And I’m not saying that as a negative on people who have done things differently from me—Issa is a brand, and she is Insecure. I could never do that. When I met Alfre Woodard to ask her to be in Love & Basketball, she said, “I’ll do it if you play Monica [the lead character, played by Sanaa Lathan], because it’s clear you are Monica.” And I thought about it for about five seconds. Then I was like, “I can’t do the love scenes. I can do everything else, but I can’t do love scenes.” If I had done it, my life would be totally different now. When you put yourself out in front, the one thing it does is create a bigger name for you, and the hope a lot of people have is that being out in front gets you work. And that is one way to approach the industry, absolutely. But I’ve always said I’m gonna let my work speak for me, and I hope that good work begets more work.

I so appreciate the way you approach your work with such moral integrity. How do you stay morally grounded in an industry that is not so much?: There’s an incredible amount of enabling of bad behavior in our industry. You can go down the line with Harvey Weinstein and Cosby, and it’s so insidious. In the last four years, I’ve come up against people at this higher level that I’ve started to work at, and the sheer lack of integrity of a lot of people is hard to navigate if that’s not the type of world you’re accustomed to. And I cannot wait, because I absolutely am gonna come out with something when I have the space, to just call it out. Because it’s wrong, and if I stay silent, then I am complicit. I’ve started with at least talking with people I know who are going to be working with certain people. Because another Black woman did that for me.

So, say there’s a white guy in your cast you discover is racist or misogynistic. What do you do?: Well, I dealt with somebody really bad early in my career, when I did not know that people acted this way. It was a shock, and it was on so many fronts. And he made going to work tough. He took something that I loved and harmed that for me. And I promised myself I would never let that happen again. So from that point on, due diligence. When I’m about to cast somebody, I call around. Aside from my family, of course, the thing I love most is directing and making movies and telling stories. It’s everything to me. And for anything to poison that . . . I will not let that happen again.

Early in your career you were working on a TV show and pitched an episode about a white family trying to adopt a Black child, and it was rejected. Why did you never pursue adoption as subject matter again?: That was my third show on television. I had written the script and loved it. It was so personal, as you know. And to have the network come back and say, “We’re not shooting this because it’s too controversial”—that was the beginning of the end for me on that show. Imagine writing something that means so much to you, and you’re the only Black writer on this show. Most of my time was spent trying to give agency to the one Black character, and to call out atrocious dialogue and story lines connected to that character—when they decided to write for that character at all. So now I’m going to focus on that character and tell this personal story. Then to have white people tell me that I can’t tell my own story . . . It is traumatizing. That shit hurts. But I have to think that had to have been a part of what pushed me to keep going.

The fact that it was rejected as controversial speaks directly to the way in which the foundational relationship of transracial adoption can tell us a lot about America, and that’s all the more reason why that narrative should be explored, specifically through the lens of a Black woman.: The stories that I tell focus on Black women, and they take so much fight to get made. I’ve been rejected personally, and I went through that before and during making Love & Basketball. I poured everything into something and was just told nobody wants to see this. It’s not fun, certainly, but as you know, growing up in a [white] environment, surrounded by micro- and macroaggressions, we have to learn how to navigate that world. And then in coming to our own, when suddenly we’re not around white folks anymore and we’re only around Black folks, you discover that your upbringing was so totally different. Like, Roots. My family watched The Thorn Birds. [Laughs.] We didn’t watch Roots, you know? So I felt cheated. But having to grow up always fighting and navigating, I feel like it kind of hardened me in a way that I was able to continue to figure out this industry and continue to fight.

I think it’s a skill set. Because I don’t think of you as hardened. I don’t think that you could make such beautiful stories if you were hardened. So, I just rewatched Love & Basketball, and my son came in and said, “Is this, like, the sixteenth time you’ve watched this movie?” I was like, “Maybe. It might be.” But the thing that struck me this time was the attention to hair—the scene where Monica, as a little girl, is sitting on the floor between her sister’s legs and her sister is tugging through her hair, and then later when they’re teenagers, and her sister braids Monica’s hair for the dance. That made me think about the first scene in Beyond the Lights, when Macy Jean, a white woman played by Minnie Driver, brings her Black daughter, Noni, to a Black salon because she doesn’t know how to do her own child’s hair. Then in The Old Guard, KiKi Layne’s character has cornrows, which were not even permitted in the military until recently. Black women’s relationship to hair is such a historically fierce act of resilience. But you and I did not grow up with that affirmation, or anyone knowing how to even do our hair, for that matter. Do you remember when the depiction of Black hair became especially meaningful for you? And what does it feel like to see those scenes played out so poignantly?: You and I share so much. My mom did not know what to do with my hair. Growing up, I had no hairstyle. I had three pigtails—one on the top and two on the sides. That’s not a look. And I grew up hating my hair. So I love to do things in film that make us see someone loving their hair. With KiKi Layne’s character, the cornrows were so specific, because Hollywood loves to use cornrows on a villain. But it’s beautiful, and it comes from us. Like, we created that. So that’s why I gave them to the Black female hero. I said, “She’s gonna have cornrows, and we’re gonna make these something celebrated and beautiful.” I want us to love our hair. I hated my hair, which means I hated myself, and I hated what I saw when I looked in the mirror. Ultimately it’s for that little girl, to give her a hug.

Also, when Monica suits up to hoop, she wears cornrows, and I thought that felt like an indication that she was ready—like, let’s go. And that’s the other thing about Monica: she’s ready, but she’s not angry. She defies stereotypes on multiple levels. I wonder if you could talk about how you confront stereotypes both in your writing of Black women characters and in your sense of self as a Black woman creator.: It’s a fascinating thing in Hollywood. Black women—I mean, Black men as well . . . but Black women are stereotyped, yet we’re also invisible. And that is a dangerous combination, because it reflects how we are looked at and treated in the real world. I think [my desire to challenge stereotypes] comes from growing up not seeing myself reflected in my own family, and what that felt like, and the number that it did on my self-esteem. Not seeing myself reflected in the schools or in the stores. And when I turned on the TV, I didn’t see myself. That thing of just wanting to see yourself is so strong, and that’s absolutely what has driven me in this industry for twenty-five years. To be able to put Black women on-screen in a way that inspires us and gives us something to aspire to be. Because I did not have that, and I know the damage that can do. I know what our industry is at its core. And they are not checking for us. So the very few of us who are here have an obligation to be in the fight, to put these images up on-screen. It starts with me. I write what I want to see, but I also write what the world needs to see.

This is perhaps in some ways specific to our experience as Black adoptees who have navigated white worlds, because we are drawn to our community, and we’re also drawn to breaking the monolith. And we kind of know how to do that in a way that other Black folks maybe don’t—I see that in your characters. I see it in Monica. She’s tough, but also sweet and vulnerable. Funny, but awkward. And I see it in Noni—her white mother wants her to be a stereotype, and Noni is smart enough to know she doesn’t want to be that.: And it’s not enough to put us on-screen. We have to show ourselves in all our complexity. Being perfect on-screen can be almost as damaging as not being on-screen at all. That’s like showing the superhero or superwoman without showing what it took to get that cape. But that’s the interesting storytelling—how we got there.

Beyond Visible: Gina Prince-Bythewood on the Necessity of Black Women’s Cinema

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