Seun Oloketuyi is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Best Of Nollywood awards (BON). He recently ventured into making biopics of prominent personalities across Nigeria with ‘Awujale’ being his latest project. He spoke to ROTIMI IGE recently about his recent projects and how he hopes to preserve history through his biopics.
You seem to be on a journey of making biopics. What’s the reason for this?
One of the reasons is the fact that history is being forgotten. If you have little children, most of them know the history of the Queen of England, they know the history of Martin Luther King, but they don’t know the history of the Oba of Lagos or the history of Awujale. Again, if you look at the kings that are in the age range of the Awujale, the only person that I feel that was as brave as him due to a lot of decisions that he made, was the late Alaafin of Oyo who, incidentally, was his very good friend. So, we felt that these stories need to be told. Apart from that, the fact that a lot of people don’t like to read again but tend towards entertainment will help many find their way to historical things.
It will also inspire us. A lot of young Obas will know that they are supposed to be custodians of culture and tradition.
You’ve told the story of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu as a governor, you’ve told the story of Governor Yahaya Bello, the Kogi State governor and now Awujale. These are all men. What plans do you have for telling the story of a woman and which woman will you like to tell her story?
We’ve actually done three biopics; we’ve done ‘Adedibu, Alagbara Ibadan’. Sometime last year, we began the journey to do a movie on HID Awolowo (Hannah Idowu Dideolu Awolowo), but the process was a long one. I actually met with two of her children who like the idea because it is a very interesting story. It’s a story we feel is relevant, especially with the way marriages are now. When you read the story of HID, you’ll understand marriage from another perspective. We feel that that’s a story that should be well told because a woman stood well behind Chief Obafemi Awolowo.
Decades after Chief Awolowo’s death, she still maintained the legacy of the man, so we are planning on that. We approached Asisat Oshoala sometime last year that we wanted to do a movie about her. She was scared about the whole idea, but we’ve had three interactions over it and we want to do the story because we feel that it will be a softer story to sell to our audience. Based on her recent award nominations, we are still going to try to convince her. Both projects are very expensive to do. If we are going to do Asisat’s movie, we are going to shoot a lot of it outside Nigeria.
If we are going to shoot HID’s story, we have to choose an angle because HID’s story cannot be shot in one movie, we have to choose a part of her story to tell. I’m happy that some other people are also doing female biopics. I know that Bolanle Austen-Peters has done a biopic of Mrs Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, and I’m looking forward to seeing it. So, our choice is not because of gender, it’s just incidental. There are a lot of very inspiring women in Nigeria whose stories can be told. Our choices are usually based on inspiration and that’s the first thing that drives us and recent history.
Is it lucrative to make a biopic?
That’s a very tough question to answer. I’ll give you an example; when we made the movie about Adedibu, for example, it was a real war. We were almost on the verge of going to court because his family did not want us to make the movie for whatever reasons, but we wanted to make the movie. We were almost chickening out until we consulted our lawyers who told us that we are on the side of the law. We can make a movie on anybody that suits us so far whatever we make are fact based.
For example, what the law says is that if I make a movie about Seun Oloketuyi and during his lifetime there was a publication that Seun Oloketuyi did something, and Seun Oloketuyi did not go to court at that time to challenge it. If I make a movie about it in the future, Seun Oloketuyi’s children cannot go to court and win because Seun Oloketuyi didn’t challenge it. So, the law was on our side when we wanted to do Adedibu and we went along. We had a lot of fights and threats but eventually when we finished making the movie and I showed it to one of his daughters, she became our emissary to the family.
So, it’s tough because in our terrain this is kind of new. When we made the movie about President Tinubu, he didn’t know that we were making a movie about him until after they saw a lot of stories around it. His lawyer wrote to us and said that they wanted to have a meeting with us. I went for the meeting and the lawyer told us that they don’t have a problem with us making the movie about him and they want to be the first person to see the movie before we release the movie, which we agreed. So, when the movie’s first cut came out, we sent it to them and they liked it. They cooperated with us one way or the other to do some things.
Funny enough, none of the biopics we’ve shot has been released. I can tell you that a streaming network has acquired ‘Adedibu’. We are talking to two streaming networks and an airline for ‘Last Man Standing’. For this one, we wait to see how it goes.
Rich historical figures abound. What influenced the selection of Awujale’s story?
It was very funny. I was on the phone with Kolade Onanuga, the Fuji star, one morning, and we were talking about certain ideas. He told me that he felt that the story not being told by a lot of people who should do so is the story of Awujale. I asked him why? He said that he has about three of his books, which he would send to me. The following morning, he sent them to me through a dispatch rider, and I read one of them in one day because the one he wrote himself was so interesting. The other books that the others wrote about him were a bit careful, but the one that Awujale wrote about himself was full.
He even wrote what we may consider bad things about himself. By the time I finished reading it, I was hooked. I came into my office the following morning and told my assistant that we needed to do this movie, and that’s how we started reaching out. I called a script writer and we drove round major bookshops that day and bought 19 books. There are actually 19 books about Awujale that we saw written by different people. I gave the books to the scriptwriter and he came up with the story that we are telling now.
Tell us about producing ‘Awujale’.
It was tough. Tough in the sense that by law when you want to tell someone’s story, the law would give you permission, the only thing is that you need to stick to facts.
In this situation, we felt like the Awujale is not just any ordinary person. We couldn’t just wake up and make a movie about him. The first thing was getting his permission to make the movie. That part was very easy. We never thought it was going to be easy, but it was just one letter and we got it. The journey from there has been like the normal journey of trying to make a movie in Nigeria. It’s tough to get logistics together, tougher now because of the current situation the country but here we are.
What does it cost to make a biopic in Nigeria of today? And how do you plan to recoup that money?
If I say that we are not making money from it, then I’ll be lying because nobody starts a business and does not want to make money. I do not run a charity organisation. After we made ‘Last Man Standing’, the good part of it is that the investors of ‘Last Man Standing’ have gotten back their money and some of those investors invested in this project because they saw that we had a structured way of getting back the money. We’ve only done like 40 percent of what we told them we were going to do to be able to recoup the investment.
We still have some plans that we are working on. Between now and the end of November, I can tell you that we are going to do three private premieres for some state governments. The First Lady of Nigeria is going to watch the movie alongside some other First Ladies and we got a distributor to come to us herself to say “I like the movie. Will you allow me to take the movie round to some places where I can sell?” This means that the movie was one way or the other accepted. For ‘Awujale’, we believe that the possibilities are very huge. Awujale is an interesting personality and the Ijebus love their king, they adore him, so we are looking forward to a lot of them wanting to see the story. We have a very structured way of what we want to do in the next few months.
What does it cost to make a film like this?
It varies. When we did ‘Yahaya The White Lion’, it is a story based on the struggle of Yahaya Bello and it was more or less like a contemporary movie that we could watch because most of the things we were looking at were how he became governor and how he got back his second term when everybody thought it was impossible. That could be just like doing the budget of every other movie, almost the same thing as ‘Last Man Standing’. But this is different. Different in the sense that we are telling the story of what happened in 1940s and 1950s.
The caliber of actors we are also trying to use to tell the story is not regular. This is a very expensive movie to make. Whatever we spent in ‘Last Man Standing’ we are spending double or more on Awujale.
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