Gina Prince Blythewood On The Secret life of Bees

02 December 2008

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Gina Prince Blythewood stormed onto the scene in 2000 when she wrote and directed the widely acclaimed film Love & Basketball, a film which went on to win Best First Feature at the independent Spirit Awards.

Her new movie sees her adapt the popular Sue Monk Kidd novel The Secret Life of Bees I caught up with her to discuss the new film and what lies ahead.

Your new film is The Secret Life of Bees can you tell me a little bit about it?

It’s a film based on the best selling novel The Secret Life of Bees and it’s a coming of age story about a fourteen year old girl who is living with an incredible burden of guilt and really her journey in discovering the truth about herself and searching for love and finding it at the home of African American women, the Boatwright sisters, and creating a new family.

What was it about Sue Monk Kidd’s 2002 novel that you thought would make a good feature film?

When I read it I could just picture everything, maybe that’s just being a director, but I could picture it, smell it and hear it. Then because I was so emotionally wrecked by the book, I rarely cry reading a book at I was sobbing at the end, and I thought that if I, a black woman in this day, could be that affected by the story of a little girl, a white girl, in 1964 south then there was definitely were some universal themes going on and I felt that that would translate well to the screen.

How difficult was it adapting a very popular novel that has so many fans how do you decide what to keep and what to get rid of?

I think the key was I was one of those fans as well so I didn’t want to wreck the experience for anyone and the hardest thing, of course, is what not to put in and also that Lily really kind of narrates the book and how could I translate that visually.

So for me it was what do I need to tell the core story? Which is about the little girl and her search for love and knowing that that was my through line and putting my own vision and stamp on it I knew what I could lose and what I could keep.

The film is set in the Deep South of 1964 how did you immerse your actors in that period?

My process as a writer and director is to do a ton of research and then I was able to give them that research as well I gave them a lot of documentaries, Spike Lee’s Four Little Girls was one of them, I gave them a lot of books and photographs and music, and music was a big part of everyone’s process as well.

Then we did improvs where I hired actors to treat, like Jennifer Hudson, treat her like it was 1964 inside a drugs store, without her knowing, and it was a nice shock to her system and really helped her to get into the mindset .

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