David Oyelowo, who is getting ready to star in A United Kingdom, has teamed up with female filmmaker, Amma Asante, on this year’s interracial marriage drama, but recently said during an interview that Hollywood hasn’t evolved to accept female directors the way it should.
“I learned a big lesson on Selma,” the actor and producer says during an interview. “There were four male directors before Ava came aboard, and I watched how perspective matters to a story. The first two directors that I was aware of on the project were white men, and then the next two were black men, and then Ava.”
He continued,
“To watch her perspective inform what that film became really illustrated to me that who gets to tell the story matters, and that more often than not we have not seen a female perspective. We very rarely see a black female perspective,” he says. “As it pertains to a story like Dr. King’s, where you have individuals like Coretta Scott King and Annie Lee Cooper… If you don’t have a female point of view… those characters were being paid short shrift. That civil rights movement was not built purely on the backs of men; it was women as well.”
Oyelowo went on to say that Hollywood hasn’t evolved to accept female directors the way it should.
“At the end of the day, here in America, women are 51 percent of the population. Why on earth should it be rare that they get to direct movies in a medium as influential as film?” he asks.
