By Iain Blair

The Woman King director Gina Prince-Bythewood is one of the most versatile storytellers working in film and television. Her eclectic resume includes writing and directing such feature films as Love & Basketball, The Secret Life of Bees and Beyond the Lights.

Director Gina Prince-Bythewood

Prince-Bythewood’s newest is The Woman King for Sony’s Tristar Pictures. It tells the story of the Agojie, the all-female unit of warriors who protected the African Kingdom of Dahomey in the 1800s. Inspired by true events, The Woman King follows the epic journey of General Nanisca (Viola Davis) as she trains the next generation of recruits and readies them for battle against an enemy determined to destroy their way of life.

The behind-the-scenes creative team includes Prince-Bythewood’s longtime editor Terilyn A. Shropshire, DP Polly Morgan (ASC, BSC), VFX supervisor Sara Bennett and composer Terence Blanchard.

I spoke with the director about making the film, editing and dealing with all the VFX. Editor Shropshire joined the conversation as well.

Can you talk about the post prep?
We put the team together very early on, starting with my editor Terilyn Shropshire who’s cut every project of mine and is such a close collaborator. She can do it all – great drama, great action – and I can’t imagine doing this without her. My visual effects supervisor Sara Bennett, who did my last film The Old Guard, also came on very early, and so did Corinne Villa, our first assistant editor. She’s done a couple of projects with me and Teri, and she’s an invaluable part of the team. It’s great to have a close-knit post team like this where we all know each other and work together well.

Did you do a lot of previz?
We did a lot of stunt-viz because we had a lot of epic battles, so Polly and I could really work out how we wanted to CG them, but also so we could really hone the fighting style. We wanted to do something really distinct, as they’re female warriors based on true life, and we’ve never seen this before. What does it look like, women fighting and beating men?

Danny Hernandez was our stunt and fight coordinator and designer, and it was supremely important that we had all that stuff worked out ahead of time. And we had a couple of very complex stunts that Sara helped previz as well.

Talk about how you collaborated on the look with Polly Morgan.
Early on, I talked to her about two phrases that summed up what I wanted: “intimately epic” and “pretty gritty.” The story is epic in scope, but it’s also about the relationships between the women. I wanted the women to look beautiful and to be shot beautifully, but for it to look real and of its time period. I didn’t want it to just look glossy.

How tough was the shoot?
It was hard work because we shot for 63 days, all on location in South Africa, but that’s where it needed to be filmed to get the real environments and spectacular vistas. I didn’t want it to be a bluescreen movie shot in Atlanta or wherever, and it was important for the actors to be dropped into the real African environments and not to see the usual cars, shops and planes and so on. We created a whole 360-degree world of this epic historical action drama.

Where did you post?
We did my director’s cut at PacPost in the Valley, which was great because then we could have not just Teri and her team of assistants there but also our whole VFX team. Even though they’re based in London, we had them stay out here, as there was so much real-time information to deal with. We also had our music editors, and we mixed all the sound on the Sony lot in Dolby Atmos. The big problem during post was that our release date got pushed up by two months, so it’s been a real scramble to get it all done in time.

Do you like the post process?
I love post, but the first three weeks of my director’s cut are really hard. I’m still studying what happened on-set. I haven’t fully separated from the shoot yet, and you can’t help but think about the stuff you didn’t get. It takes a while to get past that and to focus on the coverage you did get and to see the film you actually shot. You just never know what you have until you start putting it all together.

Viola Davis and director Gina Prince-Bythewood on the set of The Woman King

Talk about editing with Terilyn.
We’ve worked so much together, and there’s so much trust. When I’m shooting, she’s my first audience, and I really rely on her. When you’re shooting it’s all moving so fast. You feel stuff on-set, but you don’t know if it’s translating. It’s only when you sit down together later that it all starts to become clearer, and Teri puts together such great assemblies that then it’s a process of building on that. And while the first part of the director’s cut is hard, it’s also my favorite part because it’s just the two of us working away.

Once that 10-week period is over, you have to bring in everyone else in to the process. But when it’s a movie you believe in and love, it’s a good process as you’re fighting for your vision.

L-R: Terilyn Shropshire and Gina Prince-Bythewood

Terilyn, what were the big editing challenges?
Terilyn Shropshire: Time and volume since there was a lot of film shot, with first and second units often shooting simultaneously. I always aim to watch it all as soon as possible, so my assistant had a real challenge trying to turn around the dailies for me so I could give some feedback about the coverage. It helped that I was on-set. We began editing last October, and we only just locked picture, so it’s been almost a year now.

Terilyn, can you walk us through your editing process?
Shropshire: We started editing in Cape Town and then moved back to LA after production wrap. We used Avid Media Composer 2018.12.12. on the macOS platform. The Sony engineering team was phenomenal in minimizing downtime during the transition back to the States. We were able to transfer a lot of our media ahead of our arrival back in the US.

The team was able to restore our media to a different Avid Nexis, allowing us to hit the ground running, and we were able to use Jump Desktop for the first week in the US. It gave us time to get acclimated and to ensure we could adhere to health and safety protocols. As post continued, we used Jump Desktop to create a really solid remote workflow. The ability to jump in from home or from the mixing stage has proven to be extremely valuable.

This film has a lot of VFX. Can you talk about working with VFX supe Sara Bennett, who co-founded London’s Milk VFX?
Right from the start we talked about authenticity and that all the VFX had to help build this historical epic and the world of 1823 in West Africa. It all had to look real, not just in terms of removing anything modern in the frame, but in terms of the VFX feeling totally part of the environment. Sara completely embraced that. We did a ton of research, and she also worked very closely with the production designer and pulled from the artwork and illustrations we had.

When people think of “world-building” they tend to think of the huge Marvel movies, but anytime you create a world people haven’t seen – whether it’s Braveheart or Gladiator – you go through the same highly detailed process to make all the VFX as seamless as possible.

Sara was on-set for the whole shoot, which was very important because she’d let me know if something would work or not. Then she came back here to LA for post and stayed all the way through our first preview, which was also very important because often the VFX tell the story even if they’re not finished. So I gave her my wish list of the VFX shots I wanted finished for that preview and my cut for the studio, and she worked with her team and did some postviz for a lot of the VFX that’d help with the storytelling.

We did have a lot of VFX, and Sara and Milk did the bulk of the work, but there was so much to do that we also had some other vendors, including Egg VFX, Untold Studios, Nexodus, Host VFX, Jellyfish and Clear Angle.

Gina Prince-Bythewood on-set

How involved are you in the DI and how important is it to you?
I love the DI, and it’s so crucial. I like to discuss the look and then give the colorist and the DP a week to work on it together before I go in. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the choices available to you, and it’s such a specific talent they bring to the DI. We did it with colorist Walter Volpatto at Company 3.

We had a great LUT on-set, and we’re enhancing that and making sure the women all look beautiful and that the colors are rich and full for all those kingdom scenes. There’s also a whole different element of the city where the slave trade is centered. We wanted that to look far grittier and harsher, so we were working on the contrast between those two very different worlds. I’m really happy with how the film’s turned out.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.