Nice to meet you and congratulate you. My Father's Shadow This is your debut feature film, but you have such a varied body of work; Does winning the BAFTA Breakthrough Award seem a long time coming?
Akinola Davis Jr: Yes, initially no. I got into cinema because my friend’s father was an editor, and I really liked their family life. I thought they were bohemian. I had never seen people like this before and I thought, “Oh, their dad is an editor, their mom is an artist, this is very cool.” I wanted to do this. I was involved in design, editing and camera work. But everyone kept saying: “You must be a director.” Once I was brave enough to do it, it was about wanting to create a feature, but not wanting to jinx myself by saying it out loud. It's been a long journey. 15 years have passed and now I feel that I have achieved my dream. Now it's about trying to realize that dream as much as possible.
Before getting into film, you spent a long time filming music videos and working with fashion brands. It's such a big step into such a competitive industry – was there any particular moment where you had to be brave, like a do-or-die moment?
Yes, completely. Quite a few moments, but the most important was when I helped photographers and directors Tim and Barry. We used to do a lot of online filming with grime music and that really introduced me to my social circle. They were like my creative filmmaker fathers. I worked with them for six years and at the end I became more insistent, saying, “We have to do this and that.” And they said, “Maybe you should do these things.”
They were the ones who gently fired me, and I was heartbroken, to be honest. But I'm the kind of person who uses disappointment as motivation to prove people wrong and also to prove me wrong. It was difficult and took a year or two to figure out what I was trying to do. I ended up making the film and then I thought, “Okay, you can actually do this and it could work.” But yes, it came out of disappointment.
