The Love &
basketball director on The Old Guard, her fierce new superhero film starring Charlize Theron and KiKi Layne
The Old Guard might be Gina Prince-Bythewood’s first foray into the action genre proper, but the writer-director has always been a fighter of sorts. She made her feature debut in 2000 with Love & Basketball, a romance based partly on her own high-school sporting career, growing up in a middle-class
California suburb. “Everything sport teaches you is so apropos to this industry,” she says. “Aggression is good, stamina, the ability to fight … I bring the same passion to film-making – except for the tears. There’s no crying in directing.”
Speaking over Zoom from her
Los Angeles home, the walls behind her decorated with framed photographs, she seems relaxed and happy to reminisce about the varied career that led to here. She jokes that her love of storytelling “came from tragedy”, in that her parents opted not to replace a broken television set. “So for seven years all I could do was read.” It wasn’t until she got to UCLA, however, that she realised she could direct: “I think it came that late because I just didn’t have any role models.”