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Nollywood couple and producers of the hugely successful movie, ‘Lisabi’, Lateef and Mo Bimpe Adedimeji recently sat with a few journalists to discuss the their journeys so far, the success of the ‘Lisabi’ movie and how its second part will surpass all expectations. ROTIMI IGE was there and brings excerpts.
When you decided to make a film, many would have expected that you would make a feel-good movie. Instead, you chose a biopic. Why?
I’m so big on culture, custom and tradition, which is very key. I also know how much we Nigerians in this part of the world celebrate heroes of the global world. What happens to our own heroes? And we have a lot of them here that we as Nigerians don’t even know their history or their story.
I feel it’s high time we start telling stories of those people. After ‘Ayinla’, which is about the first biopic that I did, I came to that conclusion that I should make more biopic stories of people who are alive and have contributed a lot to the society, or those that are gone that we don’t even know about. I know after ‘Ayinla’, I did about four other biopics. I did the one for the sitting president, ‘Last Man Standing’; I did ‘Ige’. So I’ve done biopics of people that are living and those that are no more. ‘Ayinla’ was the first and Lisabi is the second. ‘Lisabi’ is quite big, he is the person that gave Egba the very first independence. It was the war that ‘Lisabi’ fought that stopped the Owo ori (tax paying) and that was the very first independence for the people of Egba. I felt that we should tell the story. I didn’t even know who Lisabi was as well until I started making the research. I just know the saying, “Egba Omo Lisabi Egba Omo Lisabi (Egbas, children of ‘Lisabi’).” I kept thinking, “Who is this?”. I thought it was one deity or something. When I dug into the story, I realised that this is somebody that lived and did all of these things, and I decided to tell the story. I’m glad a lot of people are accepting it. For so many people that do not know, they are getting to know that this is a real person and this is a dream becoming reality.
I want to find out first and foremost if you and Mo Bimpe decided to shoot ‘Lisabi’ or it was your idea then she bought into it. Also, were you both involved in the casting?
From the very beginning, we had a film that we wanted to shoot, but I thought that since I’d done something that is from Ogun State – Ayinla, I feel I should go back home and do one more if at all I’ll move ahead into telling some other stories. So when I told her about ‘Lisabi’, she was sceptical at first, but she loved the idea of me doing a biopic. I’m trying to create a niche for myself in that line and just do biopics of people that have been, those that are no more and all of that. And she was like, “It’s not a bad idea. Let’s try it.” and then that’s how she bought into the idea. The casting was done by Mo Bimpe, myself and Niyi Akinmolayan, the director. From the onset, when we thought about the role of ‘Olori Ilari’ in the story, we knew that he was going to be Ibrahim Chatta because I know he is the one who can pull that character for me. For other characters; Debo and I have a very close relationship, which would make it easy for us to flow. If you go back to ‘Ayinla’, you will see that it is the same line of friendship and we just flow naturally. We needed people to feel that love between them for them to feel whatsoever that is going to happen between them eventually.
MoBimpe is in a better position to explain though because she is the producer, the storyteller. She’s good when it comes to storytelling. I’m actually not as good as she is when it comes to storytelling, I just want to look for money. But bring the script to me, I’ll be your actor.
MoBimpe: Like he said, choosing Ibrahim Chatta has been a given since we came up with the story because personally, I’m a big fan of his. I feel like I’ve never worked with him personally, and this was a chance to work with him closely. For those who have seen the movie and observed the character, you can tell that he killed it. So we knew that it was either him or nobody else. Debo (Mr. Macaroni) obviously is very close to my husband in real life. He was his best man for our wedding, so they are very close and we knew that for this role, we needed somebody that is very close with him like people can relate with the character and with the friendship. And that was why we chose Debo.
Within 24 hours of the movie being released, the movie became the number one movie in Nigeria. But, there have been a lot of review, both positive and negative. How does that make you feel that the movie is making so much impact, and how do you handle the reviews, how did it hit you?
MoBimpe: We already know that when you do something, you expect the positive and the negative. So we were prepared for it. We know that some people would like Lisabi and some will have their reservations. It is normal. So we took it well. We were expecting it.
I told my husband that the only thing is that as a producer, you have to check. The only reason I read all these things is to take notes for next time. Some will open your eyes to things that you didn’t even know. Some make sense, but some are just talking. I would say I picked my pen and paper and wrote down some sensible ones to help me learn better.
I noticed that a lot of the actors spoke Egba like natives. Many without faltering. How did you achieve that?
We had about two people who were always on ground for every major character. It was going to be a problem if you cannot speak Egba and we now force you to speak it, you would say the wrong thing. But there are certain words that once you say it, people can tell that it’s Egba. So we made sure that all of those keywords, people get it correctly. We had language coaches on set before each scene. It’s an Egba story, it won’t make sense for us to be telling an Egba story and we are speaking another dialect. We had to pay attention to these things to bring it to life.
At the premiere, when you were giving your speech, you apologised to some people. Do you want to talk about that?
When you’re shooting a big project, there is no way that you won’t offend some people. There were a lot of people that would have been in the film and weren’t able to make it because the time is not just working. I cannot move my timing to work with yours because I have a particular time that I need to shoot. So in some situations, there are some actors that could not meet up with the time that I had to be like “We need to move forward and look for somebody else, because if I wait, it will delay the shoot. So we just had to keep moving. But it’s a success story. We try to carry everybody along, but some couldn’t make it, and some couldn’t meet up with it, but it’s not a problem. That’s why we have to apologise to people that couldn’t make it. It’s just the normal thing to do.
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How did you two meet?
We met on set, but the first day I met her, she was a bit rude. She saw me and couldn’t greet me. I told her point-blank that who is this person that does not know how to greet people? And I just walked away. As a Yoruba person, if you see someone that is older than you, you will greet. When it was time for her to shoot her second film, I think, they called me. It is my custom to always ask for the name of the producer, and when I was told, they said MoBimpe. My reply was that is that not the girl that does not greet people? They said it was her, and I insisted that I would charge my usual fee. They paid me and I did the job. When I am on set, no matter the situation, I just face my work. And I realised on set that I would be acting alongside her. She was the first person I called and said, “Hey. How are you? Don’t worry, don’t fidget. I’m sure you can do this. We can work on this together and we will achieve a good film.” We started filming and and that’s when we became friends. The rest is history.
With your schedule, how do you still create and manage to still be a husband?
It’s not always easy, but there is there’s a reduction in the way I shoot now. Before now, I don’t always have breathing space, but now I do. But those times that I’m supposed to be resting I don’t joke with them because those are the little time that I have to create a lot of things. The luck I have is I married somebody that is also in the same line with me. Most of the time I just do things, which she tends to notice, and then record unknowingly to me, and then show me later. She would say, ‘look at this character. Don’t you think this is what you should build on? Don’t you think you should build on this?” So that’s the luck that I have. I just do my thing and she just notices and be like “this is another character that you haven’t explored before. You should explore this character.”
Also, most times, once I’m on set and I’m spending more than three days, if she is not working, I carry my wife with me. I’ll go and work, and I’ll come back at night to meet her there If she’s working like that too and we are lucky to be close-by, we’ll meet at the same hotel and we’ll get the same hotel for the two of us. So we would go and work and come back at night. We’ve been able to make it work that way.
When Lateef said he wanted to marry you, knowing that the history of actors, actresses in marriage, were you not scared as the younger person and woman in the relationship?
MoBimpe: At first, I was like ‘no way’ because I was obviously scared of the way the industry is. I was so scared. I told him that we can’t do this. But then, Lateef is a very open person, he made it very easy for me because he told me everything, even the things that would really annoy me. He showed me himself. There’s nothing I would hear that I haven’t already heard from him.
There’s a part two for Lisabi, why?
That’s a biopic. We cannot tell the whole story in one hour 45 minutes. And then we’re trying to make people be so ready for part two. At the time we finished, it was over four hours. We had to cut and cut, and there is a limit to what you can cut in a biopic story so that you don’t shoot yourself in the foot. That’s why we had to do it that way. And then, Netflix decided to split it into two themselves and see the way people are going to accept it. Part one is nothing compared to what is coming.
