Lagos Comedy News: Emmanuel Olabode – Portrait of a Nollywood filmmaker:::

Emmanuel Olabode – Portrait of a Nollywood filmmaker:::

Life History Interview: Project B by Shmerah Passchier

‘Wisdom is never at a height for only the aged to reach (Olisa 1972: 83).’

Emmanuel was born in 1977 and raised in the province of Imo in Nigeria just inland from the Niger Delta approximately70km from the oil capital, Port Harcourt. He is the third of eight siblings and grew up with his maternal grandmother, Faith Agummadu. His father, Jeremiah Olabode was a soldier and was largely absent as a result of political turmoil shaped by waves of military coups. Emmanuel only made contact with him in his late teens. His mother, Victoria Agummadu was a nurse and they enjoyed a close bond but she travelled to Abeokuta in the province of Ogun to find work. She was much younger than his father and when he left on extended periods of military service the marriage crumbled and she eventually remarried with the blessing of her sons.

Emmanuel attests to enjoying a happy childhood. The family was financially comfortable and he was brought up in a middle-class environment. As Emmanuel grew older and entered his teens, sibling rivalry gave way to an abusive relationship with his older brother who beat him severely, forcing him to leave his grandmother’s home and find refuge on the streets of Lagos. Hustling on the streets made Emmanuel extremely tough and resilient. This period in his life seems to have marked a rite of passage and metamorphosis into manhood. Learning from the University of the Street, in his late teens he claims to have had a religious awakening that caused him to turn to God to find a sense of nurturing comfort. Christianity became a safe space for him to tap into a more elevated mode of existence. Embracing a strict moral code and exercising religious fervour, Emmanuel was able to focus on trying to establish a career and leave the thuggish ways of the street behind.

At age 20 Emmanuel got his first break in Nollywood as a ‘Best Boy’ in the camera and grips department on the set of a film called Scores to Settle in 1998. This experience ignited an unstoppable passion in Emmanuel to make something significant of his life. He quickly moved up the ranks in the camera department and became camera assistant, shooting two feature films back to back (Bad Boys and Love is blind).

Another watershed moment for Emmanuel happened on the set of a film called Sharon Stone, which launched the career of Genevieve Nnaji, now enshrined in the pantheon of top Nollywood stars. The cinematographer scheduled to shoot Sharon Stone had double booked himself on two productions simultaneously, thinking one would fall through and had to drop Sharon Stone, giving Emmanuel the opportunity to leap into his position. This marked the start of a prolific career as a Nollywood cinematographer.

From 2000 to 2009, Emmanuel shot 135 films – more credits than his Western counterparts amass in an entire lifetime. Most of the films shot in this period were typical Nollywood productions, shot on shoe string budgets and usually completed within a week. In 2005 he was flown to the Nigerian Chamber of Commerce in Los Angeles to receive an award for his enormous contribution and celebrated as ‘Nollywood’s youngest cinematographer’. On this trip he was invited to visit Universal Studios where he happened to walk past Steven Spielberg’s office. As he wandered around the film lots observing Hollywood in action, he reached another major turning point when he realised how desperately inadequate Nollywood was in comparison to Hollywood, where the average film budget usually exceeds $100 million (Barrot 2008: xi). The average Nollywood production costs $8000, which would finance only the first six seconds of a Hollywood film (Barrot 2008: xi).

Emmanuel returned to Lagos with a new mission – to raise the level of Nollywood productions to match First World standards, thus enabling Nollywood to compete with Hollywood. To do this, he needed to go to film school. For the next four years he saved money and made plans to move to South Africa and study film at the African Film and Drama Academy (AFDA).

Emmanuel Olabode in a First Year Cinematography Workshop 2010

Learning to expose celluloid on the Arriflex 16M camera

Emmanuel arrived on the AFDA campus in 2010 as a first year student and registered for my Cinematography workshops. At the time he was perceived by students and lecturers as irksome and overly zealous. The hard-living, hustling ways he had acquired in the swarming Afropolis of Lagos often alienated people in Johannesburg, and he found it hard to make friends initially. In June 2010 he travelled back to Nigeria for the midyear break but fell victim to bureaucratic bungling by Nigerian immigration officials and could not obtain a student visa in time to return for the remainder of the second semester. As a result he missed an entire term of workshops and assignments and was very nearly failed and barred for not paying fees.

Upon his return Emmanuel discovered that I was completing a Master’s degree thesis on Nollywood and sustainable filmmaking and he would bring his films to show me after workshops. He had become a special student to me and I felt obliged to assist him in breaking through the red tape of the institution. I wrote letters of petition on his behalf to attend supplementary workshops and help him catch up what he had missed much to the annoyance of my colleagues. He was eventually admitted to second year and his academic performance has grown exponentially. He continues to build his skills on film sets in a professional capacity whenever he can outside of his gruelling schedule of theory and practice on campus.

He lives in walking distance from the campus in ‘Fitas’ which is local slang for the neighbourhood of Fordsburg. He shares a house with fellow students and spends

most of his time away from campus and film sets in a tiny brightly painted green room just big enough to house a bed, TV and laptop. He conducts a sober and frugal existence and does not indulge in the revelry that most students on campus do. His prophetic name means ‘God is with us’ and echoes what his grandmother always told him, that he was special and that he would achieve his dreams.

Perhaps as Emmanuel goes about achieving this dream of seeing Hollywood and Nollywood converging somewhere in a distant future through the process of globalization, the words of Nietzsche may hold true for transcending economic inequality in the production of culture in film form. On the subject of extravagance as artistic means the maxim follows:

Artists well understand the idea of using extravagance as an artistic means in order to convey an impression of wealth. This is one of those innocent wiles of soul-seduction that the artist must know, for in his world, which has only appearance in view, the means to appearance need not necessarily be genuine (Nietzsche 2008: 315).