My mom’s favorite movie of all time is Love and Basketball. The Omar Epps and Saana Lathan-starring basketball romance flick basically runs on syndication in my household. Coupled with my younger sisters’ fondness of The Secret Life of Bees and my admiration for action-heavy flare like The Old Guard and The Woman King, I’ve been a lifelong director/writer/producer Gina Prince-Bythewood fan.
Her husband, Reggie Rock Bythewood, scribe of the criminally underrated Spike Lee film Get on the Bus and the body-positive biopic Notorious, recently created the brilliant TV show Swagger for Apple. The canceled-too-soon two-season basketball series was a bold coming-of-age story that dealt with fatherhood, sexual assault, COVID-19, prison, protest, and so much more. Just like Swagger, NatGeo’s Genius is produced by Imagine Entertainment.
So when I got a chance to interview Gina Prince-Bythewood and Reggie Rock Bythewood, the first question I asked was about their continuing collaboration with Imagine.
Check out the interview with Gina Prince-Bythewood and Reggie Rock Bythewood below:
“Well, so the first thing we did with Imagine Entertainment was it was a series years ago called Shots Fired. And then, their production company worked with us on Swagger. And here, what was interesting is that Imagine/NatGeo came to us and asked if we would be interested in doing Season Four of Genius about Dr. King. And this is in 2020, and we really just felt like, you know, in terms of leaning in the urgency of now…you don’t get to have Martin without Malcolm. And that was basically our pitch to Imagine. So I’m really happy that they embraced it, and obviously, NatGeo embraced that vision as well. And so it was a really great collaboration,” Bythewood said.
Although Spike Lee’s Malcolm X and Ava DuVernay’s Selma are two of my favorite biopics of all time, they are both relatively small slices of life. What’s great about Genius: MLK/X is that we have more time to live, relate, and empathize with these characters.
“It really was this opportunity in doing a limited series that we knew we had actually eight hours as opposed to, say, two for a film. And thinking of it as an eight-hour film, we realize how much more story we could tell. And for us, we really did want to create a narrative where we could see the full breadth of their humanity, not just of Malcolm and Martin but of Betty and Coretta as well. We wanted to know about the moments behind the iconic historical moments. We wanted to know them as men, and as women, and as teenagers, and as boys and girls. Like what inspired them? What inspired their genius? So that tackling of their humanity, of making them real and tangible, was exciting to us. And really why we wanted to tell the story,” Prince-Bythewood replied.
Compared to previous film iterations of Martin and Malcolm’s lives, Coretta Scott King and Betty Shabazz play much larger roles in this series. As a husband and wife creative team who both create stories where Black love is at the core, I wondered if incorporating strong Black relationships was a priority for them.
“I mean, certainly, the love stories within this world were something that was exciting for us to show. And that’s obviously a great way to show humanity. I think certainly, with our body of work to put Black love up onscreen, for people to be inspired by and aspire to be. Drawing on our own lives, we’ve been incredibly lucky to find each other and to find someone who believes in the same thing that you believe in. Certainly, for us as artists, and the power of what we do and our belief that we can change the world. That started on A Different World where we met, and it’s never wavered,” Prince-Bythewood shared.