It took publisher-turned film maker, Dapo Adeniyi, about three years to perform an uncommon feat by adapting Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka’s famous childhood memoir, Ake: The Years of Childhood, to film.
Adeniyi, who directed the film, said, in an interview with our correspondent, that although the initial budget for the film was N350m, total costs eventually fell below this sum for some reasons.
One of the factors that aided the production of Ake, he noted, was the general attitude of the crew and members of the cast. Although they were paid to participate in the production, some of these people considered the film a project of honour. So, they turned around at different stages of production to donate a part of their fees or all of it as their contribution to its overall success. The result is that the movie eventually cost about N200m to produce.
As expected, the shooting of Ake was not entirely smooth. According to Adeniyi, apart from an initial difficulty in raising funds for the production of the film, there were many other challenges.
“One of them is that, between 2013 and 2015, many of the locations in which the film was shot had changed and totally destroyed. Buildings were being modified. Road construction had already claimed some of the houses and the owners of the properties were changing the landscape. Change was sweeping at a very alarming rate. This was a major problem,” he said.
Also, many people and organisations were afraid of investing their money in it because of the fear of piracy.
“But what we discovered is that no country in the world has been able to overcome piracy. They have managed to curtail the activities of pirates so that the business of filmmaking is not destroyed and core investors will recover their capital and have the confidence to re-invest. But we don’t have that in Nigeria at the moment,” Adeniyi said.
Another major problem encountered by the movie director and his crew was the nuisance posed by noise pollution. Noting that the experience revealed how noisy the Nigerian environment could be, he said, “Even if you enter a forest, you will be surprised that there is noise there. And I’m talking about human noise.”
In trying to digitally clean out the unnecessary noise from the tracks of the film, the director said he faced the risk of tampering with the audio.
Eventually Ake was recently screened to a select audience comprising members of the culture community at the MUSON Centre in Onikan, Lagos, a few months after the official trailer was released on Youtube alongside other snippets.
Commenting on the film before the screening commenced, Dr. Olaokun Soyinka, who is the first son of the Nobel laureate, described the production of Ake as an exciting development. He was visibly delighted at the prospect of viewing his aunties, uncles and other relatives in their formative years and learning how they evolved over the years.
Soyinka also expressed the belief that, like the new James Bond 007 movie titled Spectre,Ake will get to every part of the world.
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