Ebuka Njọkụ on making the much-loved, low-budget film Yahoo+

On this edition of conversations with mutuals, I have indie filmmaker Ebuka Njọkụ discuss making his debut feature film in Enugu

Before Ebuka Njọkụ, the writer and director of Yahoo+, sent me the screener of his film, I had seen posters and clips of it around but had decided that it wasn’t for me. The lurid poster clustering the entire cast undersold it. I had assumed that it was another of those poorly made and poorly told films parading cinemas as a way to aggrandize the filmmakers with the prestige of having made a "cinema film." And so when Njoku sent me that DM requesting that I write an article about the film, I told him that "I had my hands full at the moment."

ogbuzo

A post shared by Ebuka Njọkụ (@ogbuzo)

Judge me but it wasn't arrogance. I am lazy. I work two jobs. Film reviews no dey pay or at least, not well enough. Devoting and stealing time from work that actually pays me to write about a film I didn't like would be stupid. Yes, I was certain that I would dislike Yahoo+.

I should also admit that I didn't know Ebuka until that DM. This is to say that there was no past work that I could use to measure his strength or talent as a filmmaker. But what pushed me to see Yahoo+ was a very confident sentence in his message: "I'm sure you will find it interesting enough to write an article on it."

He was right. But even though I loved it, I still wasn't inspired to write about it. What I did instead was put out a good word about it on my Twitter and Instagram with a link to to a review that I had found brilliant, that captured my thoughts about the film, and have a few people to see it on its debut week at my expense.

wkmup

A post shared by What Kept Me Up (@wkmup)

But the film remained with me, and I continued to think about it days after watching. There are many things that I like about Yahoo+. I liked that it offered a fresh angle to Nollywood's " money ritual" stories. I like that the storytelling is simple and nuanced, but I liked it especially because it is cohesive and was coherent about its themes– something the big budget Nollywood films continue to fail at. I found it inspiring: A young indie filmmaker made a film with little resources and ended up churning out one of the best told films from Nollywood this year. It is something to applaud, and it is why I chose to have Ebuka in conversation. I wanted to hear how Yahoo+ was made and to tell him well done! This was how our conversation went:

Nollywood has made many films about wealth sourced from illegal means. The stories have stretched from money rituals to internet fraud. What inspired Yahoo + and the direction you went with the story?

it's a long story. But lemme see how short I can make it. Yahoo + is an expression of my fears if I had ended up venturing into the Yahoo business. It is why there is a little bit of me in all the characters in the movie. 

In 2017, I gave up Nollywood after walking out of a series I had created. I found myself lost in the world - unsure of what the future held for me. Someone advised me to try Yahoo. I was this close to moving to Ghana to try it. As I prepared for the journey, I learnt as much about Yahoo as I could. However, a week before taking that trip, I rewatched American Gangsters - a biopic on Frank Lucas, a notorious black gangster. Frank's end made me see the end of the journey I was about to take. The beauty of the film reminded me of why I fell in love with filmmaking in the first place. Then, I decided to find another hustle. 

Two years down the line, I found myself working in a bar in Asaba. That was the era of boys using girls' pants for rituals. Working in a bar gives you the opportunity to hear stories from strangers. Every now and then, the conversation about money ritual and Yahoo+ would come up. I started meeting people whose idea of Yahoo+ was different from what the general public thought of it. Gradually, every film I had seen about money ritual stopped making sense to me. I was amazed that no one had ever made a film to address that. So when it was time to make my first feature, I took that as an opportunity to let the world know of the other side of Yahoo +. I only hope it would do for someone what American Gangster did for me. 

Luckily for me, I had a song like Flavour and Ụmụ Obiligbo's Isi Onwe to help me streamline the story's direction while I was writing it. 

Could you explain how Isi Onwe helped you streamline the direction of the story?

I'm an old school type of writer. Before I open my Final Draft, I have to understand what my characters want and why they want it, then find an underlying philosophical angle to my story. I call that story direction. 

While writing, I play a lot of music for inspiration. At a point in writing Yahoo +, I couldn't find a philosophical angle to the story. I was about leaving it for some other script when Flavour and Ụmụ Obiligbo's Isi Onwe started playing on my laptop. It's a song that explains how sometimes we don't understand the dimensions of our journey or the consequences of our actions until we are already way deep into the process. Then it hit me– I had found a direction for my story. I listened to that song, at least, a million times while writing Yahoo +. If say I get money, I would have bought the rights to the song and used it for the soundtrack because it summarises what Yahoo + is about.

Oh great. To take us back a little, I believe the series you walked out on is Crazy, Lovely, Cool. What happened? 

I created the show in 2015. After a while, it began to seem that the producer and I had some creative differences. At this time too, I was told that I could no longer be the head writer for a show that I created. Gradually, CLC stopped feeling like the show I created and I lost interest in writing the show. Frustrated by the experience, I gave up writing. 

It made me realise later that every other industry in the world had the same challenges Nollywood had, so it was either fight to win or quit each time I experienced some challenges. Since I loved making films, I decided to give Nollywood another try but with a different strategy.

And this different strategy was launching yourself as an indie filmmaker with your debut feature film. Well done! Any interesting story (s) from making Yahoo+ you’d like to share? 

E plenty oo. 

I’m a huge fan of Steven Spielberg’s cinematographer Janus Kaminski. We intended to move the camera a lot. However, the company we contacted for equipment sent us an old camera and horrible tracks. The tracks were too difficult to set up and were not balanced enough to give you smooth movements. The camera would even go off if you move too much. On our first day on set, we couldn't shoot more than one scene. Worse, we couldn't get a usable shot from the ones we took. I call that scene the scene from hell because days later, we tried reshooting it and once we finished setting up, rain came from nowhere to disrupt us again. The third time we tried shooting it, a car packed there couldn't move. We had to change the blocking to shoot the scene finally. 

Our money also finished a day to the end of the shoot. We spent some hours on the last day looking for money to complete the shoot. As high BP no kill me that day, e be like say I go live long. 

LMAO. Ndo. What was the cost of production, and why didn’t you just wait to get bigger financiers? 

I can't say the exact figure we used but it was close to 5 million Naira. That includes the cost of the EP we recorded for the soundtrack. 

Why didn't I just wait to get a bigger financier? The most important thing to me as a creative is my creative freedom. If I knew a Nollywood producer that would risk his funds on a raw story like Yahoo+, leave it raw and not try to control my approach to the story, I would have approached him. Also, I wasn't ready to trade my creative freedom for any budget. Besides, it was the rightest time to tell the story. Since I had someone who was interested enough to invest and give me hundred percent creative freedom, there was no way I could turn that down. If the film succeeds, bigger financiers will come.

In fact, at some point during pre-production, an actor I wanted to use for one of the roles offered to bring in more financiers into the project. From the way the conversation was going, I felt I was going to lose my creative freedom at a point so I turned down the offer.

 I share a similar sentiment with you on creative freedom. I can't put in my best if I am micromanaged. With FilmOne distribution, it’s usually the big, mainstream films that we associate them with. How did you get them to take a chance on your film? 

Mr. Moses Babatope is actually a very cool guy. He loves movies and is passionate about distributing them. I met him at an event and spoke to him about our film. He asked me to send it across to him. I did and he liked it and we started talking. 

I pitched it as a film for Igbo audiences. Luckily for me, Filmone understood my vision for it and was open to it. Yahoo+ was only meant to be in about 20 cinemas. It just happened that more cinemas wanted it and it ended up in about 40. 

But why did you choose to take Yahoo+ to cinemas? I mean it's low-budget, different from the usual, and most of its cast are unknown to the cinema audience. Doesn’t seem like the best route to recoup investments.

While shooting Yahoo+, the plan was to tour different festivals and use the medium to secure a Netflix distribution deal. However, when we finished making the film, I was too broke to afford submitting for festivals. So we missed out lots of festivals. I spoke with a couple of aggregators and the deal they offered were horrible to say the least. I read somewhere that a film's value starts depreciating if it doesn't get distributed within a year of its completion. With that in mind, I decided to give cinema distribution a try. And I'm glad I made that decision because the process has really taught me a lot about film distribution, marketing and business. 

Let me get your thoughts on filmmaking in Enugu. Do you see the possibilities of a thriving sector of the industry here? 

Of course. Why do you think I shot Yahoo+ in Enugu? I believe in the city. Enugu has everything a city needs to build a thriving sector of the entertainment industry. Getting Enugu to where it should be is just a matter of hard work, faith and time. 

An issue with making films in Enugu is getting professional crew members to work with. There is also the issue of limited filmmaking equipments. We also have very few controlled spaces (studios and short let apartments) for shooting. Those are challenges that can be controlled or solved with proper strategies. 

Outside of commercial success, what would give you the greatest sense of fulfilment with this film? 

Making it! Making Yahoo+ was fulfilling enough. As a stoic philosopher, I live for the process as that's the only thing I can control. 

I also can not wait to see the cast Keezyto, Somadina Adinma, Echelon Mbadiwe, Ifeoma Obinwa and Ken Erics play major roles in high budget movies - whether they're made for streaming platforms or for the cinema. 

Ken Erics wasn't my first choice for the role of Ikolo. He wasn't even my second. However, when my first four choices didn't work out, I listened to Lorenzo Menakaya who produced Yahoo + with me and also played Mansa in the movie. I still wasn't sure of Ken Erics when he came on set. Then we got the scene where he grabs a gun. The way he picked the gun made me realise he was more than prepared for the role. When we started editing Yahoo+, I understood why Lorenzo wanted Ken to play that role. That was my greatest lesson in casting - look beyond the surface. Ken Erics is a world class actor. I don't know any actor in this world that could have played that role as smoothly as Ken Erics played it. I keep wondering why I never thought of that while casting.

I also hope that Yahoo+ would make FilmOne and other film distributors open minded about films made in the southeast.