Chiwetel Ejiofor is best known for his starring role in the movie 12 Years a Slave. Now he's making his directorial debut. A decade ago, the English
Chiwetel Ejiofor is best known for his starring role in the movie 12 Years a Slave. Now he’s making his directorial debut.
A decade ago, the English actor of Nigerian descent picked up a best-selling memoir called The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. It’s about William Kamkwamba, a schoolkid in Malawi whose ingenuity helps save his village from famine.
« I started off thinking that I would adapt it, » Ejiofor says in an interview. « That was my first, sort of, plan. And then in the process of doing that, it sort of became clear, especially when I started to travel to Malawi to meet William Kamkwamba, to meet his family… that’s when it sort of became clear that I was making very directorial choices in the visual nature of it, and what I kind of wanted the film to feel like and to be expressed as. »
Now Ejiofor is the director, screenwriter and a star of the new Netflix film also called The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. Ejiofor plays Kamkwamba’s father, Trywell.
On first going to Malawi to meet William Kamkwamba
I suppose I wrote the first draft of the script just based on the book — purely on the book. And I didn’t have a lot of knowledge of Malawi. I’d never been there; I didn’t have much exposure to Malawi. And so there were just gaps in my knowledge about the place. And so as part of the kind of researching of the film, the first thing was to kind of go there, meet him, meet him at home in Malawi — in Wimbe, which is the village that he’s from. And he was incredibly generous with me, and just taking me around, introducing me obviously to his parents and to his community, and then going to all of the places where the events took place. …
He took me down to a place that’s called the ADMARC grain reserve.
