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| I Do Not Come To You By Chance |
The story of a young man’s rise to riches through a scam company, under the tutelage of his eccentric and cheerfully corrupt uncle, I Do Not Come To You By Chance blends comedy with social drama and political critique in a light-hearted and entertaining fashion. It’s screening as part of the Glasgow Film Festival, and shortly before the festival began, I connected with director Ishaya Bako to discuss it. I began by asking if it had anything to do with Easy Money, a short film he made previously on the subject of scamming. It’s not, he says, but “I can see how those parallels could be drawn.
“Easy Money was a short film that I made for the Home Video Integrity Awards. It was a small initiative in the city where I live, Abuja. It's a script writing competition around themes of integrity and public probity and public good. The winning films get to be made into short films. So Easy Money, which is themed around get rich quick schemes, is an interesting link. But with I Do Not Come To You By Chance, it was the novel that I'd read pretty much when it came out and from when I read it, I always thought it would make a good film.”
I ask what it was it about it that spoke to him in that way.
“I think it was the characters,” he says. “Cash Daddy [the uncle], in particular, was very larger than life, but there was also something very human to him, so they weren't just stereotypes. It was just a fascinating look into that world, because it is somewhat ubiquitous in some parts of Nigeria. It was just a lot more nuanced and I think that was very attractive, the nuance and how the character motivation started to switch as well, which I thought was interesting.
“Adapting it to the screen, you need to compress while you keep the essence. So for that, I think that was one of the things that was very interesting. He changed quite a lot from the book to the film, because in the book, he was really crude. He was a lot more exuberant or whatnot. When I started talking with the producers, I guess they found it hard to connect with someone like that on screen, which I thought was interesting, but, I was working with them and just trying to find the sweet spot. So the producers, Chinny [Carter], Genevieve [Nnaji] and Chioma [Onyenwe], and then obviously my co writer, Chika Anadu, just listening to them and listening to how they responded to that, I was figuring out how to downplay him a bit more and make him slightly more complex while still keeping the essence of who he was.
“The exuberance is still there, you know, the magnanimity that he had, the generousness that he had, which I thought was really interesting. It was finding that balance. And thankfully, Blossom Chukwujekwu, who played Cash Daddy, did a really good job, even with small nuances, with the way he drank his whisky. They were doing interesting touches that they brought in, so it was obviously just a collaboration throughout.”
You don't want him to overwhelm the story if you've got one character like that, I suggest.
“Exactly, exactly. In one of the films that I'd watched, The Great Gatsby, I've seen how the bolder character could somewhat overshadow the main protagonist, in the Baz Luhrmann version. I remember watching it when it came out and then watching it again, and I'd actually forgotten that Tobey Maguire was the lead character, you know, like, it was his story. He was the one telling the story. It was Gatsby that overshadowed everything. So we were looking at that and saying ‘Okay, we don't want that. We want to figure out the balance.’ So even if Kingsley, who is navigating us through the story, isn't as brash and as loud as his uncle, it’s figuring out how to balance it out.”
A lot of what we learn about Cash Daddy also comes from the visual, and it’s clear that a lot of fun was had in depicting his lifestyle. I ask how that developed.
“I think, again, collaboration,” he says. “Sitting down with the costume designers, with the art director, and talking about the spaces. As you mentioned, the CIA, which is his office, and scam central, as it were. There was something about making it look very professional, so that when you see them in the minister's office, it's not very different from the office that they work in every day. They created a façade that they believe in, so it's like the scam is as real as it goes. And the scam goes all the way to how his office is his house, you know? The way he presents himself and the way he moves. He was obviously very deliberate in creating all of that.
“It was deliberate to create the office the way it was so that even though it's a scam, it's a front, it is also so well put together that they believe it, and that's kind of how he communicates it to his people. That's how he moves around it. Is that make believe – pun intended – or for the work that he does in the design of business? So it translated with the conversations I had with the costume designer, with the art director, and even with the actor in terms of just how he believes. So even when he's running for office, it's full belief and this full gumption that, ‘Yes, I'm doing the right thing.’”
It’s also about making Kingsley and the other people who work in the office feel that they're doing something professional rather than something that's really criminal, he says. i ask if he did much research into that kind of scam industry before starting work on the film.
“Yes, actually,” he says. “I brought along my producer Chioma because he had this podcast called 23419, which actually interviewed alleged scammers, that went back as far back as the Nineties. It's a six part podcast series. It had literally a little over six hours of interviews with these people. I got to talk to one or two of them as well. I also knew that the way that these scams exist today is quite different from how they did back in the day, and this was like a period film around a period issue, about when it started in the late Nineties into the early 2000s, at least in this type of internet scam. It blew up with the dot com bubble. So I still wanted to keep that fresh.”
He then needed to find a leading actor who could keep people sympathetic but be quite ambiguous about what was happening inside his head. How did he approach that?
“Yeah, that was the tricky, tricky, tricky part because he's practically in every scene. Obviously there are the pros and cons for that with every film because the film is made or destroyed by that one performance. So we were keen on at least finding someone new, a fresh face, not well known even to the domestic market. And someone that is honest. There's even the line that Cash Daddy says in the film: ‘You have an honest face. It's good for business.’
“We did auditions in about four different cities in the country, and it was rigorous. But yeah, when we saw him, when he read and then we did a couple of screen tests, it just felt right that it was going to be Paul Nnadiekwe. It was tough for him because he'd been in some other smaller projects but he hadn't been in film of this scale. When we were starting and when I just told him he got the role and you know, ‘This is the rehearsal schedule and this is what we're going to do,’ I had to tell him that, ‘Look, this is going to be lot on you.’ And he was, you know, maybe it was the excitement of getting the role and all, he was cool. And then I think by the end of the first week he came to meet me and he was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I remember what you said. This is intense.’”
I ask how he balanced the comedic, dramatic and thriller elements of the film.
He ponders for a moment. “I think we set out to make a comedy, because the book is very light-hearted. So the scene with a father going to hospital and then being rejected at the different hospitals, in unfolding it, especially during the writing process, we started to say ‘Okay, you know what, like the job now becomes how do we balance all of that?’ There's the family drama that is kind of the bedrock of it with the comedy and the exuberance of Cash. I still want to hear what the audience thinks because as a filmmaker, it's kind of what speaks to you organically at every stage from writing all the way to editing. You're still making the film, you're still finding its form and how it like translates in the visual sense.
“It was important to keep the comedic aspect of it. I think what made it a bit more dramatic is in plotting the characters. It became a triangle because we looked at Kingsley at the centre and then his uncle on one hand and then his mother on the other. That's the emotional shape of the story and they're just being honest with what they're going through. Because for half of the film, the mother is mourning, and it's very tricky to put comedy within that, given the nature of what is happening to her son as well – seeing her son being corrupted while she's also mourning the loss of her husband. And on the other hand, it's the things he's now able to provide for his family, which he takes very seriously as the opara, the first son. And he's doing that with family still, which is its own irony in and of itself. But again, I'd like to know what the audience thinks.”
Did he have a sense of it developing as he went through the process?
“I definitely had a sense of it developing,” he says. “It's tricky because of the source. You are creating something completely new, but then it's obviously owned and anchored by the diaries that exist in the book. I also wanted to do justice to the book in and of itself, or to someone that loves the book. But then I also am very well aware that for creating something completely different, you have to deconstruct. Once we were able to get the script locked, we just used that as a roadmap. In the edits you're listening to the film, you're listening to the actors. You're listening to the material that you have in front of you. It was pretty fluid, but to be fair, it was particular in process.”
He’s looking forward to the Glasgow screening.
“I feel very, very good. I'm grateful. It'll be interesting to see how the audience responds to the material. What I made the film for is for an audience to consume it, and to hear what they think.”
