Sophie Okonedo Interview On Directors’ Fortnight Entry ‘Clarissa’

Oscar nominated for Hotel Rwanda, Sophie Okonedo comes to Directors’ Fortnight with Clarissa, an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway directed by Nigerian siblings Arie and Chuko Esiri. Okonedo stars as the title character — Clarissa is the heroine’s Christian name — and the story follows a day in the life of this society woman as she plans a dinner party. The kicker here is that the Esiri brothers have shifted Woolf’s very British period tale to Lagos, with key sections in a contemporary setting. Here, Okonedo reveals how she broke down in tears when she heard that the film had been accepted.

DEADLINE: You’re headed to Cannes!

SOPHIE OKONEDO: I feel like I just finished making it, and, yeah, so that’s bonkers. Me and Chuko and Arie, we were just like… (She draws a breath.) I was in tears. I’ve never been to Cannes.

DEADLINE: You’ve never been?

OKONEDO: I’ve never, ever been — and to be going with this film! I said, “If nothing else happens, this is more than we could ever wanted to happen to this film.” It was so hard to get off the ground. And tricky to get a film made in Nigeria. Obviously, they’ve got the huge Nollywood industry. But it’s a different type of film to that, and to get a film made on 35mm, and shot with nearly all Nigerian crew, is just extraordinary. There were so many instances of, ‘it nearly didn’t happen,’ right up until the wire, really.

DEADLINE: How long did it take to put the film together?

OKONEDO: My first conversation with Arie and Chuko was around the time of the [pandemic] lockdown. They’d got in touch with my agent in America and they’d sent a link to their first film, Eyimofe (This Is My Desire) [2020]. I watched that and said to myself: “Oh, that’s great. I’m going to definitely meet.”

So they came up with a few ideas they told me about, and then they mentioned doing a re-imagining of Mrs. Dalloway, that they were going to do in Lagos. And I was like, “I’m in.” 

 I didn’t hear from them for about a year and a half, and then they sent a script through. I just thought, ‘This is fantastic’. I said, “Yes, I’ll definitely do it.” There was no money. After that, I just sort of kept in touch. Then Theresa Park (Bones and All, Roar) came on as a producer, and they just went off and raised the money. 

I was in touch with Chuko. He came down to visit me in Sussex, and then he came to the theater to see me perform in Medea [at Soho Place theater in early 2023]. They’re in London quite a lot.

DEADLINE: It’s an exciting time for filmmakers of Nigerian heritage to be headed to Cannes, after My Father’s Shadow was there.

OKONEDO: I love that film. I met Akinola [Davis]. I thought he was amazing as well. I met him for lunch and he was such an interesting guy.

DEADLINE: Are the Esiris young guys as well?

OKONEDO: They’re around the same generation as Akinola. Not young young.

DEADLINE: What was the process like?

OKONEDO: Each step of the way, when they came through with the script, I thought, well, this is amazing. Just to get this far, this is great. And then when we completed it, I thought, I feel like I’ve massively achieved something already. And then to get [into Cannes]… It’s so meaningful for us. I was thinking that it’d be a long haul.

 I mean, we still had to get all the fine stuff together for Cannes. They watched quite a rough version, but they wanted it. And it has happened really fast. I was only back there doing a few extra scenes just recently… Little bits and pieces, because we were so limited on time and trying to film on film — it’s not like digital, where you can just jump around all the time. You have to really set things up, because you can’t afford on such a low budget to waste film. 

DEADLINE: What made them so bold as to shoot it on film? 

OKONEDO: [Laughs.] They are bold. They’re very bold. They’re not like me. I’m full of working-class insecurities, and they’re not really like that. They believe in themselves, and they are very singular with their kind of vision. 

DEADLINE: What did the novel Mrs. Dalloway mean to you when you first read it?

OKONEDO: I didn’t get it at all, the book. I read it when I was young. I had no idea what the hell it was going on about. Then I read it at my age now and it knocked my socks off.

DEADLINE: Because you’ve been living your life, haven’t you?

OKONEDO: Virginia Woolf… The writing in that book is so incredible. I mean, just the way she writes about stepping off the pavement and onto the road. Half a lifetime she describes in that moment — her feelings and thoughts, her hopes and fears. And I’m at the age where I’m looking back on my life and, obviously, looking forward, looking back. Was that the right way? Was that the right thing? And that’s what so much of the book is.

[In the book] Mrs. Dalloway does a walk through London, it all takes place over 24 hours. I followed the walk described in the book, two days before I went to Lagos, I thought, I’ll just do the London walk of Mrs. Dalloway, thinking that the wonder I have about London, I could infuse that when I got to Lagos. But it wasn’t hard, because in Lagos there was just too much to watch.

DEADLINE: There’s certainly a heck of a lot going on in Lagos.

OKONEDO: It is a really chaotic place. I thought, how are we ever going to make a film here? But there’s a kind of exuberance and an energy there. I went to do a bit of research before filming because I hadn’t been there for over 20 years. I stayed with Chuko and Arie and their mum. In fact, I stayed with their mum the whole time of filming because she’s a wonderful woman, and I just wanted to absorb. I wasn’t brought up in Nigeria. I don’t know my Nigerian family. I didn’t grow up with them. I didn’t grow up in that life.

DEADLINE: Does your Mrs. Dalloway have a Nigerian accent?

OKONEDO: Oh, no. This is the thing. So, sometimes things in the script are set now in Lagos, and we’re also looking back 20 or 25 years ago. And also the part of Lagos where Chuko and Arie live, and where parts of the bit that my story is set, is in a place called Victoria Island, which is very nice.

I was reading the script thinking, is this Lagos — all these very Western restaurants? I just didn’t recognize it. But they pointed out that this is how the younger generation are now.

When I got there, I said, “Well, shall I do some work [on my accent]. How do you want me to sound?” They said, “Oh no, just sound like a posh version of you.” And then they said, “Well, look, how do we sound?” They went to public schools in England, and so they just sound like public school boys, basically. One of the actors said, “Well, is a Western audience going to understand that there’s people like this in Lagos?” And Chuko and Arie went, “We don’t care. This is what we’re doing.”

DEADLINE: Precisely!

OKONEDO: I just love them for that. They introduced me to one of their godmothers, who they said was very like Clarissa, and she was incredibly grand. So I actually had to sort of beef it up a little bit. I was a bit posher than normal.

But then, obviously, there are other characters in Mrs. Dalloway. There’s the soldier, Septimus [Warren Smith, a young shell-shocked infantryman featured in a parallel story], and, of course, they speak in a local dialect. 

DEADLINE: This would be the Nigerian actor Fortune Nwafor?

OKONEDO: He is wonderful, this young lad, I mean, he’s something else. They had lots of Nigerian actors in it. David Oyelowo who plays Peter, the love of Clarissa’s life. [Ted Lasso star Toheeb Jimoh, also Nigerian, is the younger Peter].

DEADLINE: I’m fascinated by your remark about how Lagos society women are quite grand. My own Nigerian aunts, when I was growing up, were incredibly grand, and I used to hide from them.

OKONEDO: Frightening! Oh, the attitude, I’ve already missed it. I did love it there, even in the chaos and the frustrations of trying to just get from A to B because of the traffic. 

There are a lot of problems, which I’m not clever enough to go into, so I can only grab what I can, which is the energy. And also the loudness of people, I’ve always kind of restrained myself here. But when I’m there, if I find something funny, I can just throw my head back, roll on the floor, kick my legs in the air and have a good old laugh — and nobody looks.

 Obviously, there’s a part of me that’s totally British, but there’s also a part of me that’s so Nigerian, and because I haven’t spent time there, I didn’t understand that part until I went back.

And this project has been so meaningful to me on a personal level that anything that happens with it afterwards is just extra.

DEADLINE: The whole idea that this very traditonally British, classic piece of literature has now been transposed to a former British Commonwealth country — it’s as if some aspects of culture are attempting to shake off the British straitjacket.

OKONEDO: You know, it really does feel like that. And also, when I was there… You just get such a kind of European or American-centric view [in the West], but when I was there you realize, f*ck, there’s this whole other world where stuff is happening all the time.

DEADLINE: And also there’s this whole other audience.

OKONEDO: There is another gaze. Of course, there aren’t loads and loads of cinemas there, but people are watching things… maybe not in the way you want them to watch things, but people are still watching stuff.

I came away thinking, maybe I just should go and do the Nollywood format and try and create something like that but using the stories that I want to tell. It’d be really great if I could just meet those millions of people and tell the kind of stories that I’m drawn to, a very sort of inclusive format. I just thought, I’ve been so concentrated on ‘the Western gaze’ and perhaps that’s no longer where it’s at.