Taiwo Egunjobi

Taiwo Egunjobi is a film director and screenwriter who grew up in Ibadan, Nigeria. His directorial work The Fire and The Moth, is a drama portraying against societal situations of southwestern Nigeria. He frequently collaborates with Isaac Ayodeji and Emiola Fagbenle in his works. His works center on satirical settings of Nigerian society. Quotes Taiwo Egunjobi, Nigerian film director and writer. I grew up in Ibadan, South-Western Nigeria, and I’m still very much connected to the place. It’s a really picturesque and intellectually interesting place to grow up in. In constant pursuit of excellence and higher thinking via higher art. I like stories that get me to pause and think. Well, if you mean existentially, it will probably be a long discussion. But in this case, we are here because I made The Fire and The Moth, and it felt like a story that needed to be told. It’s about consequences and chaos. It’s about cultural devices and how we interact with them as a society of individuals with different motivations. It’s designed like a Western or what I call the “Afro-Western”, but not the kind that ties things up neatly. Isaac (Ayodeji) and I have developed some sort of model for the types of stories we love, and so we always had bits and pieces here and there. I had always been interested in the smuggling backdrops of the border towns of Western Nigeria, and so I had a narrative around that. At some point, we came up with the Ife bronze angle, which immediately took that narrative to the next level thematically. We got into development with Nemsia, and we continued crafting it until it became a real thing. Well, I think I actually just expanded on the tools and devices I was already utilising from previous films. I had a bigger canvas, and so I was able to pay more attention to making the film visually credible. In many ways, we had to find the language of this thing we called the “Afro Western.” I was also working with a larger cast and needed to manage their actions and performance. So in some way, maybe it was the same process, but just more latitude. We struggled a bit with the character of Saba (played by Faniran). We started with this idea of a chatty, charismatic ladies’ man, but it just didn’t work as we got deeper into story development. I didn’t find any peace until we ultimately dialled him down to something approaching stoicism. That’s a funny question, as I came to set coincidentally dressed like Saba, complete with the appropriate wardrobe and beard. Faniran even joked that I was embodying the character. However, I connected more deeply with Teriba, the Customs Officer (William Benson), because I understood the idea of being one man against an entire system that doesn’t work. Fadamana’s gift is in the abstract space. What’s not show, and that’s really where our conversations begin. What’s our soul? What’s our language? Sure enough, we dug into many small-town thrillers and neo-Westerns to find references, but the chunk of our work was done when we visited locations and began to really find the character of these locations, as well as what they could do for the story. We wanted it to be deceptively beautiful and rich, so we used long, static shots to create a pressure-cooker effect. I’ll say that the bronze itself is not just a cultural relic; it is also an object of religion, but it is plundered by many. I’m interested in what our interaction as a society with these objects tells us about ourselves. Is there value for culture and its constituents? Does the end justify the means in our moral framework, or are there buffers? These questions hound me, and I guess I wanted to get the characters to help me answer those questions. It’s a litmus test. To an extent, yes. The film is saying that once you, to speak poetically, “mess with the head”, you mess with fate. You don’t get to control what matters, and what matters is the consequence that must play out.