How Niyi Akinmolayan brought ‘The House of Secrets’ to life [Exclusive]

For his next cinematic cocktail, the Nollywood hitmaker returns with Anthill Studios’ first 2023 release titled The House of Secrets.

In this interview, the director takes us through his process, what it took to build the set for this project, casting, and much more:

It was when I discovered a picture on Instagram of a room with a window and through the window, we could see another apartment with a couple. It felt like there was someone in that room constantly watching them; it was just a captivating photo. I started thinking about what I would do if I was stuck in a place like that. ‘Would I love to write about what I see every day? What would I do?’, I was just playing with the idea in my head until it dawned on me. What if what I was looking at was a projection of some memories that I had locked up a long time ago, and there was really nobody outside the window? It was just something that was playing around in my head, so I put it on paper.

I started writing the characters first. I wanted it to be a woman in her 50s because that gave me this feeling. You have an older woman who is probably not doing anything but sitting at home, and she’s going to have a reason to talk about whatever she sees across the window. First of all, it was supposed to just be a woman sneaking on some neighbours, and then some scandal came in, but the more I thought about it, the idea of a projection of locked memories started coming to me, and then I built the premise of the film around it. What if the couple she is looking at is actually her and someone from her past life? That’s how it started. Then I started adding more characters to it, and the plot came eventually, I fine-tuned it and it became a story.

I think I saw the picture online about this time last year, probably in April, because I remember we were doing some other work. Before I decided to put pen to paper, it was like two months later. From the moment I figured out the treatment, I think the actual writing took roughly four weeks to finish. I am extremely obsessed with psychological dramas, the concept of memories, triggers, and mental illnesses. Basically, how the brain works. I’ve been particularly fascinated with some research that I read that said most times when we forget stuff, it’s not because it’s no longer in our brain but because the brain is protecting us from accessing it and then it just locks it up and with the right triggers, we can unlock them. That’s the concept that has made with me for many years because I have some love for this kind of stuff and it was just easy to put it into this story.

As a director, you tend to have a set of people that you have worked with before, that you love and would like to work with again if an opportunity comes along. We had worked with Efe Irele before and this just felt like a perfect role for her. She plays the younger version of Najite Dede, who I had worked with I think 10 or 12 years ago. I think I was an assistant director on that set and I just really loved what I saw. Over the years, I didn’t see her do much in the film space. She does fantastic theatre as a director and an actor and some TV work. I remembered what I saw then and I knew that I wanted her for this particular role because this character does things that an actor who isn’t driven by the passion for the work or isn’t intelligent would not be able to do. We were very deliberate in ensuring that we got the right people for the role, not just famous people or celebrities. We didn’t just want people who can act, because it isn’t enough. We wanted people who are intelligent enough to understand so many clues in the film. Some people have to watch it two or three times to add up all the clues together. We wanted somebody who understood those subtle nuances and the little metaphors and could interpret it just the way I thought about it. We didn’t have any other person in our minds other than Najite to do the job.

Casting Shawn Faqua is also interesting because probably six years ago, there was an audition I was doing and we needed a guy. He didn’t get the role, but he impressed me and I thought, ‘One of these days the right role is going to come and I’m gonna give it to Shawn Faqua.’ So, I suggested it to the team and we did a camera, and read test with Efe. We recorded that and we watched it over and over again and it just worked. I think this is probably the most beautiful chemistry people are gonna see onscreen this year. Every other person in the film was either people we’ve worked with before or people whose work we liked like Kate Henshaw or Keppy Ekpenyong. I hadn’t worked with Funlola Aofiyebi before, but everyone knows her so thats a given. With Emeka Nwagbaraocha, funny enough, there’s a bit of a correlation between who he has become on the internet and the character. That’s going to be something fun for people to explore when they see the movie. We worked together on Prophetess, he is a young, fantastic actor, very easy to work with. Anee Icha and I had worked on Castle & Castle. I think the two interesting roles that we didn’t think or anticipate turned out to be brilliant were Femi Jacobs and Taye Arimoro, who is relatively new but a fantastic performer. Everyone committed their all.

So, I can tell you for free that the hardest thing to do in movies is give it a title. We had a couple of ridiculous options that I won’t tell you about. We thought a film with the word secrets is catchy and cool. The first act is almost theatrical in the way it’s presented. We also wanted to take pride in the fact that we worked so hard on the production design. Since the first act is set up in this house and this film is about secrets, we decided to call it The House of Secrets. Getting the title is one thing but figuring out how to position the title is another thing. The first teaser that we released was this animation of the house coming together and that was deliberate. We wanted to reinforce the idea that this film is about a house.

We built everything in the film from scratch. We worked so hard on the production design to build the house. There’s a train set and a couple of things we built from the ground up. Visual storytelling is very key to the kind of stuff we do and you really can’t push the boundaries of creative visuals if you have to shoot in boring houses. What if you want the house to be pink? What if you want colours to be changed in the middle of the shoot? What if you want to tamper with their light or blow stuff up? What if you want to set the house on fire? Those are the big questions. Anthill is fully dedicated to building its visual design from the ground up on all our projects. We have the space, and sound stages where we build a lot of this stuff. The big challenge was that this film is about someone in the house looking out of the window and seeing the balcony of another house. Even if you got a house that allowed you to do this, what are the odds that if you look through that window you would precisely see what the story needed you to see? So we agreed from the beginning that we were going to set it up. Then of course the character interacted with the house, pulling things down and destroying a bit of glassware and stuff, which you can’t be doing in people’s houses.

The other one that was fun was a challenge for us to build a train set and simulate actual train motion. I’m not going to talk more about that, you should go see it in the film. That was ambitious. It was crazy, but it worked. Another thing that I want to say is that we extensively used AI to guide a lot of our production design this time around. We wanted to build a Nigerian office in 1999, and then we realised that there are no references online. So, we went to artificial intelligence to imagine what the Nigerian post office looked like in the 90s and it did an amazing job. So, we got ideas from that and we were able to build the post office. That is a game changer. It was a thorough job and it gave all the assistance and details that we needed. That’s something we couldn’t have done any other way if not for the help of artificial intelligence. Typically, we would spend close to two months before actual production on set design to pre-production work.

I want people to enjoy this film. It’s a different film. I mean I used to write many years back and then I quit because you know I was a bit insecure about my writing. Then, I got back to writing with Prophetess in 2020 and I’ve been writing ever since. If you want to know how I think and the kind of things that are in my head, pay attention to films like The Man For The Job and The House of Secrets. It’s practically me, my voice coming out of those films. I make all kinds of films and I’m excited about all kinds of films from party, family to children films. I love everything but if you want to know my core ideas, the things that I care about it would be in films like this and the hope is that I get to make at least one every year if I can. If you’ve ever wondered what exactly is Niyi’s visual statements or voice as a filmmaker, this is just me talking to the world via my art. You should watch it if you’ve been curious about that or if you love everything Anthill has been doing. This is a fantastic project, we paid attention to details and the performance is fantastic. If you just want to have a great time watching a film that is extremely touching and captivating, this is the film you should watch. I think people are going to watch the film and want to watch it again. I think some people are going to watch the film and wish they shared the experience in the cinema with someone.

At Anthill, we’re quite big on how we present our films and we’re always asking ourselves, ‘What is the different thing we should do this time around?’ We think about marketing before we start shooting. A lot of people don’t know this but all the pictures you see and the entire concept of the poster were already conceived before the actual shoot. We got the photographer on set while we were filming. You have to be deliberate about these things. I got to work with Tommy Wale and this is a funny story. When we did Hey You last year, we were in a rush, so we put out a quick poster like that. When we put it on the internet and people started yabbing us a lot. Then this designer came up and said, ‘Yeah, the poster is bad, but I’m gonna try and fix it I show you what it can look like because I like the pictures.’ He took the poster, reworked and sent it and he got the job to do our posters. With this, we are very deliberate with the images we put out. The black-and-white stuff that came out was precise and deliberate because we want people to get excited about the film. It’s going straight to the platform and we want we need that much social media buzz.

Everyone is a bit sceptical about what works in cinema these days. You might have this mind-blowing intelligent drama, but nothing happens. Also, the moment you start thinking about cinema, a lot of things will change. That probably wouldn’t be the lead actress, you would probably be like, ‘Ah I’m going to need a popular face, so who are we going to put blah blah blah?’ What Amazon does is that it allows me to make this kind of film where we can tap into new talents and expressions. It’s not just for the commercial purpose and it’s really important for us as a studio to be able to balance that out very well.

The Anthill motto is to keep moving forward. We never look back. We allow you guys to do that work. Here’s what I like to tell people about the economics of making films in Nigeria. If you’re going to be a successful filmmaker, you’re going to have to make a lot of films at a time. You’re going to do more than one film in a year in the capacity of a director if you want to be successful. It’s gonna be very hard to always be on top of your game when you have to make all of this work and so that’s what happens. There will be productions that know people will not entirely feel strongly about but knowing that you have to do this for the economics of it, you have to know that you win some and you lose some. For me as a director, a lot of the backlash that I’ve had has been on things that I directed for other people like Chief Daddy 2. But I have also gotten positive feedback for other projects that I’ve directed for people like The Set Up (2019) and The Arbitration (2016) so I have to be a balanced filmmaker. Everybody else needs to understand that at this level for someone like me, I’m also a businessman. Every time we make a movie, 60 to 100 human beings get paid, they get to pay their school fees, feed their families, take care of their children, and buy themselves nice stuff. So, sometimes you’re going to prioritise that over what some people think about the film. You’re going to hope that people love your film every time you make it and that you can keep impressing them or that if you get to do three films in a year that they would at least love two. But it’s very unrealistic to think that you want to meet the economics of being a successful filmmaker in Nigeria and that people will always love your films.

There’s one that is probably even coming before Mikolo but we are tightlipped right now because it’s really big, one of the biggest things coming this year. There is a possibility that we might have one more film at the end of the year but all of all that is still hush-hush. We’re in development for a film for next year and we want to foray into a little bit into the superhero genre albeit subtle. Something kind of like in that X-men type, mutant range. It’s going to be fun. It’s young people and it’s going to be cool. Of course, there is Mikolo, which is hopefully coming during the children’s holidays. It’s most likely going to be late August but we’re going to confirm soon. More announcements will come before the end of the year.

The House of Secrets is currently streaming on Prime Video.