How a Nollywood Film Gets Made: Here’s what a producer does

They secure the budget, hire the writer, director and actor. The producer is the lifeblood of film production, the consummate filmmaker.

We spoke to a rising star in the space, Ebuka Njoku, who has spent the last decade working in various capacities including as a screenwriter and a director. He first wore the hat of the producer on the film, Yahoo Plus. Most recently he released the family drama, Uno.

When we asked him what it means to be a producer in Nollywood, he had a lot to say.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The job of a producer is basically to manage a production from conception to distribution. It’s a management job and you’re working with different people. You have to work with all these people to make everything make sense. Think of the producer as the CEO of a production.

I typically have a team of associate producers that I work with and lean on for things to be done during production. So I don’t do it alone.

The first thing for me is the story that I want to tell. Once I figure out the story it becomes an issue of what’s the best way to serve this story. Then I consider who the best actors could be and how we can maximise the story. The story determines who we cast for it.

But I also consider the numbers. For each project, as a business person, you also have to consider how much the production will cost you, and also what it can do for you realistically; this includes profits and your CV. It’s important if you have plans to do another film that this one helps further those ambitions.

Then I begin to look for my executive producer who will finance the project. You need to sell them on the decisions that you had made earlier and maybe refine them with the person.

The job of an executive producer varies — depending on the project. But most especially, an EP is the link between the fund and the production. This could be the person representing the company funding the project, the person who sourced the funding, and or the person funding the project. A film isn’t just a piece of art, it’s also a product. Every product needs some financial resources. EPs are the heart of such resources.

I typically lean into my network for people that I work with. I recently used a director whom I have been speaking with for a long time about directing his own film. I didn’t have the financing for a feature film but I worked with him on a short film.

But I also got him involved in the production as well. All I did on the work was listen to his report on progress now and then.

While I’m sourcing for the money I’m also speaking to the cast and crew. You want to make sure they are not people who will stop picking up your call when production starts.

Sometimes you think you’ve decided your budget but the project ends up deciding the budget for you. On Yahoo Plus, we wanted a film that we could shoot with a pocket camera. But it would have been harder to get the streamers to accept it so we opted for a Black Magic 4k. We also decided to use known faces as well as rising actors. The budget went from ₦1 million to ₦3 million.

For Uno, we had a budget of ₦16 million, but we ended up going over ₦20 million. What guides us is the story.

If you look at some of your favourite American films, the odds are that there are top actors there. The truth is even though we are artists, we can’t make art without finance. For you to do art on a larger scale, the profits have to come and having a celebrity in the film is important for this. Sometimes aggregators who submit films to Netflix are more receptive to actors who have been in Netflix films prior.

However, I also think that a good filmmaker should be intentional about building stars. At the end of the day, you need stars to sell the films. It’s intertwined into the fabric of the industry.

When I get an executive producer, we have an understanding because sometimes you make the budget and you begin shooting five months after in Nollywood. Sometimes the prices of goods change. Other times you might just need more people for the project.

What is important is that each time the budget goes up, you can justify the value of that money.

Filmmaking textbooks will tell you not to use your money, get financing, pitch to people, etc. But Nollywood is different. Here, your best bet is the people around you. Instead of one person, try meeting two people, or else you want to make films for corporations. But in that case, you have very little control over how the film is produced. The studio can decide everything from how the film is cut to the actors selected.

Many times when you go online and read about filmmaking, they don’t show the budget for marketing. In Hollywood, marketing has a huge budget.

For my first film, we did around ₦500,000 in marketing. Marketing always affects the sales of the film so it is very important. People who have the budget spend as much as ₦50 million on marketing. Breath of Life was not in the cinemas so we don’t know how much it would have done, but the marketing for that film was insane.

When your film is out, you need to go to the cinemas and meet the audience. It’s also why you need to have some familiar names on the project because now we do meet and greet. That’s also marketing. You work with the distributor closely on this.

You should start having conversations with the distributor as soon as you’re sure you’ve gotten your executive producer. But I don’t allow that to deter me from my creativity.

The truth is a lot could be better in how films are being distributed in Nigeria. Sometimes you go to the cinemas and you’ve made an Igbo language film for instance and there are no subtitles, even though you made subtitles available. Sometimes the quality of the film in the cinemas is not great and we have next to nothing quality assurance checking this.

Sometimes you’ll get to the cinemas and the film will not be showing at the time slot it has been allotted. This can be a technical issue. It can also be political.

In more developed industries, distributors pay for the rights to the film for a certain amount of years. Here, you pay for cinema material as the producer. We still need time for distributors to have the infrastructure they need. The films are not making half of what they should because of this.

There is a standard in the industry on how we share profits. The distributor, exhibitor and producer have a stake. Every week, the stake of the percentage changes. There is also a 10% tax that the government takes which is too high.

For streaming, we pay a transfer levy when the streamers pay because they pay in dollars. The levy is not a lot of money.

It’s profitable but more money can be made. We’re very close to a Nollywood boom.