Why you must not compare Nollywood to Hollywood -Akin-Tijani Balogun

Akin-Tijani Balogun is one of Nollywood’s respected director-producers. He’s presently in the midst of a very ambitious project, and he told OSEYIZA OOGBODO BLOG about it. What’s the latest about you? I just produced a movie, Police Report, in conjunction with a friend, under a new concept we’re trying out now, which is to produce a movie every month. A movie a month? A full length movie or a short film? A full length feature movie. Producing a full length movie every month? Won’t such a movie be an hasty job? It’s not an hasty job. It depends on how you handle it. Sometimes, some movies are shot in five, six months, and some are shot in longer time than that or lesser time that that. It all depends on your planning. And being a veteran, we know the pros and cons, we know how to manage the schedule. What we’re going to do now, we’ve already planned ahead, so we’ve cut down a lot of loopholes that normally make jobs to drag. Like what we’re going to do this August has already been planned for. Likewise what we’ll shoot in September, it’s already being planned. And another concept we’re trying to work on is to showcase new faces that people have not seen. So when we did our audition, we selected people that are not prominent. How many years have you been in this industry? That’ll be about fifteen years now. I studied theatre arts at the University of Ibadan and majored in directing, so that’s how it all started. And I started getting involved professionally right on campus. I directed many productions professionally and for academic purposes. And after school, I actually diverted a little bit, you know the way it is in Nigeria, so I went into teaching and came back to the industry later. Do you appear in movies yourself? Like I said, I’m a director and producer, not an actor. I don’t want to act, although I’ve actually appeared in one or two of our jobs, just for fun. But professionally, I’m not an actor, so my face is not one that people can say they’ve really been seeing on the screen. Although one or two people still recognize me from the one or two small-small roles that I’ve taken on. What’s your biggest job so far, the one that has made the most impact? How do I even begin to answer that, because most of my jobs have made impact. People always say my jobs are different from the norm. I’ve written some scripts for some people, like a friend of mine, Bayo Alawiye, that he directed, Dark Side. It premiered at cinemas, and ran for several weeks. And most of the jobs that we do, some are not even in Nigeria, because most people are not aware that we’ve viable markets in the western world for our local movies, both English and Yoruba and some other languages. So many of my jobs have been seen outside while people in Nigeria have not even seen them. I remember a time when a friend of mine in the UK posted on my Facebook that she saw a movie of mine and she wanted to know why it wasn’t on Youtube. And I tried to explain to her that we’re trying to break barriers by bringing our movies out through new channels, especially to even avoid the scourge of piracy. So what’ve you achieved? What I’ve achieved? That’s a very big question. I view achievements in terms of human quality. Like I said before, I was once a teacher in a secondary school. So, presently now, what I’ll see as my achievement are my students. The people that have passed through me and today, they are people. Many of them are graduates, many of them even have more degrees than I have now, and we still communicate, and when we do, they always say, ‘Teacher, I’m proud that I passed through you, sir.’ That always gives me joy. So many of them are in the UK, America, Canada, doing further studies and all of that. And I see that as a great achievement for me. I know the angle you actually want me to go into is … Every angle. Every angle. I’m my own greatest critic. So it’s very difficult for me to say I’ve achieved. People look at me and say, ‘This guy is doing so well.’ They’ve seen one or two of my jobs and they like them so much. But for me, I’m still thinking of the bigger picture. I’m yet to be fulfilled. I still want to do much, much more. Talking about financially, people like you in America are billionaires. Guys like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and many others. So financially, tell us where you stand. If you look at the financial angle, that juxtaposition, that analogy you made, of comparing America to Nigeria is farfetched. The kind of marketing structure they have over there is much more different when you look at the structure of our own industry. Let me just say we are living the Nigerian way. What we are doing at least enables us to live and live well in Nigeria. Of course we know that if we do it outside, we’ll make much more. What’s your greatest plan for the industry? Oh! My own plan is to have a film village, a place that’s structured, designed to be a film village for complete productions, because movie is just one out of the several things we do. So I want to have a film village, a place where you can shoot a game show, a commercial, anything that goes on the screen.