Gina Prince-Bythewood and John Boyega talk The Woman King, the responsibility of telling real history, and Oscar buzz

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"This is a film and a story that we haven't seen before," Gina Prince-Bythewood tells Total Film. "And it was a fight – a real fight – to tell this story." 

We’re talking The Woman King, The Old Guard director’s new movie about an all-female elite group of warriors, the Agojie, who protected the Kingdom of Dahomey at the height of the slave trade in the 1800s. It’s a fascinating story based on true events – and yet, Hollywood’s various studios were initially reluctant to make an epic cenering on a Black female cast. Prince-Bythewood, though, was ready to battle to make it happen, even if The Woman King took seven years to take from pitch to the screen.

"We put all this work into it because our names are on it, this is what we're leaving," she says over Zoom. "I believe, these actors believe, that what we do can have an impact and can absolutely change the world. When you have a platform as big as this, let's entertain, absolutely, but let's say something as well."

Telling a story based on historical events comes with a set of challenges, though. The Woman King will be many people’s first introduction to the Agojie – and that means there’s pressure to get it right while also delivering an entertaining and emotional movie. 

"I do the same thing when I’m watching a historical epic, I'm taking what I'm seeing up there as fact," Prince-Bythewood says. "I knew that we created fictitious characters, but we put them in an absolutely real world.” She points to the conflict the Dahomey has with the slave trade and that they were the “only kingdom in all of Africa that allowed women to have an equal voice in the government and the council" as being examples of very real aspects of the story.

For the filmmaker, this also meant doing