David Oyelowo Talks Enduring the Pandemic, His Directorial Debut & More

David Oyelowo recently sat down with the folks of The Hollywood Reporter, where he talked, among other things, about how his family is handling the coronavirus pandemic and his directorial debut, The Water Man.

About how his family is coping, he said:

As a father of four, the kids somehow enforce a routine. They are all doing online schooling at the moment, but we’re very fortunate in that we actually homeschooled our kids for about five years when they were younger, so the transition hasn’t been as tough for us as it has been for others. I wake up every morning at around 6 o’clock. I’m in the gym, still doing my boxing training. Then the kids are up, and we get them breakfast. We’re very fortunate to have a separate building on our property that my wife and I run our production company out of and that has become ground zero for the kids’ school, too. So, we all leave the house and go to another building. The kids are in school from about 9 a.m. until 2 p.m. and my wife and I stay here until around 5 p.m. Then we all go back to the other house. It has given us a degree of structure, and it’s also been key to having some demarcation between our weekends and weekdays.

About his directorial debut, The Water Man, he said:

It’s been remarkable actually, you’d think things would have really slowed down. Our production company is called Yoruba Saxon and The Water Man, which is the film I directed, is one of our projects, but there are also so many others in TV and film, all of which we are closing deals on or in development on or have to keep on the boil while everything is shut down. Thankfully, we had finished shooting and most of the editing on The Water Man. I was doing a film in London, George Clooney’s new film, The Midnight Sky, so I was already editing remotely while shooting that. The things we had left to do were ADR, VFX and one of the trickiest things, the score. The reason I was a bit late on this call is that Rosario Dawson is at her home in L.A. and a sound recording kit was taken to her house. I was set up here in Tarzana and my sound crew, I think, was on the Sony lot. We all patched in and together we did the ADR. I’m not going to say it was easy, but it’s good to know it’s possible. Recording individual musicians one by one and then layering all those tracks onto each other in order for it to sound like an orchestra is a tricky thing. That’s something we are currently doing in Belgium.

About his biggest challenge:

Logistically, the score is the one we’ve had to really wrap our heads around because so many productions that are in a similar situation as us haven’t had time to figure it out. We tried an orchestra in Macedonia, one in Holland, and the goalpost is moving depending on what’s happening in those countries that week in terms of the virus. Some countries, the number [of deaths] are going up, other countries, the numbers are going down. So, maybe they’ll allow nine people in a room together to do the score. But then, unfortunately, the numbers go up and they shut things down. It’s a moving target. ADR you can do at home but having someone with a cello in one house, a violin in another, an oboe in another, that’s just not going to work. You need a common environment with all of the technology to capture the music properly in order to have a world-class quality. It’s been tricky.

And what’s the next step for The Water Man:

We are finishing up the VFX, which we’ve been doing remotely as well. Thank the Lord for FaceTime, Skype, BlueJeans and WebEx. I am a complete Luddite, but I’ve had to learn very, very quickly. We are on track to pretty much finish by the end of the month, so we find ourselves as one of those films that’s going to be completed during quarantine at a time when buyers are really ravenous for new content.

Asked how he plans to handle screenings, he said:

Normally as a filmmaker you really don’t want to be sending links to have your film viewed by an exec who’s probably distracted and, you know, sending emails whilst they’re watching on a phone or something heinous like that. But our business has had to fully adjust and accept that the world has now changed, probably irrevocably. We’re in a world now where big films are going straight to VOD and already audiences [are responding]. So, you just got to be happy for the fact that people want to watch your content, period. And, increasingly, I have become platform agnostic — you make the best content and hope it is so gripping that [people have to stop what they’re doing and watch it]. But the short answer is we’re going to be sending links to all these execs because we can’t expect them to go watch it in a communal setting. They will also be getting a very stern email from me, saying, “Please put the phone down.” That’s the best I can do.

You can read the rest of the interview here.