Amma Asante had her own real life romance to inspire her new film A United Kingom. Photo/Getty
Amma Asante had her own real life romance to inspire her new film A United Kingom. Photo/Getty
Amma Asante is not only a true romantic when it comes to her movie romances, Belle and A United Kingdom, but in her own life as well. Eleven years ago when Asante, a British-born film-maker of Ghanaian parents, went to interview Soren Pedersen, the spokesman for European police in The Hague, it was love at first sight.
"Soren literally walked across the canteen at Europol and I just knew I was going to marry to him," recalls Asante. "It was a very weird, scary feeling because I wasn't a kid. I was 36 years old and you don't do that kind of thing."
They went on one date, decided to move in and get married.
"I think Soren could have been black, white or Chinese," Asante notes. "He could have been a woman -- but to the best of my knowledge I'm not a lesbian. He could have been African and I would have been very happy to marry him. He came in the shape of a Dane and that's cool too."
That their marriage is mixed race is of little consequence today, she says, but back in the late 1940s when A United Kingdom is set, it was a very big deal. It was in fact a gargantuan deal when the man in the equation was an African prince Seretse Khama (Selma's David Oyelowo), the heir to the throne of the country now known as Botswana, and the woman Ruth Williams (Gone Girl's Rosamund Pike) was a lowly British clerk. They fought tooth and nail for their relationship, which endured right up until Khama's death in 1980 by which time he had become the country's first president. Their son Ian is Botswana's current president.
"Six years ago I read Susan Williams' book Colour Bar and discovered an African story of a leader I'd never heard about," Asante recalls. "It wasn't a story about child soldiers and it wasn't about dictatorships but about fighting for something a bit more positive, a universal story about love. So it was hugely appealing."
The project had been brought to her by Oyelowo, with whom she'd worked on the 1998 BBC series, Brothers and Sisters, and it hadn't been easy raising the finance. The success of 2013's Belle, the fictionalised story of Dido Elizabeth Belle, the child of a British admiral and an African slave, meant Asante's newfound directorial cloud enabled A United Kingdom to go ahead.
Rosamund Pike and David Oyelowo star in A United Kingdom. Photo/Supplied
Interestingly the story is just as personal for Oyelowo. The rising British star who delivered a forceful portrayal as Martin Luther King in Selma, has been married for 18 years to the former Jessica Watson, a white British actress and the mother of his four children. She plays Lady Lilly Canning in A United Kingdom.
"Jessica had to fight for the role to be perfectly honest with you," Asante assures me. "I live or die by how good the actors are in my movies so nobody's going to get a role because they're somebody's husband or wife. What's really funny is that Jessica's playing a racist, the antithesis of who she is in life and she got some of the nuances so well."
Asante was also attracted to the project because of her close relationship with the other significant man in her life, her father.
"My parents grew up as children of the colony and my father stood in Independence Square when the Gold Coast became Ghana. He waved the first flag of Ghana. I get goosebumps when I talk about him because he was a truly wonderful man and many of the sentiments I have when it comes to life come from him. He was a pan-African; he believed in a united states of Africa, at a time when there was a belief amongst some that the only way for African countries to gain independence was to move the oppressor out and that Africa should just be black.
"So understanding how Seretse was not only able to take his country through to independence but also to tolerance and an appreciation of difference, I didn't know that anyone before Nelson Mandela had done that. Of course Seretse also appears to have been hugely motivated by his love for Ruth."
While we don't see it in the film, Seretse's life was cut tragically short. He died at age 59 from pancreatic cancer while still serving as president and we see him constantly smoking.
"You have to be careful today when you show smoking in movies," Asante says. "Though it was very relevant here."
Indeed. Ruth stayed in her beloved Botswana until her death 22 years later and died from throat cancer, aged 78.
"When I went to Botswana I tried really hard to find out what was the original reaction to Ruth," Asante notes.
"It was so hard to get anybody to say anything other than, 'Ruth is a lovely woman', or 'our Lady Ruth'. They just adore her today. The fact that she went from being a rejected queen to a beloved First Lady is such a great story arc and it's not fake. For Ruth it was hugely important to be accepted by the people."
