“We scrapped our first short movie draft because it felt extremely off at the time.” —Moshood Fattah
It was during the pandemic when actors weren’t working. But Actors were auditioning and they were posting a lot of monologues online. I didn’t want to do that cause I just shouldn’t be doing monologues then.
Mike Afolayan reached out to me, but before then we met at Tera Culture. He introduced himself to me and told me that he was a fan of my work. We had mutual respect. So he reached out to me during the pandemic and told me about a short movie he wanted to shoot. He suggested that I shoot at my house while he shot his part at his house, then we’d edit together because nobody could move around because of the pandemic. I felt that it would make sense if we shot it together at the same location because I am particular about that mutual energy in the room while we record, but we however agreed on making shooting in two different locations work.
We shot it but the first script wasn’t what it eventually became. In retrospect, I am glad that we didn’t do it because the content of the short film was very racy. Then End SARS happened. There was a barrage of tweets and comments online about The End SARS protest. So Michael and I spoke; I was like “Michael, How far? The Youths are out there talking about stuff happening and we’re here making a movie about that’s totally unrelated”. So I suggested that we should be more topical and be relevant to what was happening at the moment. We couldn’t just have been in it for just entertainment
I remember that from that phone call, sitting down from my bed, I wrote the First Draft of “Aargh!” in just one sitting. I wrote it and ran it by a couple of friends then we shot that and at the time it wasn’t a hit. So that happened, then “Far From Home” happened. So people started digging through our archives and saw how Mike and I had been putting out content for a while. So, In retrospect, we were preparing for our Chemistry in “Far From Home” on “Aargh”. I sent my first audition for “Far From Home” The day before we shot the Short Film. Mike could send his audition at the time and I was mad at him. But we saw how God’s plans played out. So it’s just beautiful how we were investing in our friendship and see how it just bore fruit. You can’t make this up!
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