The Kitchen's Kibwe Tavares on co-directing With Daniel Kaluuya, Dystopian Theme and Rise Of AI.

Kibwe Tavares - an accomplished Director, Architect and Filmmaker sits with BLK Brit to discuss the newly released project The Kitchen, the already number one movie on Netflix. He gives insightful accounts from the ups and downs of the creative process, experiences working on the film, collaborating, timing, self-belief to how working with technology can support productions.

Kibwe Tavares, Co-Director of The Kitchen.

So we’ll get into it, your latest project The Kitchen. How was it directing your first feature? I know you’ve done shorter forms, but in terms of a feature, what’s the similarities and differences?

“Well, I guess the main differences are really, obviously just the volume, one. But I think it's just like trying to command a full narrative really, because shorts, it’s always like you can kind of get away with sometimes an idea, but when you're doing a feature, it's really working out the full arcs and really working with the actors and the cast, the crew, and bringing all of it together, and it's just epic. We had lots of moving parts in The Kitchen, and so it was quite challenging just sort of like making it all sync together and finding it in the edit, those sorts of things.”

You co-directed with Daniel Kaluuya, so it was his first directorial debut as well - how was it? Because I know that he also co-wrote and co-produced it. How was it directing alongside somebody who is also producing and writing it as well?

“Yeah good, so me and Daniel worked on it [for] a long time together and were really just sort of like learning each other’s strengths. We started working on this almost a decade ago now, and so organically we started to lean into the each others strengths at different points when it was needed. Daniel's made lots of films, not directing lots of films, but he's been a leader and actor in all these different [projects], whether it's from Skins all the way to Judas and the Black Messiah. So he's worked with lots of amazing directors, and he helped bring that experience on other sets to our set, and then to the edit, and then to finishing the film.”

With the cast, you're directing actors that have been doing it for a long time, like Kane Robinson and then newcomers like Jedaiah Bannerman, he stars in the film alongside Kano. How do you balance directing someone who has been in the industry a long time versus someone who’s a newcomer?

“We sort of like planned for that, because we always knew it was going to be someone that was coming in new, so I spent a lot of time getting to know Jedaiah. I remember we went bowling with him and his auntie just to kind of start to get to know each other. We started to learn how we're going to communicate and started preparing. Once we had casted it, we started to prepare him for the shoot. But he was a natural tweak, sort of like a duck to water, that expression (laughs). He just came to it with all the energy and was so open, I learnt a lot from working with him, and like him and Kano also learnt from each other… We tried to structure it so that it allowed him to face the challenges from not acting at all, to suddenly there’s a hundred people on set. The camera’s right there in your face, but he fell into it quite naturally.”

With the themes that’s in the film, it’s quite dystopian and there’s a lot of good narratives going alongside each other in the film. Some of your previous projects as well, Robots of Brixton, that was your debut into making film and it did really well in terms of awards. So, with some of the projects you’ve done, it kind of links in terms of that dystopian type feel - what is it that attracts you to that theme? 

“So for me, we wanted to look into sort of like a near future London and try to really use the social-political landscape to define and pull that to extremes and define what we want to say about London. So I think it’s probably my background in architecture that you’re always designing something new or something in the future - it doesn’t exist yet. I lent into that because it’s my way to sort of articulate the way I was feeling about the world a bit. And also to plant and build on some ideas and find a way to visualise them using techniques that I had built on in the shorts and bringing that forward into the future.

Relating to your architectural background you established a company Factory Fifteen and that produces a range of material, you’re co-founder. Explain your process in terms of founding that business. 

“We started that straight out of architectural school. It was me, Paul Nicholls and a good friend of mine Jonathan Gales who passed last year. And we really just had finished architectural school and wanted to find a way to keep making our own work. Because we were making architectural films at school - and a way to do that was to balance our commercial work, doing architectural visuals and architectural films, then sort of pouring the profits into our creative work. So the short film Jonah that we made, the one where I met Daniel (Kaluuya) on was part of that. How do we sort of find our own voice as a company, and it was really a way to generate and keep making our own work, and then expand our own work into commercial spaces and corporate architecture films that we make… Because one of the things that's so hard to do when you start out is if you say you want to direct a feature film right, you don't know how long it's going to take you for you to get there. So how do you sort of sustain yourself? How do you build an infrastructure that allows you to kind of keep working and keep moving? The company allowed us to do that. But we were broke straight after finishing school so we didn't have much to resource that, but said let's just try and see where it goes. And now we're about 10 to 15 employees. We were going from pretty much when we started The Kitchen, we also started the company, so those things have aligned.”

Kane Robinson [left], with Jedaiah Bannerman [right] in “The Kitchen.”

That's brilliant. Watching the film, there was brilliant chemistry between the two lead actors - I love the non -verbal powerful scenes. I'm not gonna give too much away because we don't do spoilers. But there's some really powerful scenes for the non -verbal. How did you direct those ones where there’s not any dialogue? 

“I think that was really the strength of the two leads that we had, and really talking about and spending time with them. But they just brought that in a sense and if they felt like they could do something without dialogue, they done it. And we cast them really because I think inherently they had the qualities of the character, like Izzy for Kane had the quality of someone that we needed, so it really was about giving them the space to spend a lot of time talking to them about who they are, who the characters are and what they're feeling at the time and what the intentions are going into the scene, then also just giving them space and crafting and shaping them to play it. But then in the edit you know often you find you've got too much, or you can tell as much with a look rather than having the line there, so you might say, ‘Okay, cool, let's find a way to lose that line,’ and just show that moment between how Kane is looking at Jedaiah. So there's a combination between feeding them with the tools for the attention for the scenes, the right casting, and then finding the edit, which we found that it’s often pulling stuff out which gave us more power than having to articulate vocally.”

What were some of your favourite moments from being on set? Because I know that sometimes it can be long shooting days, it can be quite challenging. Can you think of anything fun that happened on set? 

“Quite a lot of special moments. I remember for me when we created the funeral scene, it just felt really powerful because we had a choir. We had a whole bunch of extras and everyone was singing this song and I remember watching the monitor and seeing our story editors are like weeping at this sort of funeral that we had created. The roller disco was amazing because again, we saw at points we just created real life. There's a point when at the end of the roller disco it just turned into a real rave right - we had the DJ there and then Daniel got on the mic and then he just started hyping everyone up. And then it just turned into like a rave - it's just actually one of the best days… But there were just lots of like quite special moments. We had a couple of days that we shot in Paris as well that were quite special being there and working with a French crew. And all of the crew coming and getting on the train and meeting us all there in Paris seeing everyone again… But there were quite a lot of special moments, and I've shot like lots of stuff on my phone, and so sometimes I sort of reminisce a bit about it, but it was intense as well, (laughs) so it's like that. It's a weird thing - when you're in it, it's like a lot, then you start to especially towards the end of the shoot feel a bit nostalgic, and you're starting to wrap up.”

Yeah, like ah, it’s ending already?! (both laugh). So what can we look forward to in terms of future projects? So I know you’ve only just wrapped on this one, but is there anything that you are interested in exploring in the future? 

“I’ve got a whole bunch of projects - some in development. I'm actively in the middle of a project now, just ramping up on it. It's an animated film. I can't talk too much about it because of the release and stuff like that, but I can tell you who my producer is - I'm working on an animated film for Netflix Animation out in the States and I'm producing it with a woman called Darla Anderson. She produced Toy Story 3, Coco, a lot of big animations and so we're working on that together. It's got a couple more years to go but. Long process, but yeah animation’s slow, but that’s gonna be the next thing.”

Because we are on the BLK Brit platform, how do you identify yourself in terms of Black British? And does your heritage feed into that? Just because it’s great seeing projects and collaborations with a lot of people from Black Britain, so how do you identify yourself? 

“Well, I definitely identify myself as Black British. My mum's from Grenada, my dad's from Jamaica, so I've got Caribbean roots but with an African name, right? You see, I always think that's interesting because it's like, I always think a lot of [how] Black Brits will probably say the city they're from first. You say where you're from, like the first thing you’d say is London. Then I would probably talk about my parents' heritage and growing up in and around South London. And so all of that, and we were gonna bring that identity out into the film - we wanted to talk about our culture growing up and bring those characters with the world that we’re building to celebrate that, and so The Kitchen is fundamentally about that - a mix of communities, but that’s a significant part of it with the leads in the film.”

Yeah - you really get a sense of that coming through in the film. Is that part of The Kitchener reference with the DJ? 

“Yeah, he came in quite late as a character. He came in just before the shoot, like maybe about six weeks or something like that before we started shooting. We had a quite big rewrite, but we definitely wanted to speak to the heritage of where the character came from, a reference to the original Lord Kitchener the calypso singer that came in on The Windrush.”

Kane Robinson [right], with Jedaiah Bannerman [left] in “The Kitchen.”

So what would you say were some of the more difficult moments in terms of directing?

“Difficult moments. There's many. I think sometimes it's a mix between sometimes you're confident and you know when you might have a challenging scene or… I was going through a bit of a process of re-finding. I've shot quite a few things before, but then shooting this was my first big shoot back after a little bit away and so I sort of like had to find that belief in myself, you can do it because sometimes you start to feel a bit intimidated by it all… you know, like I think people commonly talk about imposter syndrome and stuff like that and so I had to find a new way to direct this for a bunch of different reasons, I won’t go into it all now. So there was a bit of confidence going back and trusting my instincts of the fundamentals coming down to it. Because it wasn't a challenge I had during the shorts, but I think sometimes the scale of it and all of those things can become a bit challenging.”

But I mean you are very accomplished in terms of the projects that you've done, so for you to say imposter syndrome it just goes to show that it can happen to pretty much anyone. So how do you combat that? And what advice would you give to up-and-coming creatives who probably haven't got the body of work that you have so might be a little bit intimidated coming into the field, what advice would you give them?

“For me it's like leaning into the fundamentals - you've got to like make stuff and try things and produce stuff. Like this all started really from me, Daniel Kaluuya and Dan Emerson coming together and saying look we want to make something together, let's put a little bit of money in and we've done a workshop in the barbershop and just filmed it, and then that became sort of like the start of the process. Then it moved into more formal development, but it was like look, we're going to do it, we're going to just make something together. From that, we built the project and then it grew and developed over the years. Our careers developed over the years and then this was the time that it was ready to go, we were ready and all in the right place to do it. But it did start from that seed of us just saying look let's just film something. We had like I think it was Canon 5Ds at the time, so we hired a barbershop and started to make stuff. So whether it's using what you've got around - Daniel had a lot of active friends, I had a technical background and it was just combining the different skills to say let's just make something together, go on a journey and see where it goes. So I think for me, it's like if you write, write, if you animate, animate,  if you draw, draw. Just go for it and find out what your strengths are. But it is important to produce something, whether it's something written down or something that you film and cut together. 'Cause I think that the access to technology, equipment and self-taught stuff is so much more accessible now. Finding my way in was doing my short Robots of Brixton then putting it on the internet, then that got some traction and then after that I got commissioned to do something else… You’ll find your voice through making your own things.” 

One thing that does stand out from your architectural background, your business and your films amalgamating them all together, you’re very much an advocate for the advancement of technology and it going with the creative field. Because I know that there’s been a lot of talk of AI (artificial intelligence) and a lot of disruption in terms of the creative field, but you seem to make it work well together. What do you feel like the future of filmmaking is going to look like in terms of that with technology? 

“Well, that's a big question - but for me, it's like technology's tools, right? So the advance in technology probably allowed my career to start. Because when I started, I was really efficient in using 3D software and animating, but back in the day, the computers used to have to be massive or you needed to have really high-end machines or really expensive equipment to do that. But then slowly it became a bit more accessible and it allowed me to make Robots of Brixton on my computer by myself in my bedroom, which then led to certain other things. AI is definitely going to disrupt things and change things. But again, at the moment, there's elements that if you can creatively use that tool to help you make what you want to make, it's just another tool- there's going to be lots of different tools. I'm working on animation now; everyone has a big worry about the idea that you're going to write in and it's just going to make it for you. And that might be what happens in the future. But at the moment, it's potentially a tool for artists to use and help them, you know, as a resource. Like for example, I used to make a lot of collages in my work and back in the day you'd have to go and find prints or whatnot, and then I started to use Google Images to start embedding- before you wouldn't necessarily be able to do that. But I can't predict what's going to happen. Obviously it starts to get very murky when it's like using an actor's likeness or using someone's likeness and not paying them for it. But that's a different thing to what I'm talking about. I'm talking about how do you as a creative use the technology available to help with your storytelling, to define helping your creative process, which I think a lot of people are starting to do.”

Yeah, no I get it because technology can help and hinder sometimes, but it's about knowing how to work with it instead of against it. 

“But it's coming, that's the thing. For example, like phones and old-school telephones with a dial-up and eventually it changed, so it's like how do you embrace it and use it as a tool and part of your creativity rather than something that you have to fight against. Because we try and fight against it too much, this feels like an inevitable thing that's gonna be part of the development as films move forward and the art form moves forward.” 

Yeah! So last question - The Kitchen is a beautifully powerful film with a lot of interesting themes. What are you hoping that the audience takes away from the film when they watch? 

“That's always a really hard question. For me, it's like we wanted to create a film that you could reflect onto. We wanted to talk about community, we wanted to talk about this idea of like individual versus community and the sort of journey that you see; trying to not to spoil it at the same time. But we wanted to create a film that allows people to reflect and allows people to find themselves. They don't actually need to be with the main characters of it but, something to kind of hold on to. So we did want people to think about their community and their networks, and what their cities mean to them.”