‘The Woman King’, with producer Cathy Schulman

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘The Woman King, with producer Cathy Schulman’

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Hi, listeners. This is Lilah. A quick announcement that next week we are going to start publishing on Fridays instead of Saturdays just to get you into the weekend spirit a little earlier. OK, that’s it! Enjoy the show.

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The producer Cathy Schulman has made a lot of movies. She was part of the team behind Paul Haggis’s film Crash from 2004, which won three Academy Awards. She was executive producer on Mike Mills’s Thumbsucker. She’s worked with Angela Bassett, Patricia Arquette, Jackie Chan, Charlize Theron, Ryan Reynolds . . . You get the idea. But when she was in her late 40s, Cathy decided to go back to school. She had done a lot of advocacy for women in film, and she wanted to find a way to talk about diversity in her industry as something that wasn’t just good politics, but also good business.

Cathy Schulman
So the very first thing as an academic I did was look for the original statistics that prove that we should be making movies for men and boys. And by the way, I was taught that as an emerging producer, as an emerging executive, it came out of my own mouth many of times. Let’s first figure out how the boys and the men or the boys or the men are gonna come, and then we’ll add additional demos.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Wow. Really? Sorry to be totally naive, but that’s how the film industry was making movies was how is this going to appeal to men and boys first? And then once that’s figured out . . .

Cathy Schulman
 . . . Then you add additional demos. Yeah . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
Wow.

Cathy Schulman
That’s because that was what the research said, supposedly. So the very first thing I did was go to read that research. Guess what? No research.

Lilah Raptopoulos
(Laughter) Really?

Cathy Schulman
It never existed. I ask all of your listeners on planet Earth to find (laughter) that piece of research, and it does not exist.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s Cathy talking to me on Zoom last week. She’s been promoting her recent film The Woman King, which is basically the opposite of a production meant to appeal to men and boys first, especially white men and boys first. The Woman King is a sprawling blockbuster, and it has tons of action. But the action scenes feature an all-woman army led by Academy Award winner Viola Davis, which means it’s led by a dark-skinned, black woman who’s middle aged. Not exactly Hollywood’s traditional hero.

Cathy Schulman
I mean, and it’s funny because, you know, Viola, who was 56 when we made this, as was I, and we’re old friends. We’ve been friends for almost 20 years. And (long pause) she said, “Am I crazy?” You know, like, I’m gonna try to do this at 56 years old. But we were like, I was like, “Well, we better do it fast (Lilah chuckles). Because we’re not doing it at 60”.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I wanted to talk to Cathy because The Woman King is exactly the kind of movie that we’re always told is nearly impossible to make. But she and her team made it happen, and it’s proved to be this massive success. It’s dominated the box office. It’s being floated as an Oscar contender. And I was curious: behind the scenes . . . what does that take?

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Then I speak to my colleague Emiko Terazono, who’s been covering the rise and fall of plant-based meat. A few years ago, the Impossible Burger was meant to be the future of sustainable food. Emiko tells us where we are now. This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

Before Cathy and I get into it, here is what you should know about The Woman King. It’s a stunning two-hour and 15-minute epic about the Dahomey kingdom, which is a real kingdom in west Africa that existed in what’s modern-day Benin. The movie is set in the 1820s, and the women warriors of the Dahomey kingdom, called the Agojie, are fighting their neighbours, the Oyo empire. But the Oyo are abducting and selling people into the transatlantic slave trade. So the story is also about resisting colonialism.

Movie clip
Welcome the strongest warriors in Africa.

Movie clip
The king does not allow us to look upon the Agojie.

Movie clip
They do not know an evil is coming.

Movie clip
They know you will protect them . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
The other thing you should know is that The Woman King took a lot longer to make than most action movies. Cathy started pitching it in 2016. Viola Davis came on board soon after as a producer and a star. And then it didn’t get funding from Sony Tristar until 2020. The film is directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, also a black woman. You might know her previous films like the classic Love & Basketball, Old Guard and The Secret Life of Bees. Cathy, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

Cathy Schulman
Thanks for having me.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So my big question for a movie like The Woman King, which is so groundbreaking, is sort of how do you get something like this made? But before we get to that, I’m wondering if you could kind of tell us about the role you had in the film as a producer. I think there’s a lot of confusion for people about what producers do, and there’s so many things producers do. Can you kind of walk me through it?

Cathy Schulman
Yeah, well, that’s a funny place to start because my own mother doesn’t know what producers do (Lilah laughs) I’ve been (inaudible) for 35 years. The way I like to talk about producing is you’re really responsible for everything from turning the lights on to turning them off. And in that period of time, which generally ranges from about four years to ten years, you pretty much vision keep the whole thing. And in the case of this particular project, The Woman King, a friend of mine, Maria Bello, went to Benin on a trip. And she was able to visit what was becoming the Agojie Museum in Dahomey, which is basically a tribute to the women warriors of this culture. And she came back, and she told me the story that there had been this army of women, who were not only an army of women but they were also victorious time and time again. And they were victorious against men and without guns.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Cathy Schulman
And I thought, there’s a movie in this. And it was like I had landed on a gold mine (laughter) you know? How is it possible that a story like this hadn’t been told? And that was in, let’s see, 2016. So . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK. That’s a long time ago.

Cathy Schulman
Yeah, 2016.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Here’s how Cathy pitched the movie to funders. She said it would be a totally new kind of film, like nothing they’d ever seen, and that it would intentionally appeal to women, all women but women of colour in particular.

Cathy Schulman
Because women do, in fact buy 70 per cent of all content — film, television and streaming. And diverse women overindex. It shouldn’t even surprise people that much because, frankly, women buy more of everything (Lilah laughs). Women also buy more cars and more electronics and (laughter). And in the case of content, in an extreme way. So also, what about a heroic action movie for women specifically targeting women who overindex, black women, diverse women . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Uhuhm.

Cathy Schulman
 . . . A movie about sisterhood, which everybody is craving, in combination with a relief from the comic book movies.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Cathy actually told funders that The Woman King would not use the kind of special effects you see in comic book movies. Instead, the Warriors would only do what was physically possible, only what they could train for, which is what eventually happened. Viola Davis and her co-stars trained intensely for months to become fighters. And the pitch worked! Well, sort of. It got interest.

Cathy Schulman
You know, the first time I tried pitching this movie, I was an executive. I was actually the president of production at STX. So I went to my colleagues, who are actually my bosses . . . Somehow you’re the president of production and there’s still white men above you (Lilah laughs). But anyway, I went to say, tell my colleagues that, you know, I had this idea for a movie, and I pitched my sort of heart and soul about what I thought it could be. And my colleagues said, yeah, that does sound interesting. Could you make it for $5mn? (Lilah laughs) OK. We couldn’t have made one battle scene for $5mn.

Lilah Raptopoulos
For context, the budget on big superhero movies is more like two or $300mn. At the mid-tier level for historical epics, a movie like this year’s The Norsemen cost about 70mn. In the meantime, something else happened that helped The Women King a lot. Black Panther was released in 2018, and it actually used the Agojie warriors as an inspiration for the all-women personal bodyguards of the king of Wakanda.

Black Panther clip
(Sound of women fighting in a battlefield)

Cathy Schulman
The Black Panther opened up a lot of doors for us, you know, and proved a certain audience. And I thought, well, if the Black Panther asked the audience to imagine an African nation with agency, how about actually telling the story of an African nation with agency that was true? You know, and that really was like a click, I think, you know, for, for buyers. But it’s hard. It takes a whole lifetime of, of work and, you know, credibility to convince anybody. And I’m still kind of amazed we did.

Lilah Raptopoulos
In the end, the budget for The Woman King came in at $50mn. Shooting was set for South Africa, where the money would stretch further. And the team included three female leads, a female cinematographer, Polly Morgan, as well as a female director.

Cathy, I’m curious about, you know, I know you’ve been very active in driving gender parity and diversity in Hollywood. You were the director of Women in Film. Your own production company is about that. If I were to ask you how hard it was to make this film compared to other movies you made, what would you say?

Cathy Schulman
Well, I mean, I actually think that this film is kind of the culmination of the other movies I’ve made. I don’t think it could have been made any time sooner. It was enormously difficult. But all my movies, for the most part, are about race and class and gender. So they’re always kind of an uphill climb. But I do think that because the movies I’ve made about race, class, gender and the various stages in women’s lives, including motherhood, otherhood, grandmotherhood, all the different things that I’ve worked on — bad moms, good moms, all the different things — I think that, you know, it’s potential grew out of the years of making content by and for women combined with activism and education of the marketplace. But that said, it was still enormously difficult because it was physically difficult. So besides getting it made, you know, we had a big giant crew of women for the most part, you know, up in the jungles of, you know, KwaZulu-Natal, which is in sort of the eastern cape of South Africa. And it was pretty intense. I mean, we didn’t have working phones. We didn’t have working Internet. We didn’t have roads. It rained a lot. There were bugs. There was a hippo attack. There was like all sorts of things. I’m not even exaggerating, like all the way through — spiders, stomach viruses, you know. So when I think back on it now, I’m kind of amazed that like, we did it!

The Women King clip
Our ancestors weep for the pain (sound of drums). We are (unintelligible) in the dark hulls of ships bound for distant shores (sound of chanting, drums). When the wind blows, our ancestors push us to march into battle against . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Cathy, you know, one of the most extraordinary parts of watching that film to me are just watching women be warriors. And like, they were just strong, and they walked strong and there was a lot of unity between them, even in the battle scenes. And it was one of those things where you watch them, and you don’t know why it’s like (laughter) powerful to you until you kind of realise like, “Oh, I’m usually bored by fight scenes, but there’s something about these fight scenes, these action scenes, that are different and that make me want to watch it”. And I guess my question is, like, how did you do it? What were the conversations behind it?

Cathy Schulman
There were two major components. One is strategy. So women were gonna have to depend on intellectual strategy to outsmart their foes for two reasons: one, they were male, but secondly, they were, it was a much larger army, the Oyo battle, which is the big battle in the centre of the movie. It’s a David and Goliath battle. You know, they’re much, much smaller, smaller troops. And I think, you know, there’s a line in the movie that very much describes our strategy, which is, you know, be careful for the mouse that takes down the elephant. And the concept being the mouse can scurry around and do all sorts of mysterious things while the elephant can’t see what’s happening. But more importantly, I think the reason why you felt emotionally connected to the battle scenes is because we were very specific that no character in the movie does anything in the action sequence unless it pushes their character’s arcs further. For example, you’ve learned that Nawi doesn’t think a rope is a weapon so she’s going to kill her aggressor with a rope. So each and every time that you’re watching something happen, you’re supposed to be, and we hope you are, motivated not only in the kill but much more so in the arc of the character.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Cathy, the other thing I wanted to ask you about is just how you make choices around stories that are based on histories that like are real and complicated. I know there’s been some criticism of the movie in how it portrays the Dahomey’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. And how do you weigh that stuff ahead of time?

Cathy Schulman
Yeah. You know, historical fiction is a choice. And the reason why I like it versus documentary is that it allows you to create, you know, propulsive narratives. And I actually think that propulsive narratives engage audiences of all types, whereas documentary tends to be more of an intellectual pursuit. I wish it weren’t, but I think documentary, you know, filmmaking, you know, doesn’t engage as wide a, as many demos, you know, as narrative film does. So I really like it. And I, I also think that, you know, there’s a reason that we choose to paint a painting versus take a photograph, which is that it allows some into interpretation, you know, the eye. But once we decided, you know, to work, you know, within, you know, historical fiction, you know, you have to start with resource material and research. You know, everything you possibly can. But once we had done that, the crucial thing was to find scholars, you know, who were specialising now, today in this history. The criticism that happened afterwards is kind of you know, the first thing I always say is, why don’t you watch the movie before you criticise it? Because we do talk about it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm hmm.

Cathy Schulman
And then the Agojie, who represent the faction of people who were, in fact, you know, against the continuation of the sort of cycle of enslavement, and that was a very real thing at the time. And King Ghezo was very much engaged in that debate. So our heroes represent the movement away from enslavement. And others in the story represent the opposite. And you see them both. And so the way we use the fictional aspect to deal with the real importance of the issue was to come up with sort of the good guys and the bad guys, essentially, you know, to illustrate the issues around it. So, you know, we knew that it was going to be an issue, and by the way, it should be an issue.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Cathy, my last question, I have to ask, why do you think it’s still so hard to make a movie like this in 2022?

Cathy Schulman
There’s some kind of a rooted bias in Hollywood that diverse people don’t come to the movies, and secondarily, that non-diverse people don’t want to see diverse people on screen.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Cathy Schulman
And the combination has been sort of lethal.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Cathy Schulman
. . . to making movies that deal with diverse people in front of the camera. And frankly, we’ve had a real problem with storytellers behind the camera, writers and directors. We’re making some progress, and that’s what all the activism is about. But that rooted bias made a movie like this such an outlier that there were many, many noes before there was a yes. The part that makes me happy is that there was a yes.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Cathy Schulman
We have made progress if a major motion picture studio did this, and furthermore, the executive who drove the train internally as a black woman, Nicole Brown. So it also proves that when you include diverse women, diverse people around a decision making table, the trickle down effect is enormous.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Cathy, this was such a pleasure. So thought provoking. Thank you for being on the show.

Cathy Schulman
It’s been such a pleasure. What an interesting conversation. Thanks for having me.

(Sound of flame grilling)

Lilah Raptopoulos
A few years ago, a new phenomenon hit the food market.

Burger King advertisement
Introducing the Impossible Whopper with a patty made from plants. No beef. No beef. I’ve never had a plant tastes like beef before. It tastes like a Whopper. It tastes like a Whopper. It tastes like a beef burger . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
I’m talking about plant-based meat. You just heard a 2018 Burger King ad for the Impossible Whopper. Do you remember when the Impossible Burger first showed up? It was everywhere. People were excited for a vegetarian option to meat, a claim to taste like meat. It felt like finally there was a solution. My colleague Emiko Terazono, our commodities correspondent, has been covering plant-based meat for a long time.

Emiko Terazono
Increased meat eating has been one of the big issues surrounding food and climate change. Livestock belching out methane, the use of soyabeans and industrialised crops used to feed these animals, it’s been something, you know, if you’re a meat eater, something that does weigh on you.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Emiko Terazono
And all of a sudden, these guys seemingly had an answer.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I asked Emiko on to the show because I had this question, what happened to that answer? Plant-based meat has disappeared from ads. It’s rarely in the news. Was it successfully absorbed into our daily lives or was it just a fad? Emiko, thank you for joining me. Welcome to the show.

Emiko Terazono
Hi, Lilah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So a few years ago, I feel like talk of plant-based meat was like everywhere. Like nice restaurants were putting it on their menus, and Burger King came out with an Impossible Burger, and it was supposed to be the future. But it feels a little to me like the hype is over. Maybe it’s gotten as big as it’s going to get and was just a blip. I guess my first question is, you know, you’ve been reporting on this all the way through. Do you think that’s true?

Emiko Terazono
I think the excitement around it is over. The novelty factor is definitely worn off.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Emiko Terazono
Our coverage around plant-based meat is essentially been about growth. And so I think initially when this whole plant-based meat trend blew up, a lot of the companies and start-ups behind it had seen, you know, consumers sort of rushing to it and annual growth of 20, 30, 40 per cent. And they were hoping that would continue. But that’s definitely worn off.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So what is plant-based meat? You’ve maybe heard of vegetarian pulled pork or plant burgers, but what’s in it?

Emiko Terazono
It’s made from powdered protein, from so-called “plants”, ie, things like yellow peas and soyabeans. Sometimes it’s got rice. Impossible Foods for instance has a special ingredient called heme, which it claims that it’s the backbone of the meaty flavour.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And what is that made of?

Emiko Terazono
It’s plant-based haemoglobin so it’s that kind of irony taste, you know, that you have with meat. It uses its own technique to create that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah

Emiko Terazono
Some plant-based burgers, “bleed” . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right

Emiko Terazono
Beyond I think uses beetroot juice.

Lilah Raptopoulos
To solve the mystery of why plant-based meat lost its popularity, we need to go back to when it first hit the market. And the goal was for it to be something, not just for vegetarians, right? Like it would be so good that meat eaters would also crave it.

Emiko Terazono
That’s right. Yeah. So the term flexitarian has been around, you know, it predates plant-based meat, but it really came under the spotlight because the aim of these companies was to get the flexitarians start eating plant-based meat instead of real meat and get the meat eaters on side. And so the boom really started in about 2018, 19, and then the pandemic hit.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Emiko Terazono
And during the pandemic, people were looking for things that they could store in the freezers or in the cupboards. Had this huge sales surge and people had stocked up, you know, they had stocked up so much that they didn’t really need to go out and buy more. The other big issue was because of the pandemic, you couldn’t go out and trial things. One of the things with new foods is that you need to give people samples and, you know, you have you have stores set up in supermarkets and getting people to try it, and you didn’t have that opportunity. So that really hampered sales as well.

Lilah Raptopoulos
The other problem is that consumer sentiment changed. Deloitte did a survey recently and found that there has been a decline in people’s belief that plant-based meat is actually healthier. Because the things that make it seem like me also make it considered ultra processed like hot dogs and chicken nuggets.

Emiko Terazono
It is quite processed, isn’t it? I mean . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Emiko Terazono
 . . . from my point of view. Whether it’s actively harmful or not, I don’t, I think that’s a bit controversial.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And then there’s the most important part, the matter of taste. Emiko remembers going to her first plant-based meat expo. She tried a bunch of stuff.

Emiko Terazono
There was a huge range of things like salamis, and burgers, and chicken, and mushroom-based beef bourguignon. I really wanted to like them, and I took some home, and you try it later and you have to ask yourself, do I see myself going to the shop buying this? And the answer, sadly, was no. Ultimately, what’s hurting plant-based meat is that it just doesn’t taste like meat. Well, it does taste like meat, but it doesn’t taste like a juicy burger (Lilah laughs). You know, it’s, it’s a derivative product, isn’t it? If you are going to eat a burger, if you’re a meat eater and you’re going to eat a burger once a month, say, would you eat a real burger or would you eat a plant-based burger?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. It’s not really something you crave.

Emiko Terazono
Right. And the other issue is that it’s really expensive. So in America, a pound of plant-based veal meat product costs $8.35 compared to real ground beef, which is at half the price at around $4.90.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. So it’s a big difference.

Emiko Terazono
Big difference.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Especially with inflation.

Emiko Terazono
Yeah. Now with, you know, people’s wallets being affected, cost of living, and also on the plant-based meat side, you have huge ingredient costs increases as well so that’s only going to get worse.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Here’s the bottom line, plant-based meat can’t succeed unless it wins over meat eaters, even if vegetarians take to it. The rest of us still eat too much meat for that to make a substantial dent. That said, these companies still seem to have pushed our conversation about meat and sustainability forward culturally, and they’re now pouring millions of dollars into research and development to make it better. It feels to me like the plant-based meat conversation and fad and whatever a few years ago, and even Burger King, and I remember when Burger King adopted like Impossible Whopper thinking, I never thought that Burger King would provide a plant-based option, and now it’s just normal. So there’s a part of me that wonders whether, like, it’s shifted the way we think about eating meat long term or that and the environmental crisis have shifted that for us. And so, I don’t know, this can’t be the end of the road for it, right?

Emiko Terazono
No, no, I think you’re absolutely right. And it’s definitely sort of changed the way people view meat and food. It’s introduced so a whole concept of sustainability around meat and so even people who weren’t aware of it, I think, has sort of become, you know, have become aware of it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Emiko, I’m curious, like, what other developments are on the horizon? You wrote in one of your pieces, and we’ll put them both in the show notes, but you wrote about the commercial launch of meats made from cow and pig and chicken cells that are grown in vats. And that that’s coming.

Emiko Terazono
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Can you tell me about that and whether you think people will be comfortable with that?

Emiko Terazono
Yeah, I think the so-called lab, “lab-grown meat”, and actually not grown in labs, as you say they’re grown in vats.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm hmm.

Emiko Terazono
I think people are curious to try, like how they were towards plant-based meats. But the problem is it’s just not hitting markets. It’s very difficult to scale.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Emiko, this is so interesting. Can I ask now, my last question is really what do you think is the most interesting question around this as you’re reporting on it? Like, are there things that you’re looking out for?

Emiko Terazono
I think I really want it to work.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm hmm.

Emiko Terazono
And I just am looking out for the new innovation.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm hmm.

Emiko Terazono
I think taste for me is really important so if there’s something so delicious that I can’t, I can’t resist, then I’d be delighted to eat it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Emiko Terazono
And if that is affordable, then even better.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Emiko, this is so fascinating. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Emiko Terazono
Lilah, it was a pleasure.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend, the podcast from the Financial Times. Next weekend we have another great film guest, Ruben Östlund. He is the director of Triangle of Sadness, which is the winner of this year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes. We also talk about how airlines are competing to provide their first class customers with the fanciest foods they possibly can to keep them buying flights. It’s a good episode. A reminder that next weekend we will be publishing on Fridays. I hope you enjoy the extra day and that we are doing a bonus four-part series starting this Wednesday all about travel. If you want to say hi. We love hearing from you. You can email us at FT Weekend podcast at FT.com. The show is on Twitter @FTWeekendpod, and I am on Instagram and Twitter @lilahrap. You can keep up with behind the scenes content about the show on my Instagram. Links to everything mentioned today are in the show notes alongside a link to the best offers available on a subscription to the FT. I get FT Weekend every Saturday in print, and I read it at my coffee shop. That could also be you, and not for that much. The offers are at FT.com/weekendpodcast. Make sure to use that link. Last thing, the FT has a new app called FT Edit. It features eight pieces of in-depth journalism a day, handpicked by senior editors and is actually a really good deal and a manageable amount of content. If you want to just get a sense of what the FT is like. It is free for a month and then $0.99 for six months after that. It’s available now for iPhone users. Just search FT Edit in the App Store.

I am Lilah Raptopoulos, and here’s my exceptional team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smith is our producer. Molly Nugent is our contributing producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer. And special thanks, as always, goes to Cheryl Brumley. Have a lovely weekend, and we’ll find each other again next week.