#* 1k

Collider: When it came to watching this, the second, you know, you see Nicky and Joe, I’m like, “Oh, that’s it, it’s that love story again, that’s the thing in her filmmaking that gets me so much” and it’s beautiful and bold and everything that audiences have been asking to see instead of these disposable husbands that are in one scene and can be cut out for China, things like that, you know. It’s a very beautiful, bold statement that as a queer person I felt very empowered and touched by. So I’m curious about your approach to lacing that rich of emotionality, romance and queerness into a space that does not usually make room for those things. Gina Prince-Bythewood: Yeah, it was one of those things that surprised me when I read the script. I loved Nicky and Joe. And I felt like, “God, we haven’t seen this” and in the same way that Kiki and I talked about the importance of seeing ourselves as heroes, it was the same thing with Nicky and Joe, the opportunity to do that. But it started with these two people, just their characters. If you just think about it, these two men who, you know, fell in love during the Crusades and you know, back then—there was a time in our history where homosexuality wasn’t a thing, it was just out there, it was just love is love, truly love is love and then through the centuries, through the years, religion and governments have so corrupted people’s thinking, used and weaponized it and now suddenly, finally, hopefully, step-by-step, coming back to love is love. It was just so much that both Luca and Marwan, the two actors that we talked about—about just the depth of what their relationship was, the depth of their love, what they’ve been through. But Marwan—he was so excited about that speech and I think anybody would love their significant other to say that and it was certainly in the graphic novel and it was very important for Greg when he sold it to Skydance to make them promise that it would stay in it. When I came aboard I was like, “This is why I’m here. You don’t have to worry at all.” To see the way the audience, the test audiences, embraced the relationship—there was literal applause in the middle of the theater, in the middle of the screening, when the kiss happened. That says a lot to me that it’s being embraced and I think because it would just—you know, in the same way I wanted to normalize Andy and Nile as these female warriors, I wanted to normalize Nicky and Joe. I didn’t need to make a big production out of it, it was just, as you said, and I’ll steal that, it was just woven into the narrative. It was just part of it. It was part of the grounded, real thing, and, you know, I love that scene, I love those two characters, and I love what the actors brought to it.