Few new directors have to leave their local area because of their burgeoning success. Nor do they have to juggle the advances of rival moguls before making their first film – or do so with an audience of 7.2 million people waiting for the results. Given all this, Rapman – the alias of the British rapper and film-maker Andrew Onwubolu – is surprisingly relaxed, a bright-eyed barrage of words in sweatshirt and black jeans on a cold afternoon in London.
The 7.2 million in question are the viewers to date of Shiro’s Story, the three-part drama he authored, whose phenomenal numbers on YouTube have led to a movie, Blue Story. The film is set in Lewisham, south London, where its writer-director grew up, but which he has since had to leave. “Don’t get it twisted,” he says. “The majority of people are happy for me. But you also get: ‘What have you put in my individual pocket?’ Until you can answer that, you can’t live where you’re from and feel safe.”
Onwubolu is a fluent talker, as anyone who has seen Shiro’s Story knows, where his raps narrate a crime drama of family secrets and oh-no-they-didn’t betrayal. This device is used again – more sparingly – in Blue Story. Still in place, too, are the seismic twists of fate that dogged Shiro, now driving a powerful tale of childhood friendship destroyed by a postcode war. Yet the director is aware of the gulf between YouTube clicks and ticket sales. “Are people going to leave that comfy chair at home and the Netflix subscription? I don’t know, man. I’m nervous.”
For now, that cliffhanger is left to dangle. If Onwubolu has a brilliance for moreish storytelling, the past year of his life has shared the sense of whatever next? When the final instalment of Shiro’s Story was released on a Sunday last September, he was dropping his oldest son off with his ex-partner. The first two episodes had drawn a significant audience under the radar of the mainstream. By the end of the half-hour journey, the views had reached 150,000. That evening, they hit a million. He woke to find the UK media anointing him an overnight sensation.
On Good Morning Britain, Susanna Reid told him: “You’re making waves among a, you know, great audience.” But palpable in the film and TV industry was a terror that their endless trawl for next big thing had somehow missed a writer-director able to build a vast fanbase – much of it young and of colour – entirely outside the system. Onwubolu took the chance to ask awkward questions. “I said: ‘Why aren’t our stories on bigger platforms? Why are they not at the cinema? Why do we have to rush to our phones?’”
His own phone erupted to the sound of panicked executives. There were back-to-back meetings with British production companies. Their plan was always the same – to remake Shiro’s Story with their logo on the credits. Amid the promises in members’ clubs, he met the producer Damian Jones, whose CV includes Noel Clarke’s Kidulthood trilogy as well as the film work of Alan Bennett. “He was literally the only person who asked: ‘What do you want to do next?’”
The answer was direct Blue Story, a script he had written which was inspired by his childhood. Jones was keen, Onwubolu pragmatic. “Where I’m from, people talk a lot. So I’m like: ‘Cool. Let me know when there’s a contract.’”
The producer turned out to be briskly effective. Conversations took place with heavyweight potential backers, including international studios. One wheeled out an assembly of staff to say how much they loved his script. They seemed less sure about why. At another, a senior figure talked eagerly about Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s biographical drama Farming. In the end, Onwubolu accepted an offer from the UK arm of the Hollywood studio Paramount. “They actually spoke about my writing in depth. They proper got it.”
Then, before the contract was finalised, came Jeffrey Katzenberg. The onetime chair of Disney and co-founder, with Steven Spielberg, of the studio DreamWorks, Katzenberg was busy with Quibi, the bleeding-edge platform for “snackable” content made to be watched on phones. He had already signed up film-makers including Spielberg, Jennifer Lopez and Guillermo del Toro before a 2020 launch. Katzenberg flew Onwubolu to LA, where his team read the script for Blue Story. They were polite, but insistent. “They said: ‘We feel you should leave this and come to work with us here on short-form ideas. Straight away.’ And then they offered me a lot of money.”
For the first time, he started to doubt his own judgment. “My agent is saying: ‘Who’s going to pay more?’ He’s just loving life. I’ve got Damian back in London saying: ‘Where’s your signature?’” Onwubolu wondered aloud to Katzenberg about the speed of events. It had been mere weeks since Shiro’s Story Part 3. “I said: ‘Shouldn’t there be a bit in between?’” Just asking the question clarified his thinking. “I said: ‘Nah, I’m making my movie. I know you lot don’t get it, but the people it’s intended for will.’” This could, he reasoned, be his only shot at the film. Katzenberg was gracious, his agent despondent.
A week later, Quibi phoned to say they would wait for him. Onwubolu is now writing a project for Katzenberg. He is no longer with his agent. “I haven’t mentioned Jay-Z yet, have I?” he asks. Still in LA, a meeting was brokered at the hip-hop magnate’s home, finalising a deal that saw Onwubolu sign with his management company, Roc Nation. Jay-Z, it turned out, was one of the viewers of Shiro’s Story. “That contract was never not getting signed.”
He relishes the story. The one he tells in his movie has a different tone. Blue Story is blue because Lewisham is the “blue borough”, council signs rendered in the colour. Yet at 11, his Nigerian parents sent him to a Catholic secondary school a bus ride away in Camberwell. Between the two was Peckham, delivering him daily into a bitter local rivalry. For many of his peers in Lewisham, growing up without role models, gang hierarchies were at least a structure, dominant personalities demanding loyalty from boys hungry to belong to something, even if only a postcode. Onwubolu’s parents were loving; he mostly stayed out of trouble. But he was a sociable kid. His friends were his friends.
He saddens discussing the violence he witnessed. “We’d see a boy from Peckham and I’d know we were meant to batter him. And I’d think: ‘But this kid never did anything to me.’ I never had that dark heart.” As his teens turned into his 20s, he tallied the acquaintances who had been stabbed and the friends in prison. He wanted a change of direction.
He had rapped since school. Then, while working in JD Sports, he began to make a name for himself in London hip-hop with long, character-based rhymes. Catholic school had fuelled his gift for narrative. “I’m big on Bible stories. There’s always a Judas in my stuff. But I’m a sucker for plot generally. Might be Goodfellas; might be Desperate Housewives.”
For a film lover, video was a natural next step, although he wanted to do more than just accompany his tunes. In 2014, he learned his way around a camera, directing an early version of Blue Story with a beyond-skeletal crew. By 2017, he was debating what to do with a rap he had called Shiro’s Story. “I thought: ‘Should I bother making a film for this?’ But I wanted to test myself.”
His feature debut was another education. The £1.3m budget sounded lavish compared with the £3,000 with which he made Shiro’s Story until, he says, crew members hired over his head ate up costs. Having always shot guerilla-style, he now diligently applied for the correct official permissions.
The result was Lewisham council and others in London refusing to let Blue Story shoot in their boroughs, under instruction from the London mayor’s office to withhold support from projects depicting knife and gun crime. It appeared filming would have to take place in Dartford, Kent, a location Onwubolu saw as laughably inappropriate. At the last minute, he was allowed to film in Enfield, north London, a passable stand-in.
Onwubolu is still affronted. “No one in [London mayor] Sadiq Khan’s office read the script! The heart of the film is that the good times only exist before the violence. If you see my film and tell me afterwards I’ve glamorised gangs, I’ll know you’ve just been sitting there on Instagram.”
The irony for a mayor desperate to address youth violence was that here was a film that laid bare its tragedy and a director with the attention of the audience who most need to see it. “Start preaching at a 15-year-old, and they ain’t going to hear you. A film gets the message over wrapped inside a story.”
His exasperation passes. The moment is too exciting to be downbeat – a true original crashing an invitation-only party. “The same people have been running the industry in Britain for years,” he says. “They decide what stories get told, and who gets hired to make them. But you know what’s funny? When it turns out the person they never heard of is the perfect person for the job.”
Blue Story is released on 22 November
