Unlike most other movie directors in Nigeria who have at one time or another fallen for the antics of starlets eager to sleep with anybody in exchange for movie roles, ace filmmaker, Kunle Afolayan, seems to be a hard nut to crack. Afolayan, in an interview with our correspondent, boasted that no Nollywood actress would dare to dangle her body at him in return for a chance to appear in his movies.
The filmmaker said, “Personally I have never encountered a situation whereby an actress would offer me sex for a movie role. They would not even dare come to me. They say that I am proud.
“The social media may have some advantages, but it also has a lot of disadvantages. It is only in the past that people would say that a director asked an actress for sex in exchange for a movie role. These days, some actresses would reach out to the movie director or producer and tell him that they would do anything just to be in the film.
“Hardly would they say such to me. Such a thing does not come to me and if it ever happens, I will just wave it aside. I will not respond.”
The moviemaker said that, aside from acting, he was passionate about music. Stressing that he could have become a singer, he urged his fans to keep their fingers crossed as he could decide to launch a music career anytime. “ I would have been a musician if I was not acting, I still sing for myself. If God wants me to go into music, then it will happen,” he said.
Currently working on his latest film project, Mokalik, which means mechanic in English, the actor dismissed the rumour that he sent his child to train as a mechanic apprentice because he wanted to promote his new movie.
“I don’t do publicity stunt. Who wants to know me, do I care? I don’t. When I came to the mechanic workshop to fix my car one day, I remembered that back in the days, people bring their kids to learn the craft.
“I also noticed that there were many kids in the workshop. It coincided with the period that children were on holidays. I noticed that most times these kids would be engrossed in watching television and sometimes, they travelled out of the country for summer. This year, it did not happen so I decided to bring my son to the mechanic workshop to learn the job.
“In the mechanic workshop, there is the rewire, mechanic, upholstery experts and others. So I felt that he could learn a lot from them. I told him about the idea and I took his sister to a tailor’s shop to learn the craft as well.
“When I took him there on the first day he cried. But my kids are very cultured. So I told him I would pick him up personally by 4pm. Although I could have sent the driver, I did that to encourage him. When I got to the mechanic workshop by 4pm, he asked me to wait for an extra hour because he was busy. I also made the move for him to meet different people and he mixed so well with the people that they started calling him an engineer.
“Right now, my daughter makes skirts. Now that I have a fashion line, I have told her that every evening she has to be with the tailors so as to learn. I believe that by the time she decides to travel out of the country, she would have learnt a trade that could add value to her life.”
Afolayan said he was motivated to shoot Mokalik to tell the world that education should not be limited to the four walls of a classroom. “I am not shooting this as a commercial film, I am targeting Oscars and that is why it is an indigenous film. This is a story close to my heart,” the film maker said.
Source: Punch Newspaper
