I think doing a documentary is one set of your muscles and doing a drama is another. You can learn from both of them -- how to place material, where you build it. I learned those lessons doing both documentaries and drama. Both of them helped the other; how to keep things interesting on camera when interviewing them, the same way you keep the actor of a drama alive and not just doing it by numbers. The dramas I do are usually character-driven. It’s very similar to doing a documentary; in a drama you’re always trying to build to something. I say to documentary directors to look at more dramas, to give it more wit so you don’t put one great thing at the beginning; structure the documentary to keep the audience’s interest. I learned a lot in documentaries about how to cut performances in dramas and to keep the audience on their toes.

It's a dream to make a documentary about the story of my mother and our family. It's a way of paying tribute and also taking control of my life. I'm the one who knows what I went through to be here, what I built. As an artist, I want to tell relevant stories that contribute to making the world a better place than it is.

Become a documentarian of what you do.

You have to not be arrogant and say you know better, and you have to not thwart their creativity because they are creative people and they have a very different point-of-view than a filmmaker on how to get people in the seats. So, it’s a balance, like everything in life, between keeping your focus and being overly constricting. So, if you want to be a filmmaker, you have to realize what a long arbiter a movie is cut of and shaped on, how many phases there are to it, and how long you have to be totally focused on your story and the movie itself, and how it seemed one way but making a film is really trench warfare.

Filmmaking is a journey. Some people are lucky, they get instant success but for others it’s a process, it’s not something that can be achieved in a day. You might even get success overnight but the effort, the dedication, the passion and the love for making films are a continuous process.

Just make the film. Action is the first word you must learn. And the second is patience. As a filmmaker you must wait for many things. You have to wait for money, the weather, the cast, the release. So you need to have good patience. The process is so long and most of the time it’s frustrating. To be a filmmaker, you must first take action, then have the persistence to pursue it.

Using “realistic style” does not mean that we have to change and make a documentary film. It remains fiction. When I make movies, it is subjective, my own interpretation of the novel, my way of organizing the movie scenes. The director’s reflection is not objective, because we are expressing our own point of view, and from the angle of what interests us.

The director’s task is to recreate life, its movement, its contradictions, its dynamic and conflicts. It is his duty to reveal every iota of the truth he has seen, even if not everyone finds that truth acceptable. Of course an artist can lose his way, but even his mistakes are interesting provided they are sincere. For they represent the reality of his inner life, of the peregrinations and struggle into which the external world has thrown him.

As a director, you have the job of dreaming up the movie, and then you have to get everyone else in the movie – hundreds of people – to have that same dream, too.

In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is a God; he must create life.

I don’t like making didactic, pedagogical documentaries based on standard formulas of narration: I'm only interested in the ambitious French tradition of the documentaire de création where the film, if successful, is not about something but that something itself. The goal is to incorporate areas of risk and paradox that we associate with cinematic art.

Shooting documentaries in Nigeria is difficult for a number of reasons: Nigerians aren’t very honest. Nigerians aren’t very open. Nigerians don’t keep footages. Everyone demands money to share their story and Everyone is more interested in ‘their truth'

Fiction film is really different from documentary in this aspect. It is less objective, because the director expresses a subjective point of view with the movie. I would like the movie to look like a documentary, look real.

I find it quite difficult to watch the film once it is done, because in your head or imagination it is totally different. In the beginning it is quite hard, and I don't mean hard as in a negative or a positive. It is difficult to see the film being edited and see the real images for the first time coming out of your head and onto the screen. Sometimes you are surprised that he left something in and he took something out. The director is the creator; he's the captain of the ship when it comes to the creative journey of the film, along of course with the producer. So when you start out acting you have to find a way to understand and to deal with that. But as I say I don't mean it as a negative or a positive.