Abraham Adeyemi knows what he wants to say
With his upcoming short film Chasing The Night, Abraham Adeyemi talks to Yolanthe Fawehinmi about dealing with rejection, how it can spark our best ideas and the importance of Black British stories
Abraham Adeyemi is a screenwriter-director and producer | CREDIT: Joupin Ghamsari
“Do you drink green tea?” Abraham Adeyemi asks me, not too long after meeting for the first time.
“Hmm, not really,” I say from the small kitchenette at the entrance of BISON Studios in Hackney, east London. I’m not a massive tea drinker but I usually like to start my day with peppermint or camomile tea.
I’m washing a dirty mug to make Adeyemi his hot beverage of choice but notice that the 32-year-old has already taken a seat at the table we will be speaking from, attentively listening and waiting for my answer. He’s comfortable.
“I think—,” I try to explain my rationale. “Okay. I don’t drink it often enough, so no.”
“Don’t worry about it then,” he says, unabashedly.
I laugh to myself, taken aback. Don’t worry about what?
“It’s not your tea of choice, so I won’t waste it.”
CREDIT: New Strange/Tony Hulse
I can already tell that Adeyemi, an award-winning screenwriter-director, has a mind of his own. He doesn’t always believe in the hype, likes to take calculated risks, and is quite generous with his time, support and energy. It’s probably why he was about to gift me an unopened box of Westminster Tea’s vanilla-flavoured green tea, that he got from an Aldi in Seville, Spain when he was living a nomadic life in 2022. Adeyemi swears it’s the best he has ever tasted and wanted me to brew in that pocket of joy too, even if it was for a short while.
Adeyemi is in his grey cotton Adidas Originals trefoil logo hoodie, but I notice one of the drawstrings is tucked away. His dark brown hair is cut to level one — faded on the sides —and his beard is thick, full and healthy. His smile is contagious and does a great job of brightening the room.
In August 2021, the 32-year-old British-Nigerian had just returned from a holiday in Antigua and was on his agent's case about needing more work. A year before, his directorial debut No More Wings, about two friends who meet at their favourite fried chicken shop, but their lives have diverged, had won the Tribeca Film Festival’s best narrative short competition by a unanimous vote. So Adeyemi was struggling to understand why he was still being passed over for opportunities. It led to two weeks of introspection until his agent suggested that he made another short film.
CREDIT: New Strange/Tony Hulse
“I don’t like writing to tick boxes. I like writing because I want to tell a story,” says the founder of Creative Blue Balls, a film and theatre production company. “But the one consistent thing I had been telling people over the last couple of months, was that I want to write about love.”
Cue in Chasing The Night, Adeyemi’s new short film with Film 4 featuring Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù, who is the lead in Gangs of London, and Deborah Ayorinde, the lead in Riches. “Think Love Jones meets Before Sunrise,” he says in an Instagram post.
But for Adeyemi, these types of stories have always been there. “We — when I say we, I mean Black people — understand the importance and significance of our craft, stories and our work, in a way that people outside of our community can’t understand. The Black British cinematic canon is very limited and that’s not because the talent isn’t there. It’s the way the system has been set up,” says the 2019 Script House finalist for Soho House.
“There are a lot of Black British writers who are older than me and have been in the industry for [a] longer [period] and they've always been trying to tell these stories, they just weren't getting any opportunities. [But] because of their hard work, people like me are finding it easier.”
CREDIT: New Strange/Tony Hulse
Adeyemi had always felt like a writer but decided that he wanted to write when he was around the age of 19. But not too long after graduating with a Creative Writing degree from Birkbeck, University of London, he was kicked out of his family home and “it was no longer about whether I believed if I could achieve [my goal] or not, it was about survival,” he admits.
“Discipline is what separates the people who get there and the people who don’t. I don’t know what else people want to hear. There's not a nice way or kind way to say it. The best way you are going to learn is by doing. Nothing can beat doing. That’s how I have got better and developed my ideas.”
For instance, Chasing The Night was born out of frustration and the whole story came rushing out of him after watching Really Love on Netflix, one Friday night.
CREDIT: New Strange/Tony Hulse
“I just knew what I wanted to say, what I was thinking and feeling, what was frustrating me at the time,” Adeyemi says. “The best thing to do is write what I call a beat sheet, which is a very long document where you write out every scene in your film or TV show. Once that’s ready, you then start to write your script following the beat sheet.
“I used to hate writing beat sheets because I felt like they were ruining the fun. But now, people are often shocked when they hear how many pages I write a day. Typically I’ll write — dependent on my mood — 10, but sometimes it’s 15 and can go up to 20. But that happens because the beat sheet exists.”
And once you have it, Adeyemi says you are just writing from a blueprint and adding the dialogue, and character names, and of course, throughout, you are getting inspired by many different things, like he is every single day.
Listen to our full conversation in the latest episode of the Black Prose podcast here.