When actor Chiwetel Ejiofor optioned the rights for the 2009 best-seller The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, penning the screenplay for a feature directorial debut that world-premieres in Sundance and then appears in the Berlin Film Festival before being released globally by Netflix this spring, colleagues floated the idea of shooting the Malawi-set film in tried-and-tested locations like South Africa or Kenya.
Ejiofor demurred. “It just didn’t seem plausible to me,” says the director, who was captivated by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer’s story about a 13-year-old boy who builds a windmill to save his village from famine. “There was no way that we could shoot the film anywhere else. For me, it was really a question of diving in feet first and just seeing what happens.”
Potboiler Prods.’ Andrea Calderwood (The Constant Gardener, The Last King of Scotland) had worked on 2013’s Half of a Yellow Sun, the adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s critically acclaimed novel that was shot in Nigeria and in which Ejiofor starred. She agreed with his instincts on The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, noting that while investors once questioned whether it made sense to risk filming off the beaten path in Africa, many have come around to acknowledging that there’s value and integrity to shooting in the country where the film is set.
“We shot right next door to the house that William grew up in,” Calderwood says. “That gave it all an incredible authenticity and atmosphere and texture, which you can’t buy.”
Ejiofor, who also stars in the film as William’s father, first travelled to Malawi in 2011, when he met Kamkwamba and his family in their village. Returning to London, he says he was able to “build a visual idea of the film,” tinkering with that vision while traveling back and forth to the central African nation throughout preproduction. Read more