On Day One of the 2024 ESSENCE Festival of Culture, our Film Festival kicked off with an intimate chat with one of Hollywood’s most active forces, Aml Ameen.
The actor-producer-screenwriter sat with the creatives in attendance and broke down his journey to becoming a multihyphenate creator in Hollywood. Working both in front of and behind the lens, both as an actor in projects like Yardie, Boxing Day, and most recently, Netflix’s A Man in Full and as a producer and writer through his production studio, 113.
“I’m one of nine children, so I picked up a camera and with my brothers and sisters would create these monologues or do renditions of old movies and all the rest of it,” he told the Film Festival attendees. “I knew, quite instinctively, that I needed to be a writer, a director, an actor. I would say to my dad, ‘look, I can act produce, I can do this, all this stuff. But how?'”
Noting that many creators have big dreams but lack knowledge of the most effective path to arrive there, Ameen detailed how he used his acting talent to open doors to exercise the rest of his skillset.
“My personal process wasn’t going to film school. It was becoming an actor,” he said. “I eventually moved to the United States in 2010 and I did a show called Harry’s Law. I would save the money I got from acting and put that into my own film work.”
On top of using his acting to fund his work behind the camera, Ameen also used it as an opportunity to shadow other actors on a similar path to his own.
“I did a film called Yardie with Idris Elba, and it was his first time directing a movie. And I got to see firsthand for myself like, ‘okay, this is what the process is like.’ And it gave me a bit more confidence to do my own thing.”
Taking that knowledge and re-focusing his energy from a prior failed project to using more of his own truth in his writing, Ameen settled his energy on a new script, that eventually became the burgeoning new Holiday cult classic Boxing Day. The film, a culture-melding rom-com taking place the day after Christmas in London, has found an audience stateside and has gained an increase in popularity since its release in December 2021.
“What’s very unique about Boxing Day specifically is that you guys as African Americans have been the spearhead of incredible cultural revolution when it comes to film, when it comes to black storytelling around the world,” Ameen said.
“England, at the time, had never done a black British romcom. All of our movies were either [things like] Kidulthood, a movie I was a part of, or Top Boy a TV series. So that was the storytelling we were doing. But Boxing Day would be the first and it eventually found its audience. And we are now preparing to do the sequel to Boxing Day, which is great,” he revealed, to a swell of applause from the audience.
“I really stress to anybody – that’s artists and filmmakers in here – I think it’s really imperative that if you really have a vision for what you want to do and you know what you are, you do not rely completely on the studios. You do not rely, you have to put yourself out there first with a real vision for how you want to create. And you’ve got to stand by that in a real way.”