The Nigerian secret to movie success is we don’t care what anybody thinks – RMD

Award-winning Nigerian actor Richard Mofe-Damijo has attributed the success of the Nigerian movie industry, known as Nollywood, to telling their story how best they know how to tell it without any worries for what others think.

He told Ismail Akwei on The Qonversation that the Nigerian attitude has made them the best in telling their own story and the world has accepted it hence their success in film and even music.

“The Nigerian secret is Nigerians own their story. We tell it in the best way we know how to tell it. We don’t care what anybody else thinks. It’s the same thing that has happened to our music. We’ll play it for ourselves and when we accept it here, the rest of the world would accept it. Even if the rest of the world doesn’t accept, we don’t care. It’s our music. We enjoy it. 24/7. If you don’t dig it, hug a transformer, like we say it,” he said.

On whether Nollywood owes its global success to Netflix, RMD stated that Nigerian films predate Netflix or any other streaming platform and Nollywood has improved its quality to meet their standard.

“We have improved with the quality of films that we give to them because they have a standard. Right. They say, you must tick these boxes for us to put your film on this platform, we tick the boxes and we go on. When Disney comes and they bring a different set of boxes that we tick, we tick but we keep telling stories,” he said.

“It wouldn’t matter whether anybody comes here. That is why we started doing our stories long before there was anything called Netflix or even YouTube. Okay, We need to tell our story, and we just told it. We have been telling our stories for years,” he added.

Watch this exciting episode on Qonversations.