'Fancy Dance and Passing' producer Nina Yang Bongiovi recalls a meaningful moment with Octavia Spencer during her time working on 'Fruitvale Station' during an "Achieving Gender Equity in Storytelling" conversation presented by STARZ #TakeTheLead and moderated by THR contributing editor Stacey Wilson Hunt.
Category
✨
PeopleTranscript
00:00If you're Asian, Asian-American, you're supposed to be quiet and keep your head down and work
00:08hard.
00:09And the one person that really influenced me and affected me in the best way was Octavia
00:15Spencer on Fruitvale Station.
00:17She saw me bust my ass on that film, right?
00:19And then when we were releasing the movie, she goes, where are you on the red carpet?
00:24I go, it's not about me.
00:25I don't want to be there.
00:26She goes, from here on out, every event we go to, you're going to walk with me.
00:31And that really affected me so much.
00:34She said, I want people to see that a female producer can do what you did.
00:40And I want young women of color to see that they can do what you do.
00:46And I just love her for that.
00:53Because in every event afterwards, she'll text me, goes, where are you?
00:57Are you hiding?
00:58Are you hiding?
00:59And then she'll make sure that we walk.
01:02And then when we walked, people would be like, Octavia, single of yourself, move to the side.
01:08And she's like, no, she's my producer.
01:11And I was like, oh, my God.
01:12So really just a small act of being photographed and having a record of your experience forever.
01:20You're in the Getty Image site forever if you have your photo on the carpet.
01:24And now I know how important that is.
01:26Because every film I've done, I would go to a Q&A and women would line up to talk to me.
01:31Not talk to all the dudes on my film, they talk to me.
01:34And I would text Octavia, goes, you're so right.
01:37I'm making a difference.
01:40And it's an evolution of it.
01:41And as I go on in my career now of what I fight for is the producer and title integrity
01:48and what we do as producers.
01:50And that's really, really important.
01:52And that kind of reflects all the way back to Fruitvale to now.