*AT&T has announced that Emmy-winning writer/producer Lena Waithe has been tapped as the Lead Program Mentor for the 2019 edition of AT&T’s Hello Lab Filmmaker Mentorship Program.
The initiative, which began in 2017, aims to help filmmakers from underrepresented communities work on their craft and to provide them with major platforms, such as Direct TV, to showcase their work.
Waithe will select five screenwriters whose projects will be financed and produced by AT&T. She will also pair each writer with an up-and-coming director who will help bring their vision to life. The program puts an emphasis on diversity; pulling talented women, people of color, and content creators from the LGBTQ+ communities. Each of the mentees will be given access to the full filmmaking process; including meeting with everyone from casting directors to top-level executives.
Lena recently dished with Complex about her involvement with program… peep the Q&A below.
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We’re back and we want YOUR scripts!
The @ATTHelloLab Mentorship Program is empowering more underrepresented filmmakers with our lead mentor, @LenaWaithe. Submit your script. Give your dreams a chance ? #ATTHelloLabFilms
More info: https://t.co/moigBjI21R pic.twitter.com/6r0gxVn6tr
— AT&T Hello Lab (@ATTHelloLab) May 1, 2019
How did you to get involved with the Program, and what it was about the program that you were hype about?
I think that what excites me so much is that me and my executive Rishi Rajani over at Hillman Grad, we really are big into not just mentorship, but we’re always searching, looking for new talent. We found that we had a lot of really cool interesting directors in our pocket, a lot of really cool writers that we knew that we were trying to put on shows and help get their shows made.
Every now and then you get a writer/director who is amazing, but there’s just not that many amazing writer/directors out there. I wanted to do this the right way. Because of [our working relationship last year], they were kind enough to say “Look, you really found something special, and you seem to know a lot of these people, why don’t you do all of them next go around?” That’s what we’re really excited about, is to really put this together in a really cool way so that we can [find] even more writers and directors. That, to me, is really exciting.
How involved are you with the mentees that are selected?
It’s a bit of a team effort. Rishi, who is really out in the trenches and out there every single day while sometimes, like today, where I’m in the writers room working on The Chi as we started on season three, so where it stands we’re like I have to be focused on that, and he is always like, “Hey Lena, this is a person you should know, this is a person you should check out, I think we should give this person opportunity to do it,” and I’m like “Oh great, love it, that person’s great, love that person” or sometimes I’ll say “Hey, I don’t think that person’s ready yet, do you have any other options?” And usually, when those scripts are done I’ll take a look at them, read them, give my thoughts, give my feedback, and then what we really try to do is [get] people who are great, o we don’t have to babysit. I think there’s this sort of weird misconception that just because someone is new, they usually don’t know what they’re doing. It just means they haven’t gotten an opportunity yet to show their stuff.
Look, not everybody succeeds, sometimes people falter, and we have to pick up the pieces and make sure everything is cool. It’s really on us to take people that are responsible, take people that are ready, take people that we’ve been following for a few years. It all works hand-in-hand, but we don’t put them on the position unless we know that they’re ready for it. For me, yes, we’re sort of mentoring our program, but in essence, it’s helping us.
The industry is constantly looking for people of color, women, people who are queer, people who are not able-bodied because they know it’s almost like a mandate—you can’t just have a bunch of white guys directing your shit. Everybody has to be on their A-game because if somebody’s a new person, they’re coming in, they’re hungry, they’re ready, and they’ve got a story to tell, I’d rather go with that new person with a new, fresh perspective, who is coming ready to work.
This year, you’re bringing in a more musical element to the Program, with an incentive on finding unsigned producers and musicians and working on music videos. What drove that expansion?
The big thing we’re trying to do is we are trying to help bring music videos back. We have some amazing directors that also could use some shine. To me, it’s sort of like a two-fer. Kill two birds with one stone, where you hear a really beautiful song, and we also want to really elevate the music video, because I feel like so many music videos are so literal. They go straight down the middle; there’s no real plot put into it.
Back in the day, the real artists used to get movie directors to do their videos. RIP John Singleton, he directed Michael Jackson’s “Remember the Time” music video. I was like, “why not have these budding feature directors, TV directors, bring their aesthetic, their visual ideas to these songs?” This is a director who has a vision [working on] your song. More often than not, you’re going to get something very cinematic, very unique, because they think in a cinematic way. It’s really exciting because I always love matching up certain artists with certain directors where you were about to go “What? That don’t make sense.” And then you get something really unique and really fresh that comes out of it, so we’re really excited for people to see that.
For more information on AT&T’s Hello Lab Film Mentorship Program, visit their website.
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