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"  When Belle hits theaters May 2, you&amp;#039;ll not only be dazzled by its gorgeous star, newcomer Gugu Mbatha-Raw, but by the woman behind the camera as well: Britain&amp;#039;s Amma Asante. The former child actress and writer for the British television drama Brothers and Sisters won a BAFTA for her feature directing debut, 2004&amp;#039;s A Way of Life, and a slew of other awards. But with the release of Belle, reviewed in our April issue, Asante is likely to become a hot commodity on this side of the Atlantic, too. We sat down with the director (who&amp;#039;s as feisty and steel-willed as her protagonist) and talked shop about women in the film industry\u2014and the little-known story (in America) of Dido, Belle&amp;#039;s protagonist\u2014the child of an English admiral and African slave who became a society belle in 18th-century England, and lived in the home of her illustrious paternal grandfather, the Earl of Mansfield, England&amp;#039;s Lord Chief Justice at the time. &amp;quot;I was completely obsessed with 18th-century England\u2014and I was also obsessed just generally in where we, as people of color, fit into European history,&amp;quot; Asante says of her motivation to make the film. Below, the director discusses the importance of indie films, tackling this unCinderella story, and how the movie hits home for her. Beware, for those who don&amp;#039;t know the true story behind the film, there are some spoilers ahead. There&amp;#039;s a line in &amp;#039;Belle&amp;#039; where Dido says, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know that I find myself anywhere.&amp;quot; Related: Reel World: Women and Power in Hollywood As women, haven&amp;#039;t we all been there at some point\u2014where we just don&amp;#039;t know where we find ourselves? We don&amp;#039;t know where to look and find that reflection of who we truly are. For me, Belle is a movie about instinct versus conditioning. Every character, including Dido and quite clearly Lord Mansfield, has to battle that conflict in themselves. But this is also a story which begs the question, &amp;quot;Who defines us\u2014society or us?&amp;quot; If I say, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m an amazing director,&amp;quot; and society and the critics say, &amp;quot;No, you&amp;#039;re not,&amp;quot; what does that mean to my chances if I have the drive in myself to be successful? If Dido is a black woman who speaks like a lady, walks like a lady, talks like a lady but doesn&amp;#039;t look like one we&amp;#039;ve seen before, and society says, &amp;quot;No, you&amp;#039;re not,&amp;#039;&amp;quot; does that mean she isn&amp;#039;t a lady? And if all of society says, &amp;quot;You are a lady,&amp;quot; and she doesn&amp;#039;t feel like one because she feels like a child of a slave\u2014what is the most important? That&amp;#039;s the question I feel like I&amp;#039;m trying to negotiate throughout the entire film. Related: Love in the Digital Age: Eternal Sunshine, 10 Years Later &amp;#039;Belle&amp;#039; is a story about race that I haven&amp;#039;t seen before. I had never heard of the real Dido, who is famous in British history. Did she and her future husband (the lawyer John Davinier, played by Sam Reid) continue to be a force in politics? Not really. They got married and had sons, but they didn&amp;#039;t marry until Lord Mansfield (played by Tom Wilkinson) died. We can never be sure that Dido felt she couldn&amp;#039;t leave Kenwood, the Mansfield manor house, until he died. It was very important to leave the film on a triumphant note\u2014Lord Mansfield&amp;#039;s stunning judicial blow against slavery. That&amp;#039;s what happened in real life, so there was a real sense of commitment, loyalty, and love on her part. That&amp;#039;s what brought me to the movie. Tell me about your first film. It was called A Way of Life. You&amp;#039;ll need subtitles because the teenagers in it have really strong Welsh accents. But that film was very different from Belle on the surface. At the time, there were a lot of crimes happening in the UK that were led by girls, but with boy-gangs, and they were ending in murder. I essentially ended up telling a story\u2014based in fact\u2014about a young girl who, with a group of boys in South Wales, kicked her Turkish neighbor to death. I wasn&amp;#039;t interested in the headline. I was more interested in the story behind it. Who were these people, what was the world they came from? I started to do my research and became really fascinated with the role of female identity\u2014what it means to be a young woman. For women working in the film industry, the indie numbers are much more palatable than those in the big studios. Is the situation in Britain the same? In England it&amp;#039;s pretty similar. What I can tell you is that audiences are hungry to see different points of view. We all know that if you give the same script to two different directors, you get two different movies. The fact that there&amp;#039;s not the greatest chance for women to tell stories through a lens only damages society. It does nothing for people to restrict the variety in which stories can be told.  In &amp;#039;Belle&amp;#039; you also tackle the infamous Zong massacre, about a British ship in which 143 slaves were ruthlessly thrown overboard for the insurance money. My dad died the night before we shot those scenes, so that father-daughter element of the story was so important for me to get right, and so important that we understand that this wasn&amp;#039;t just a moment for the larger story. It was also important for the personal story, the relationship between this unexpected daughter and a kind of paternal figure that we&amp;#039;ve never seen on film or TV. We&amp;#039;ve never seen a white guy love a black child in this way on screen before. And it&amp;#039;s not a slave owner/slave scenario. Lord and Lady Mansfield (Emily Morton) had no children, so it&amp;#039;s a proper paternal relationship in which he adores and loves her as his own child\u2014just as they love and adore Elizabeth (Belle&amp;#039;s white cousin, played by Sarah Gadon, who was also brought up in the Mansfield household) as well. For me, it was really important that we do not see this as a Cinderella fable. This isn&amp;#039;t a rags-to-riches story in that way. Dido&amp;#039;s development, her coming of age and going from girl to woman, and her political awakening with John Davinier, parallels the story of the Zong. I was struck by the way you directed &amp;#039;Belle&amp;#039;, interweaving two hot subjects at the same time\u2014race and money. Quite recently there was a story in &amp;#039;The New York Times&amp;#039; about how aristocratic English daughters don&amp;#039;t inherit anything, unless the male heir decides to throw his sister a bone, and even now they don&amp;#039;t always. So in &amp;#039;Belle&amp;#039;, we see an 18th century meat market, with young women hoping to find a tolerable man to marry. The only way a woman could choose a partner for love is to have money of her own. This was the case of Dido, who chose an educated commoner and turned society on its head.  In her own journey Dido has to come to terms with who she is as a woman, who she is as a biracial woman, who she is as the child of a slave she never had a chance to know and an aristocratic family who against all odds wanted her to be safe and thrive. You know, someone who is half-black and half-white is half of many things: a wealthy woman in a complex society where nobody looks like her, and most difficult, not to have her seeming to be asking for more, when actually what she&amp;#039;s asking for is equality.      Photos: David Appelby, courtesy of Fox Searchlight "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/news/a19119/belle-director-amma-asante-interview/>