Gina Prince-Bythewood

Gina Prince-Bythewood (born June 10, 1969) is an American director and screenwriter who began in 1990s television before making Love & Basketball in 2000 — a debut that won her an Independent Spirit Award and has since been enshrined in the National Film Registry. She followed it with The Secret Life of Bees and Beyond the Lights, then became the first Black woman to direct a major comic-book film with The Old Guard in 2020, and mounted the historical epic The Woman King in 2022. Her next film is an adaptation of Tomi Adeyemi’s fantasy novel Children of Blood and Bone.

Prince-Bythewood has spent her career arguing that the stories Hollywood has not told are the ones worth financing — that the future of cinema lies with “the voices that have been excluded from cinema.” It is a body of work built on the premise that authorship comes from lived experience, which makes her position on machine-generated work fairly predictable, if unusually terse.

Twelve words

In December 2024, Empire surveyed a large group of filmmakers for a feature on the future of cinema, asking each of them the same short questions — including “What’s your take on AI?” Most hedged. George Miller called it “yet another powerful new tool” and asked whether the industry could use it ethically; Sofia Coppola allowed that it could be helpful but insisted art needs “a heart and soul”; Adam Wingard and Gurinder Chadha both called it inevitable. Prince-Bythewood did not hedge.

That is the whole of her public record on the subject: one sentence, in answer to a direct question, from a director who has otherwise stayed out of the AI fight. She has not signed the open letters, joined the campaigns, or made it a theme of her press tours. But the answer packs both halves of the creative-industry case against generative models into a dozen words — a capability claim (it cannot originate) and a provenance claim (what it produces is somebody else’s work, rearranged).