G20 director warns the Amazon Prime Video movie will ‘change culture’

The director of Amazon Prime Video’s big new action film, G20, is keen for her movie to ‘change culture’ thanks to Viola Davis’s role.

Patricia Riggen, 54, helms the flick, which stars Oscar-winning actress Davis as US President Danielle Sutton, who is forced to defend her family, fellow leaders and the world when the G20 summit in South Africa is hijacked by terrorists.

The movie has Sutton as a military veteran, who relies on her training and instincts to strategise and fight back in this pulse-pounding emergency – meaning there’s plenty of action for the 59-year-old How to Get Away with Murder star to sink her teeth into.

From bone-crunching hand-to-hand combat to shoot-outs and knives, Davis is at ease as the action hero of the thriller, which she produces alongside her co-star and real-life husband, Julius Tennon.

For Riggen, this was ‘the reason to make this movie’, as well as the message it would send, when she signed up for G20.

‘It was just the idea of having a Black female president that seemed absolutely important for me, as a woman, as a female director, to make it happen,’ she tells Metro. 

‘Because movies change culture. They normalise things. And I thought, this is a fun popcorn movie – but it’s also going to help normalise something.’

Riggen praises the UK – which is represented in G20 by Douglas Hodge’s reluctant ally, Prime Minister Oliver Everett – for having ‘normalised its powerful women centuries ago’.

‘But that’s not the case in other countries, for instance, in the United States. So let’s put them in movies, let’s help people see them like a normal thing, and then we’ll get a woman elected one of these days.’

The Mexican filmmaker, who is known for her work on TV shows including Jack Ryan, as well as Disney Channel movie Lemonade Mouth and 2016 Jennifer Garner drama Miracles from Heaven, also notes that she signed up for G20 ‘years ago [and] it has nothing to do with the political situation of the present moment’.

But it is striking that, had the US election gone the other way, America would currently be governed by its first female president, former VP Kamala Harris, who also identifies as South Asian American and Black.

How Viola Davis got fit to play an action hero

On the poster for G20, Davis’s toned biceps are front and centre, with her taking the traditional pose of the determined action hero at the centre, holding a gun.

As well as Riggen herself being a fan of Davis’s ‘inspirational’ arms (‘I feel that Viola’s arms should become a trend – they really are outstanding!’), it was deliberate that she was positioned as the traditional, and legitimate, action star – in the mould of a Dwayne Johnson or a Will Smith or a Tom Cruise – every step of the way.

‘Any action hero in a movie does a lot of things: they have to be super-fit, they have to handle weapons, they have to be able to fight. And Viola already had the experience of The Woman King, so she was coming in, very fit, very muscular,’ Riggen explains.

For Fences and Widows actress Davis, the training for G20 was weapons-based, ‘knives and pans, anything that we could get our hands on in this hotel for her to fight [with]’ because Riggen’s priority was also that it felt real.

‘I like movies in which I believe what I see. I don’t believe it, I’m not engaged in the movie,’ the director states. ‘And I feel Viola is absolutely believable, that she can take any of these guys, so [that’s] a testament to her.’

Putting a female stamp on action with G20

Riggen also knows that her partnership with Davis as a producer on G20, and two women being in charge of the movie, fundamentally changed it – ‘because we get all the toys and all the tools and all the budget to do a big action [movie] but at the same time, we also care about story and characters’.

And Riggen is coming at this as big fan – and consumer – of the action genre.

‘Sometimes action movies have a lot of action, but I don’t really care about them. In fact, you use the fight or the chase to go and get some food in the in the kitchen instead, and then it’s like, “Call me when it’s over so I can follow the story again”,’ she points out.

‘In this case, both Viola and I really wanted to still have a powerful story with really strong characters and moments, so that the female audience would also be engaged in the movie – and I think we accomplished it.’

Working with married couple Davis and Tennon – who pops up onscreen too in G20 as CIA Director Mikkelson – was a dream collaboration for Riggen ‘because then we’re all fighting for the same things’.

It was also a huge positive to have Davis as the star and producer with her accumulated power in terms of unlocking budget and advocating for important – if costly – parts of G20.

‘In a movie, it’s a push and pull. For us, for me, it’s all about doing the most I can, basically spending the most I can, because you want the best action scene, you want the most time, you want everything. And the studio’s job is to limit and keep the movie on budget,’ says Riggen.

Identifying preserving the bombastic action scenes as where she, Davis and Tennon put up the ‘biggest fight’, Riggen recalls: ‘It was like, we must have the Beast – the presidential car – we must have it flipped, we want to have a missile to destroy it.’

There’s also a dramatic helicopter scene at G20’s thrilling climax that the filmmaker mentions too as a vital element of the movie.

‘Some things are very important for the quality of the movie, so if you have your star fighting with you and having the authority to protect the movie, that’s a really wonderful thing. I totally recommend actresses having companies and developing their own movies and working for them!’

G20 streams exclusively on Amazon Prime Video from Thursday, April 10.

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