Halle Berry On Making A “Supernatural Love Story” Through Her HalleHolly Banner & Upcoming Collaboration With Angelina Jolie – Red Sea Film Festival

Speaking in her masterclass at Red Sea International Film Festival, Oscar-winning actress Halle Berry said that launching her own production company is finally empowering her to make the stories she has always wanted to produce and direct – including a project that she identified on the plane on the way to Jeddah. 

“Finally on the plane coming here I saw a story, I saw what’s in my heart, and realised what I wanted to share,” said Berry, who recently launched production company HalleHolly with former WME partner Holly Jeter. 

When pressed further she said: “It’s a love story at its core, but it deals with the supernatural and time travel and the future. It’s taken me the last few years to figure this out.” 

Berry said having her own banner – which she has previously said will make content with strong, multicultural, female protagonists – is finally giving her the freedom she needs after years of struggling as a woman of color to be taken seriously as an actor and a filmmaker, including her well documented negative experiences on her directorial debut Bruised. 

“I’ll say this honestly, that because I was a black woman, the treatment that I suffered [on that film], the things I had to go through, were unconscionable,” Berry said. “And I truly believe that if I had been a white man, or even a black man, the experience would have been much easier.” 

Berry became the first woman of color to win an Oscar for Best Actress with Monster’s Ball in 2001. She said she was “heartbroken” that no other black woman has won that honour in the more than 20 years since. 

She also said she had deliberately taken on gritty roles like Monster’s Ball, and playing a crack addict in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever, to overturn the stereotype that she was just a pretty face. 

But she’d had to fight hard to be given those roles: “Spike really didn’t want me for that movie – he said no about five times – which is something I always tease him about. He wanted me to play his wife and said ‘you’re not a crackhead, you’re pretty’. And I was like, Oh God, I’m trying to get rid of that title.” 

However, she’s also enjoyed the blockbusters like the X-Men series and Die Another Day, and said of Bond producer Barbara Broccoli: “I adore her, I feel like I’ll always be a part of that Bond franchise family. I told her I wanted to modernise the role, and to my surprise she was open to that, and gave me the opportunity to sort of reimagine what a Bond girl is.”

Berry also talked about her upcoming collaboration with Angelina Jolie on Maude v Maude, which she said satisfies a craving to mix action and comedy, and on which both actresses will take a role as a producer. 

“I’m just thrilled to just work with another woman and craft a story from our sensibility, from our point of view. So many times we’re characterised in movies, and the writers are usually men, so we’re portrayed from their perspective. And so there’s a female director, Angelina and I are there, and we can tell a story from our point of view.”

She also said the Warner Bros film is a big action movie that will shoot around the world: “And maybe we’ll come back here [to Jeddah]. When I was looking around the old town today, I was thinking about what we can get in here.” 

The Red Sea International Film Festival runs until December 9. Masterclasses are also taking place with Baz Luhrmann, Gwyneth Paltrow, Andrew Garfield and Nicolas Cage.