‘Content Is a Memory. If People Don’t Remember It, It Didn’t Happen’: An Exclusive Conversation with Director Chris Eneaji

NollyPrime

You have a quote that keeps coming up whenever people write about you. That content is king because people remember great stories for the message they carry, not the directorial style. You’ve said that for years. Do you still believe it?

Chris Eneaji

More than when I first said it. Look at what has happened in this industry over the last three years. The films that people are still talking about, still quoting, still watching again — they’re not being replayed because of their shot compositions. They’re being replayed because of what they said to the audience. The story landed somewhere real in a real person. That is what memory is. If your film is technically brilliant but the audience walks out empty, you have failed at the thing that matters. I can live with a rough cut if the story is airtight. I cannot live with a pristine film that has nothing to say.

NollyPrime

That’s a filmmaker’s position. But you’ve also said if you weren’t in Nollywood you’d be in marketing and advertising. There’s a tension there.

Chris Eneaji

There’s no tension. Marketing is storytelling. The best advertisements are short films. The best brand campaigns understand exactly what memory they want to plant in a person’s mind and they work backwards from that memory to the story that creates it. I think about filmmaking the same way. Before I write a frame, before I talk to a cast member, I ask: what do I want this person to feel when they’re telling someone about this film two years from now? If I can’t answer that, I haven’t found the film yet. I’m still looking for it.

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NollyPrime

The Secret Room came out over a decade ago and still gets discussed in university film classes. That must feel strange.

Chris Eneaji

It doesn’t feel strange. It feels correct. Which I say not with arrogance but with honesty about what I was trying to do when I made it. The thriller genre in Nollywood at that time was being used to package supernatural stories that weren’t really thrillers — they were horror films using thriller packaging. What I wanted to do was build sustained psychological tension. A room. A secret. The mechanics of how secrets operate in relationships and what happens when containment fails. When students are still sitting with that years later, that’s the film doing its job at the level I intended. That’s a good feeling.

NollyPrime

You moved between thriller and comedy — Jacob’s Mansion is very different from Murder at Prime Suites. Is that a deliberate range or does it just depend on what comes in?

Chris Eneaji

Deliberate in the sense that I do not believe a director should have only one emotional register. But practical in the sense that you take the projects that align with what you believe in, and comedy aligned with what I believe in when Jacob’s Mansion came. That cast — Helen Paul, Paul Sambo, Tony Akposheri — those are performers who understand the precision that comedy requires. Comedy is the hardest genre because the audience tells you immediately and honestly whether it worked. There’s no polite uncertainty when a joke dies in the room. You know. I wanted to understand that dynamic from the inside.

NollyPrime

The industry is at a commercial peak right now. Are you working toward cinema or staying independent?

Chris Eneaji

Both, but in sequence. I have a project I believe has the scale for cinema. The story is there. The structure is there. What I’m working on now is the infrastructure around it — the right producing partner, the right distribution conversation, the right cast alignment. I don’t rush that process because rushing it is where projects die. You get to set before the preparation is finished and the lack of preparation shows up on screen in ways you cannot edit out. I would rather spend an additional year in development and arrive at production knowing exactly what film I am making than spend less time preparing and spend the entire shoot discovering it.

NollyPrime

What does Nigerian cinema need most right now that it doesn’t have?

Chris Eneaji

Honest development culture. We don’t spend enough time with scripts before we shoot. The development process in Hollywood — where a script can spend three years being shaped before a single day of production — that is not a luxury. It is the reason those films arrive structurally solid. Here, we are often writing and shooting almost simultaneously, and we then discover in the edit that we were solving a problem we should have solved in the room six months earlier. I’d like to see more writers and directors spending more time in the room together, arguing about what the story actually needs, before anyone picks up a camera. That patience is not a delay. It is the work.

Chris Eneaji is a director, screenwriter, editor, and content producer based in Lagos. He runs C&C Screen Production and has directed The Secret Room, Murder at Prime Suites, Victimz, Scar, When the Poor Smile, Perfectly Flawed, and Jacob’s Mansion, among other titles. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.