Tagline: Bring your girlfriends, sisters, mothers and daughters.
The Secret Life of Bees movie storyline. Lily Owens (Dakota Fanning) is a fourteen-year-old- girl that is still reconciling with the loss of her mother. She goes away with her caretaker, Rosaleen, to South Carolina with no place to live. They end up on the steps of the Boatwright sisters, August, June, and May, house. While building maternal bound with all three of the Boatwright sisters, Lily thinks she has found the home she has always dreamed of. Lily soon finds out that to find home, she first must leave home.
Owning and operating a successful bee farm and honey-making business, August Boatwright (Queen Latifah) is the family matriarch running the household with a firm but loving hand with her sisters, the fiercely independent music teacher June (Alicia Keys) and the innocent childlike May (Sophie Okonedo). The Boatwright sisters? lives are disrupted when fourteen year-old Lily Owens (Dakota Fanning) and her caretaker Rosaleen (Jennifer Hudson) appear on their doorstep seeking refuge.
After fleeing with Rosaleen to Tiburon, South Carolina, a place surrounded by mystery and a strong connection to Lily?s mother, they find shelter at the Boatwright household. Lily is immediately taken under the wing of August Boatwright as her new beekeeping apprentice. There she is given a comfortable place to explore and, for the first time in her life, just be. Lily also discovers joy in the simple pleasures of life through her deepening relationship with the Boatwright sisters and soon comes into her own, determined to enjoy the sweet nectar of life for the first time. As a budding young woman who has left the place she once called home, Lily unexpectedly finds her true home and a family she has always yearned for.
From Novel to Screenplay
“The bees came summer of ’64, the summer I turned fourteen and my life went spinnin’ off into a whole new orbit. Lookin’ back on it, I want to say they were sent to me….they showed up like the angel Gabriel appearing to the Virgin Mary. I know it’s forward to compare my small life to hers, but I have good reason to believe she wouldn’t mind.” -Lily
The movie began its gestation when visionary producer Lauren Shuler Donner first read The Secret Life of Bees in galley form eight years ago and could not put it down. Moved by the story of a young girl’s attempt to find self-worth and her search for a family, the award-winning producer committed herself to bring this complex and arresting novel to the big screen. “Lily is searching to see if she’s lovable and I think there are times when we all feel that way,” Shuler Donner observes. “This is also a story about family. That’s what’s really important in life.”
Tackling a period film set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement, with a teen lead and a multi-racial cast, became not only a challenge but also a labor of love for the filmmaker. But, just as the novel attracted millions of readers around the globe, Shuler Donner believes the film’s universal themes will resonate with moviegoers. “Rarely can Hollywood make a movie that’s better than the movie you’ve seen in your mind,” she reflects. “In this case, I’m hoping we’ll match the movie in your mind and enhance it.”
Despite a two-decade track record of bringing critically and commercially successful projects to the big screen, including her recent X-MEN franchise; the Oscar-nominated DAVE; YOU’VE GOT MAIL and the FREE WILLY franchise, Shuler Donner was excited about the low budget prospect of THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES. Shuler Donner joined forces with producer Joe Pichirallo, who first optioned the novel for Shuler Donner while he was a senior executive at Fox Searchlight. “Of all the projects I’ve been involved with over the years, I can honestly say that this book really spoke to me on so many levels – especially the importance of family and how we find love in the most unlikely places,” says Pichirallo.
While at Fox Searchlight, Pichirallo shepherded such critically acclaimed films as ANTWONE FISHER, the directorial debut of Denzel Washington which starred Derek Luke; QUILLS, nominated for three Academy Awards; and THE BROTHERS MCMULLEN, winner of the 1995 Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Pichirallo was head of feature film production and development at Overbrook Entertainment when he brought the project in with Shuler Donner to James Lassiter, the producer/manager who had created Overbrook Entertainment with Will Smith in 1998. Together, Shuler Donner, Lassiter and Pichirallo now set about securing a screenwriter who could bring all the nuances of the novel to the screen, and also a director who could handle such a delicate yet complicated tale. The solution emerged with write r/ director Gina Prince- Bythewood.
Six years ago, Prince-Bythewood had been sent the novel The Secret Life of Bees. At that time, she was too exhausted to read it after wrapping back-to-back directing projects: the multi-award-winning LOVE & BASKETBALL, a feature she wrote and directed; and the HBO film “Disappearing Acts,” starring Sanaa Lathan and Wesley Snipes. Over the years her family and friends raved about the book and five years later Prince-Bythewood finally read it but by then the producers had moved on. “After I read it,” she recalls, “I got what all of the hype was about and I was so disappointed that I’d missed an opportunity to be involved.” Amazingly, a few months later the project fell apart and it was again sent to her for consideration.
“We met with lots of writers and directors who wanted to do this project,” Pichirallo remembers. “Many of them came with interesting ideas, but when we heard Gina’s approach and her thoughts on the book, we knew we had found our person.”
Shuler Donner agrees. “Gina did an amazing job. She was able to translate the beauty and lyricism of Sue’s book into a screenplay.”
Casting The Secret Life of Bees
Liftin’ someone’s heart, now that matters. The whole problem with people is they know what matters, but they don’t choose it. – August. Prince-Bythewood and the producers still marvel at their unprecedented good fortune at being able to secure the actors they had imagined for leading roles in the film. “The fact that we got everybody we wanted is a great blessing,” Prince-Bythewood says. “It’s a blessing beyond belief.”
Dakota Fanning was the unanimous favorite to portray Lily Owens, thanks to her previous impressive performances, her own love of the novel and her proven history of holding her own opposite such powerful onscreen presences as Robert De Niro, Denzel Washington, Tom Cruise and Sean Penn.
As Lily Owens, Fanning portrays a teenager struggling with typical pubescent angst, but her challenges are compunded by her feelings of self-loathing and sorrow – all tied to the death her mother. Lily’s one saving grace is her empathetic caretaker Rosaleen, portrayed by Academy Award winning actress Jennifer Hudson.
Describing her character Lily as being stuck between a rock and a hard place, Fanning enjoyed the creative challenge of portraying a white teenager in the South during the 60’s, whose only mother-figure is an African-American housekeeper. “It adds a certain amount of tension to the movie,” Fanning explains, “because it was looked down upon for a young white girl to be living with African-American people. This is something my character can’t understand.” Hudson says her character and Fanning’s were bound together by shared needs. “They both have a struggle: Rosaleen wants to be acknowledged as a human being while Lily is looking for a mother. So where one is weak, the other is strong.”
Given that neither actress could reference the 1960’s from personal knowledge, Prince- Bythewood tried to create an environment steeped in the period. “Only 60’s music was allowed on the set — a lot of Motown,” says Prince-Bythewood, who would not even allow modern music in her own car on the way to work. The director also created an elaborate improv to help them get into character. Before filming began, while on location in downtown Burgaw, a little town in North Carolina, the director had Fanning and Hudson meet at a drugstore where they were told to purchase 10 items and eat a meal. Extras in the drugstore had been instructed by the director to interact respectfully with Fanning, but to ignore Hudson. “I couldn’t hear what that guy at the counter said to Jennifer, but I know what I told him to say,” Prince-Bythewood recalls. “When I saw her head whip around so fast, I was thinking ‘Oh my God, is she going to hit him?’ ”
Acknowledging the impact of those exercises – and the historical research she did – on her performance, Hudson says she developed an overwhelming sense of gratitude at being young today. “I was sitting watching a little white girl and a little black boy reading a book together recently and I thought ‘Wow that would have been illegal 50 years ago.’” She adds, “You have to know where you’ve come from to know where you’re going and you need to know what mistakes you made, so you don’t make them again. This was a part of our history.”
For Hudson, the closeness she experienced with her fellow actors on the set mirrored her feelings about the film itself. “It’s about togetherness,” she says. “If we stick together, there’s so much we can accomplish, because no matter what the struggle, as long as you’ve got somebody, you can make it.”
Ironically, however, Prince-Bythewood says that one of the most memorable scenes for her involved the opposite emotion, when Lily tells August Boatwright (Queen Latifah) she is unlovable. “It just kills me,” Prince-Bythewood says, noting that the sheer vulnerability exuded by Fanning, coupled with the tenderness Latifah summons to heal her, in many ways is at the core of the film’s concerns. “This film is about love and finding the mother within yourself,” she says.
To handle a scene like that required a multifaceted actress who could portray August Boatwright as a loving matriarch who nurtures both her younger sisters and the two lost souls who come to her house in need of love. “Queen Latifah just embodies August’s character,” says Prince-Bythewood. “She exudes warmth and she’s larger than life — and that’s really what August needed to be.”
A huge fan of the novel, Latifah welcomed the opportunity to work on a film with dignified and well-defined female African-American characters. “To be able to reach back in time and find this character to play was extremely interesting to me,” says the Academy Award nominee and Golden Globe winner. “These women are progressive, intelligent and educated. They own their property; they’re very loving and nurturing.”
The role also struck a personal chord for Latifah, who cared for her own younger sibling just as her character, August, cares for her sisters June and May (Alicia Keys and Sophie Okonedo). Recalling her days as a 12-year-old looking after her infant sister, Latifah says, “You feel so protective and you love them so much. I think my character, August, is content to be in that kind of position. She’s happy living in Tiburon and taking care of her bees and her family, instead of being out in the world.”
Art often imitates life, and Latifah is also a huge fan of bees – a fondness that helped her immensely in bee-training school and during filming. “I love bees,” she exclaims. “The fact that they work all day long to feed the queen and the babies and to make honey and pollen is just a fascinating life!” Her co-star Fanning agrees. “The fact that they’re the only insect that makes food that people eat is simply amazing.”
Since bees are summer-oriented insects and the film was a summer movie shot in the middle of winter, prop master John Sanders arranged for 12 beehives to be imported from Florida – some with as many as 40,000–60,000 bees in them. The hives were kept in a warm greenhouse in Burgaw, North Carolina, where the actors worked with them. Prince-Bythewood is confident that familiarity helped with the performances. “You get more ad-libbing when there’s comfort, so we wanted to make sure everyone felt prepared,” says Prince-Bythewood, who admits that she herself is afraid of bees. “I’m much better now,” she says, laughing. “I used to be the one running around screaming if one bee was in the room. Now I can enter a room with 12 live hives and I’m fine – which is shocking.”
Queen Latifah had to be particularly at ease with the bees because her character does most of the harvesting for her family’s business. Bee master Julian Wooten, a man with 50 years’ experience (and also a retired strawberry farmer), instructed the actors on bee biology, on how to extract honey from the combs, on how to separate honey from bits of wax and on general bee etiquette. “I was stressing slow, gentle movements and trying to get them over their fear,” he explains, knowing the actors were all anxious about getting stung. Affectionately referring to him as “the bee whisperer,” Latifah says she was impressed by his understanding of bees and reassured by his guidance. “Going in there, I was always trying to calm down and come to the bees with love,” she says, though she admits that handling the honeycombs, covered with live bees, while using her bare hands, was nerve-wracking. “I just kept my hands closed, because naturally you want to swat at them, but you can’t. So you remember that they don’t want to harm you. They actually lose their life to sting you.”
Latifah’s co-stars, Alicia Keys and Sophie Okonedo, each faced equal challenges in preparing for their roles: Keys had to learn to play the cello, while Okonedo had to attend cooking school. “Sophie was someone I did not want to make this film without,” says the director. “I didn’t feel I could trust anyone else with the character May. Sophie’s face is so expressive, warm, childlike and just beautiful. She digs down so deep and gives you so much.”
Like her fellow cast members, Okonedo read The Secret Life of Bees and was deeply moved by the story. Thrilled at landing the role, the British-born actress, who received an Academy Award nomination along with SAG, Critics Circle and NAACP Image Award nominations for HOTEL RWANDA, felt nervous about working alongside her fellow superstar actresses. “I was a bit overwhelmed,” she admits. Just before Christmas, Okonedo and the other female leads were asked to travel to New York to get to know one another before reaching the set. “It was a really good thing to do,” adds the actress, who describes the atmosphere on the set as being like one big family. “I can’t remember when I laughed so much. We had so much fun on and off the set. I really adore all of them and Latifah is hilarious!” Like Fanning and her other co-stars, Okonedo believes the blistering cold helped them bond. “You’d be shivering and thinking, ‘At least I’m not alone!’ ”
Okonedo is drawn to stories about ordinary people who get tangled up in extraordinary events, like her character, May, the Boatwright sister whose heart has been broken since her twin sister’s death years earlier. Her pain runs so deep, her sisters dedicated a prayer wall in the woods to their late sister, much like the ‘Wailing Wall’ in Jerusalem. To prepare for this intense character, Okonedo watched Spike Lee’s Oscar-nominated documentary 4 LITTLE GIRLS, which details the real-life events surrounding the 1963 racist bombing of an African-American church in Birmingham, Alabama that left four girls dead. The Cambridge University graduate was completely devastated. With a young daughter of her own, she says, “I felt the pain of those parents and decided to always have that feeling bubbling on the surface.”
By contrast, the actress – who is of Nigerian and European descent – made it known to the filmmakers right from the start that she was not much of a cook. Since many of her scenes take place in a kitchen, cooking lessons were arranged with two restaurant owners from a popular Southern soul food spot, Two Fat Ladies. When they learned whom they’d be teaching, the owners jumped at the chance. Says Okonedo, “Cooking is a very kind and nurturing thing to do. I really enjoyed learning about it.”
The final Boatwright sister to be cast was June, played by music superstar Alicia Keys. In casting Keys, and making the character of June much younger than she is in the novel, Prince- Bythewood had her embody the emerging African-American woman of that time, educated and committed to making sacrifices to change the world.
Keys had contacted the producers several years earlier to express interest in the project. Interested in casting Keys, Prince-Bythewood was still unsure of what to expect, given that this was only her third feature. But when she saw Keys in a public service advertisement for Reading Is Fundamental – holding The Secret Life of Bees, she felt it was meant to be. “She could have chosen any book in the world and she chose that one,” the director marvels. During the shoot, she was thrilled: “Her work ethic is unbelievable and Alicia gives an incredible performance.” One of the greatest creative challenges for Keys involved learning to play the cello, an instrument she was largely unfamiliar with. “It was actually really exciting for me to learn a brand new instrument,” she says, “though it was definitely a lot of work learning the finer details.” Holding the bow and positioning her fingers was a painstaking experience, but now the sensual star, who composes many of her songs on the piano, calls the cello soulful and beautiful, and says she may continue to play it in the future.
The film went into production just as Keys’ new album, “As I Am,” was released and the single, “No One,” topping the Billboard charts in record-breaking time. Keys’ tour schedule was jam-packed, but her passion for the film drove her to find the time to participate fully. As one who makes her living traveling around the globe, she says she could relate to the film’s theme of leaving home, in order to find it. “It’s a great theme. Leaving home, leaving your comfort zone, can be scary at times, but I believe it ultimately leads you to somewhere better.”
Prince-Bythewood enhanced the passionate relationship June shares with Neil (Nate Parker), who received critical acclaim for his portrayal of Henry Lowe in the Golden Globenominated film THE GREAT DEBATERS. “I arrived on set from New York and Gina had set up a little candlelight dinner in her trailer for me and Alicia,” Parker recalls. The two ate on paper plates and talked for several hours, bonding. “After that,” he says, “I no longer saw her as the singer that other people see.” Other cast and crewmembers had the same experience; indeed, during the Super Bowl, they watched in amazement as Keys transformed herself into a sexy songstress, and then right away returned to the set as June. “I felt uncomfortable when I had to leave everybody, because we had created an environment that really made us sisters and family,” Keys recalls. “Being together made us want to be the best that we could be.”
Internationally acclaimed actor Paul Bettany, whom audiences recall as the loyal, but relentlessly daunting imaginary friend to Russell Crowe in A BEAUTIFUL MIND, portrays Fanning’s cruel father, T. Ray, in the film. “To try and think like another human being – however awful they are, however you might judge them as horrible and cruel – it’s very edifying,” Bettany says.
It was Bettany’s chameleon-like ability to seamlessly morph from one character to the next in previous film roles that caught the attention of the filmmaking team, especially the director. Even before she’d met him, Prince-Bythewood had thought of Bettany during the screenwriting process. Then, at their first meeting, she recalls being flabbergasted. “All I kept thinking was “Oh my God, he’s T. Ray!” Immediately following the meeting, she called and offered him the role. “There’s obviously a bunch of really great American actors that she could have gone with,” says Bettany. “Because she had faith in me, I wanted to give her my best.”
With the help of a voice coach, the versatile Bettany replaced his genteel British lilt with a Southern vernacular and transformed his easy-going, off-screen personality into that of an enigmatic time bomb, T. Ray, the lonely peach farmer who eventually becomes a cruel parent. “The struggle is to put aside your own politics and sense of right and wrong to try and produce a man of his era,” says Bettany.
Prince-Bythewood shares a surprising bit of on-set observation about Bettany. “I know T. Ray is such a dark character, but you say cut, and Paul is cracking everybody up,” she says. “He is so funny.”
Describing her character as a woman who marries beneath her social strata, so caught up in dating a “bad boy,” Hilarie Burton portrays T.Ray’s wife and Lily’s mother, Deborah Owens. The actress hopes women will find Deborah relatable and think before they act. “She knows she put herself in a difficult position, so there’s a lot of self-loathing there.”
Co-starring as Zachary, a young African-American teenager with whom Lily shares a special bond, is Tristan Wilds, an emerging young actor. “Zachary so wants to be a lawyer, a drum major like Dr. King talked about in those days. It’s significant to see a kid who’s stuck in the 60’s, with all of that oppression, who still wants to come out and become something to help his community and his nation,” shares Wilds.
Respected and adored by the filmmakers and cast and crew alike – each can detail a story of her gentility and grace under fire – was the director herself. “I trust Gina,” says Bettany. Keys agrees. “Gina has this calming effect and a genuineness of spirit that makes you feel like everything is just fine, all the time.
About The Novel
“I can’t think of something I’d rather have more then someone lovin’ me.” – Lily
Sue Monk Kidd’s internationally acclaimed novel The Secret Life of Bees was born from her experience growing up as an adolescent in the South during the 1960’s. “I do think race is the wound of my geography,” she says. “It’s the wound of the South and of American life.”
Despite the power of that experience, it took almost 30 years for Monk Kidd’s deeply internalized feelings to surface, when she started to share her memories with her husband and when they began to crystallize into book form.
Monk Kidd grew up in a large country house in Sylvester, Georgia, where bees inhabited a wall in the guesthouse. “I remember my mother cleaning up puddles of honey that had seeped out, and the unearthly sound of bee hum vibrating through the house,” the writer has noted. The bees never left, and even years later, when Monk Kidd’s husband visited her childhood home, he woke to find the bees flying around his room. That was when his wife “began imagining a young girl lying in bed while bees poured through cracks in her bedroom walls.” Unable to shake that image, she still had to answer two profound questions: “Who is this girl?” and “What is the desire of her heart?” Answering them led to the creation of Lily Melissa Owens, the girl who yearns for her mother, and who became central to Monk Kidd’s story.
At first, however, Bees was very much a story, not a novel. It was only after writing the short story in 1993, and after it drew a rapturous response when read aloud at a New York literary event, that Monk Kidd thought of turning it into a novel. During years of research and preparation, that took her through collage making and more contemplative periods, the author turned her attention to matters of race and spirituality. Ancient statues and “archetypal feminine images” of the Virgin Mary became her focus and she set out to learn more about the origins and significance of the Black Madonna, in particular, a journey that took her far from the South and all the way to Europe. There, she found that images of the Black Madonna were symbols of defiance among oppressed women. She knew now that the Black Madonna must be included in the novel.
A coming-of-age story, The Secret Life of Bees takes place in an intricate emotional landscape that explores the psyches of its young heroine and the matriarchs who mentor her. These characters, so genuine and true to life, are culled from the novelist’s imagination and from impressions drawn from her years in Georgia. Deeply affected by the social dynamics of growing up white in the racially polarized South, Monk Kidd also benefited from her own immersion in African-American culture — especially with the character of Rosaleen, partly modeled on her own black caretaker; and the characters of May, June and the women who belong to the Daughters of Mary, all of whom called on memories of the Southern black women whose enthralling stories and kind nature left an indelible impression on Monk Kidd. As for August, the matriarchal figure played by Queen Latifah, she sprang from what Monk Kidd describes as “a vision I carry inside, of feminine wisdom, compassion, and strength… what I would have wanted to find if I’d been in Lily’s complicated situation.”
The novel was published in 2002 to critical acclaim and has since been published in more than 23 languages. The novel spent more than two years on The New York Times bestseller list and has sold more than 4.5 million copies.
Special Sets
“Most people have no idea about the complicated life goin’ on inside a hive. Bees have a secret life we don’t know anything about.” – August
THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES was shot on location during the months of January and February 2008, primarily in Burgaw, a small North Carolina town outside Wilmington. Much of the movie was filmed in a beautiful old house, painted Pepto-Bismol pink, just like in the book – though it took the director three attempts before she finally settled on the right shade. “The first time we painted it, I actually loved the color but it was a little too salmon,” the director explains. “Then we went too Pepto Bismol and it was just wrong. Finally, we arrived at this happy medium that everybody was pleased with.”
With the exterior in place, production designer Warren Alan Young, together with his property master and set-decorating crew, proceeded to transform the large old house into a 1960’s home, referencing magazines and catalogues from the era. “With writer Sue Monk Kidd’s help, we came up with a history for the house that put it near the end of slavery, when the Boatwright sister’s grandparents would have acquired the home,” Young explains.
One of the film’s other pivotal sets, May’s “Wailing Wall,” was constructed as a two feet by two-and-a-half-feet-wide stone wall, just large enough for Okonedo to sit on, per the director’s request. It was that kind of care that stamped the film.
Honored when renowned African-American artist Charles Bibbs agreed to collaborate with the filmmakers to create signature artwork for the honey jars featured in THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES, the design process became an exciting and fruitful one. Following multiple design consultations and subsequent conversations, Bibbs’ initial sketches included pencil renderings, which later evolved into color, before the artist finalized his image of the Black Madonna.
A highly respected contemporary artist who has enjoyed success with his fine art and popular graphics, Bibbs internationally acclaimed body of work is a fusion of cross-cultural themes including African, African-American and Native American aesthetics. Also a committed cultural philanthropist and community leader, his leadership has culminated in the establishment of numerous non-profit arts and media organizations benefiting minority artists and youth across the nation.
But all those involved knew this production was something special, something significant. Prince-Bythewood kept thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr. – particularly when she found herself and her team shooting on his birthday. “I found it fascinating that, at the time this movie takes place, he was alive fighting for us,” she says. “You look around the crew and it’s very diverse. That was his dream – that we could all be there, putting this story on the screen.”
The Secret Life of Bees (2008)
Directed by: Gina Prince-Bythewood
Starring: Queen Latifah, Dakota Fanning, Jennifer Hudson, Sophie Okonedo, Alicia Keys, Paul Bettany, Hilarie Burton, Sharon Conley, Nicky Buggs, Jasmine Burke, Shondrella Avery
Screenplay by: Sue Monk Kidd
Production Design by: Warren Alan Young
Cinematography by: Rogier Stoffers
Film Editing by: Terilyn A. Shropshire
Costume Design by: Sandra Hernandez
Set Decoration by: James Edward Ferrell Jr.
Art Direction by: William G. Davis, Alan Hook
Music by: Mark Isham
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic material and some violence.
Studio: Fox Searchlight Pictures
Release Date: October 17, 2008
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