“The level of devastation that Sanaa went to on that bench was real,” Prince-Bythewood recalls. “She was different that day, she was very quiet, and I like to joke on set but she wasn’t joking back. Then she told me, ‘Can I have some space,’ and I didn’t understand it until we started filming and I saw the level that she went to and it was great.”
Throughout the film, Prince-Bythewood shows the reality of sports training and competition and how it differs for men and women. During the college quarter of the story, we see the juxtaposition of Quincy and Monica’s games – where his take place in a massive stadium with a big crowd and televised commentary, hers are hosted in smaller gyms. Quincy is also able to drop out of college and join the NBA draft whereas Monica has to go to Europe to play professionally because the WNBA hadn’t been formed yet.
“Growing up playing sports, back in high school, we were really good but we would have only about 10 people in our crowd,” says Prince-Bythewood. “Other students didn’t come. And then you look at the college where we were shooting and the women played in the small gym where they practised but the men had a big beautiful one. The disparity has always been there and continues to be there to this day.”
Happy ever after?
However, she believes that this movie is a love story first and foremost, and in order to make sure the romantic ending was as progressive as her narrative on female athletes and womanhood, she had to make a major change from the original script. “I’ve never told anyone this but in the original draft, Quincy shows up at Monica’s wedding [when] she’s going to be getting married to someone else,” says Prince-Bythewood. “He shows up, breaks up the wedding and they take off.
“At Sundance, I had great advisors and someone pointed out that you’re doing something so progressive in three-quarters of the movie, and then you fall back on the traditional trope, so why not continue with the progressiveness and have her win him back? [They] were absolutely right.”
The launch of the US Women’s National Basketball Association in 1997, during the development of the film, provided the cherry on top of this ending. After winning her man back, Prince-Bythewood shows Monica a few years later playing in the newly formed women’s league while her husband Quincy and their daughter watch from the sidelines.
“I wanted to tell women that you could have it all; you could have the career and you could have love because so often, especially back in the day when I was writing this, the world told us it had to be one or the other,” says Prince-Bythewood.