After hits with Bob Marley and Will Smith, what’s a director do next?

We live in a world in which a Bob Marley biopic has grossed nearly as much as Aquaman 2, completely outpaced Madame Web, and currently stands as the third-highest-grossing movie of 2024. Bob Marley: One Love, which stars Kingsley Ben-Adir (Peaky Blinders, Secret Invasion) as the reggae titan, and Lashana Lynch (No Time to Die, The Woman King) as his wife and confidante, Rita, is pure grounded drama — and another major win for director Reinaldo Marcus Green.

Green has made a career out of telling the tales of extraordinary but mortal people in ways that go down easy. He loves drama, truth, and character exploration, but he still wants his popcorn. Green’s debut film, Monsters and Men, was a raw, indirect examination of the killing of Eric Garner that played to raves out of the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. His follow-up, Joe Bell, teamed him with Mark Wahlberg for the true story of a father walking across America to tell his son’s story. King Richard was his major breakthrough, scoring a Best Picture nomination and an Oscar win for star Will Smith, who starred as Richard Williams, the father and coach of famed tennis players Venus and Serena Williams.

One Love puts Green back in biographical territory, but given the challenges of telling this story, it doesn’t feel like he’s typecasting himself. With Bob Marley: One Love now out on Blu-ray and digital, Polygon sat down with Green to talk about what it means to be the kind of director who has built enough cred that studios trust him, but potentially box him in by his reputation. That dynamic has turned his career into a tricky balancing act where micro-decisions can matter a lot.

Polygon: You walked into One Love carrying the cred of an Oscar-winning film, and now the movie is a big hit. You are a reigning king of dramatization. Is that where you expected to be? Is that where you want to be?

Reinaldo Marcus Green: I think I’m right where I need to be. As a kid, I played baseball, so all I thought about [making movies] was, Maybe one day I’ll make the major leagues. Then you make the major leagues, and then you’re like, Wait, I don’t want to just be here; I want to say something, or I want to make it to the hall of fame. There came a point early in my career where I made it to the major leagues, when I made my first film [Monsters and Men]. So how do you stay in the major leagues, this place I dreamed about as a kid? I guess it’s finding a voice and who you want to be and what you want to say, then leaning into that. If I hit 30 home runs this year, I want to hit 40 home runs next year, then 50. You have to know your limit, your lane, your strengths.

My strengths were at least telling stories that mean something to me, or that matter. I didn’t have to look that far in, in the films that I’ve chosen, because the heartbeat is so strong. And I didn’t create that heartbeat. It was just the stories that I’m telling, whether it was Joe Bell and a father that walks across the country in the absence of his son, or King Richard, raising five girls in Compton, two of them to become two of the greatest to ever do it. Or a homeless kid from the streets of Trenchtown who rises from the ashes to become one of the greatest musicians to ever do it. These are just remarkable stories with a tremendous heartbeat.

I take great pride in finding those stories and trying to be a part of things that matter, to not only a community of people where I grew up in, but global stories, people that don’t know these stories, people that don’t know the impact they’ve had on our communities. I try to share them with wider audiences. So yeah, I’ve been just grinding! Trying to find it.

Did One Love feel like a 50-home-run movie, or did you have to tailor it to be one?

To keep using the analogy, if you’re hitting 30 home runs, you have the power, you’ve clearly shown that you have the power. It’s not like I need to get more power to hit more home runs. You have to get smarter about how you get more home runs. That comes through preparation and precision. It’s not If I lift more weights, I’m going to actually get more home runs — that may have an adverse effect on your swing. So how do you add to your arsenal so you can be smarter about the pitch count you have?

Photo: Reinaldo Marcus Green/Paramount Pictures

So then it’s like: What did I learn from King Richard? I assembled a team that I really loved. So who are the players that are going to continue on to this journey? And then how do we build culture? A lot of what I do is building a team and building culture — a winning culture. “Winning” and “losing” in film is not necessarily about money. It’s about respect, and that what we’re doing is a unified effort. We’re making a movie about Bob Marley. We’re not just making a movie about anybody. This takes a certain amount of care. This could be your Saturdays and Sundays — people don’t like working Saturdays and Sundays. So how do you get people excited to work on Saturday?

That’s part of the trickery of becoming a filmmaker. We’re on this journey. We’re climbing Everest together. And not everybody has the same skill set, so how do we use our skill sets to create the alchemy of a winning team? Kingsley Ben-Adir is the guy that’s going to have to take that flag and plant it on the top of Everest. We’re not all fit to be able to do that. He has to carry that for us. But we have to help him get to the place that he can then go and do that. That’s part of the team-building, and the alchemy of making movies. How do you build a cast? How do you build a team so you can have a successful movie? If I were a pilot, it’s not like I could land the plane sometimes. That’s the job. It’s the mission; you have to get it down. And you hope you can do it smoothly.

Marley’s life has been so commodified through the T-shirt-ification of his image and compilations that sanded down the edges of his music. Was there tension in adapting his life into a big studio movie that could play to the masses?

You want to get the hits, right? It’s what people come to the movie for. You’ve got to make sure you have the popcorn when you go to the theater. But people want to be surprised, and more so today than ever. There’s so much noise out there. People want real stories, they want human stories, they want to feel something. Joy, happiness, sadness — whatever that is, they want the rainbow of emotions when you go to the movies, and that’s what we’re trying to do. For us it was figuring out what part of Bob’s life we were going to tell.

You couldn’t do everything. I mean, it’s impossible. Two hours, three hours — there’s only so much life we can tell. We chose ’76 to ’78 because we thought it was the richest period of Bob’s life. “Richest” in terms of what defined Bob as the man that we know, and the music that we know today. That’s what took him from being a musician to a revolutionary, what took him from being a national hero to a global superstar, ’76 to ’78.

The assassination attempt changed him forever. That moment changed us forever. It’s what gave us his music on a global scale. So people knew him in Jamaica, but he was not known in Europe, he was not known in Asia, and he was not known in the Americas. And so the reason we know Bob is ’76 to ’78. Now people have rediscovered all his other music, but it was that period of time that brought him to another level. That’s what brought him to the T-shirts.

Photo: Chiabella James/Paramount Pictures

Were there scenes that were nearly cut — or cherished scenes that ultimately did go — that you wrestled over because of the economy of telling such a specific story? Is that batting with precision?

Well, on the home entertainment release, you will see a lot of things we left on the cutting-room floor. But that being said, I think we needed to shoot them in order to find what was necessary for the story we were telling. So what was the threshold of that?

We went back and ended up getting a scene with young Bob, the moment his father left in Jamaica, and that felt like a critical moment in understanding the psychology of someone that watches their father leave them. You know, in the script, it was a memory, it wasn’t a point of view of the kid seeing it. And so we wanted to show that, because I think it gives you insight into the older version of the “A story” Bob, to Kingsley, because you understand his pain in a way that you don’t have to belabor. It’s just something you feel.

And so all of those flashbacks that we decided to depict in the movie, like the moment that Rita introduces them to Rastafarianism, are turning points in Bob’s life that allow you to sink into Kingsley’s character.

You have come to specialize in dramatizing real life. Even in a movie like Monsters and Men, where you aren’t directly adapting a person’s life, you’re dealing in what some might call “documentary truth” — but it’s not documentary. So when do you know to crank up the fiction of a moment? Is there a scene in One Love where the story you’re telling is more important than how it really happened?

The shooting, and how the shooting happened, [is that]. Look, if you go to the Bob Marley museum, you see the bullets on the wall. They’re real. We know it really happened, and we know that it really happened in a kitchen. We don’t know who was there — we don’t know exactly who was in the room. But we heard that Bob knew who the shooters were. So in “movie world,” in order for us to see that, we have to see our character see him.

So we slow it down. We create a moment where Bob takes a very good look at the shooter, to show you that he sees the person that does it. He knows who it is. There’s no mistake. And so there are moments that you can depict, that help to tell that story in a way that maybe it didn’t happen precisely, but it happened. It doesn’t make it any less authentic, it just makes it authentic to the movie.

That’s one example. Playing “Redemption Song” around the fire at night with his children is a metaphor. It’s not that he didn’t play around the fire with his kids. I don’t know if he played “Redemption Song” that night around the fire. Probably not. But it doesn’t matter, because he had done that before — he had played around the fire at his house. And the movie is about the next generation of Bob Marley fans. That generation is from his offspring that are going to carry his legacy. So it’s an interpretation of the truth. Did the shooter walk in the house and have a conversation with them? Probably not. But Bob did forgive him. It’s the reason he came back to Jamaica. So it may not have happened exactly how you see it in the film. But it happened. It is dramatically true.

As you said at the top, you are in the major leagues. You don’t take the power to tell a story like One Love lightly. Do you see yourself veering in a different direction and doing a story of pure fiction, where you may have less responsibility to real-life figures?

I love big movies. I love Jurassic Park. I love E.T. I love Jaws. Give me Jerry Maguire. Give me Rain Man. Look, if you know Stephen King, tell him I’m a fan. I’m looking for the next one!