Filmmaker Nia DaCosta doesn't want to be limited by genre. Her movie credits include an indie film (Little Woods), a horror blockbuster (Candyman) and a foray into the superhero universe (The Marvels).
"I have this feeling of having to prove myself ... and part of that was knowing I need to not get typecast," DaCosta says. "I need to also pursue these other genres that I love, like horror, like comic book movies."
DaCosta's latest film, Hedda, is something more personal, a project she wrote years ago and couldn't shake. In it, she reimagines Henrik Ibsen's 1891 play, Hedda Gabler, recasting the main character as a queer, mixed-race Black woman and transporting the action to a 1950s English manor.
The film tells a twisted story of jealousy and control as it follows Hedda (played by Tessa Thompson) over the course of one wild, unsettling night. For DaCosta, situating the film in post-War England offered a perfect parallel to the upheaval of our modern age.
"I'm a bit of a stoic … when it comes to trying to navigate the horrors of humanity in our present day. And history really helps me to sort of process what's happening, the cyclical nature of it," she says. "So many of the conflicts that we're dealing with now are directly related to the end of [WWII] ... I think the '50s were this time of a reaction to trauma in a way that I found really fascinating."
Interview highlights
On reimagining Ibsen's title character as a Black woman
When I came to writing a script, I always thought a Black woman would be the center because I wanted more visions of us and more diverse kinds of visions of Black women in media. And also I was lucky enough to have Tessa Thompson as a collaborator in my first film and as a very good friend. And I just thought, oh, Tessa's gonna play Hedda. That was just an assumption I made and I told her about it. And so from that point on, I'm like, yeah so now Hedda is a Black, mixed-race woman is this dimension that I have to feed into the script.
On escaping into art as a kid
My parents got divorced when I was 9 and it wasn't one of those very easy, amicable ones. And so I think my way of dealing with any sort of emotional strain or stress was by escaping into art, by reading lots of books, by watching movies and watching TV. And that paired up quite nicely with the fact that I'm a very curious person. I find curiosity to be a really important quality and that drove me. That was like the engine, but ... I love to disappear into things. And I think part of that was just a way to deal with trauma.
On directing Candyman, and why she likes to tackle big ideas through horror
You can really push people out of their comfort zones. You can be really confrontational in horror films because people go into horror films the way they get onto a roller coaster. If you're on a bus, on a midtown bus trying to get across town and it starts careening everywhere, that's not fun. But if you get onto a roller coaster, you know what you're signing up for. And I think that horror, people know they're signing for an extreme experience, they're setting up for discomfort. And that means you can push a lot more into it.
On what she learned from working as a production assistant for Steven Soderbergh, Steve McQueen and Martin Scorsese
I was a production office PA, which was good because I would write my scripts at my desk. But when I got to go to set it was really awesome to watch them run the set. They're all very different people. But what I learned was everything comes from the top. Because even in the production office, you feel the difference because of how the director is running the set.
When I was working on The Knick, which is the Stephen Soderbergh TV show, I think a PA got yelled at by someone, and the production manager said, "Whoa, whoa, who yelled at you? We don't do that here." And she went and talked to the person. And that's a Soderbergh thing. It's like, everyone is respected here. And I thought it was so inspiring how that comes from the top. And then on Steve McQueen's sets, he comes to the production office and I visit the set some time and you just see the way he talks to people and the gentleness, but also the sheer honesty with which he communicates. I was like, ah, noted.
And then Scorsese, I mean, geez, that was so amazing for me. That was my first big scripted job, PAing on the pilot of Vinyl and it was a whole production, oh my goodness. I mean, 24-hour production office. Which I have not experienced since. … I learned there, it's like those sorts of big muscular productions, it's like the rigor of the work, that like the seriousness with which he's pursuing perfection was really inspiring as well. But still, the sheer skill and experience of the people there, It was very Hollywood, I'll say. It was very cool.
On learning to be uncompromising with her vision
I was educated in many predominantly white institutions, and you learn what being a Black woman does to the sound of your voice, to how much presence you have in a room. You learn pretty quickly what it means to other people and how that changes … how you're perceived, and how you are perceived changes perhaps how you will approach compromise, for example, or being uncompromising. That has been very helpful because Hollywood is a predominantly white space. …
I've always [believed] kind honesty will get you through. But as I've gotten older and as I've become more confident, sometimes it's a hard "No, I am not doing that," or, "Guess what? I'm doing this" … even though I know that perhaps you'll perceive that as more aggressive because I'm a Black woman. I'm OK with that. … When I was younger, I felt like I would lose something if I wasn't always fully liked or seen as being polite and accommodating. Now that's not really my concern. My concern is the work.
Ann Marie Baldonado and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
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