Nia DaCosta stayed calm. She had one night to shoot scenes in an elaborate maze, through which the characters of her drama, “Hedda,” run, conspire, have sex and swear revenge. But someone on set at the stately Flintham Hall in Nottinghamshire, England, had cut a cable by mistake, and the complicated lighting rig was down.
“It was the middle of the night, in the middle of the countryside, with no obvious solution,” said Nina Hoss, one of the stars of the movie, which is now in theaters and streaming on Amazon. “If I were the director, I would have been jumping around: The money! The time! But she made jokes, the light guys found some spotlights, we all played card games to stay awake, then shot the scenes. Nia can hold a set like that.”
It’s only seven years since DaCosta, 35, made her directorial debut with “Little Woods,” the story of two North Dakota sisters (Tessa Thompson and Lily James) barely scraping by and confronted by impossible choices in a bleak, unforgiving landscape.
“Afterwards, I thought, I’m never going to work again,” DaCosta said with a laugh.
Not so.
First came “Candyman,” a reimagining of the 1992 horror film, produced by Jordan Peele, who was also a co-writer with her on it. Then DaCosta became the first Black female director hired by Marvel Studios, for the woman-fronted “The Marvels.” And since writing and directing “Hedda,” based on Ibsen’s seminal 1891 play, “Hedda Gabler,” she has made the horror sequel “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple,” due in January.
So: gritty indie realism, horror, superheroes, psychological period thriller, postapocalyptic gore. Is there a through-line?
“I am really interested in people, particularly women, doing unconventional things, and drawn to people living on the fringes of society,” DaCosta said in a recent interview at a London hotel. “And I am super interested in the idea of freedom — at whose expense do you enjoy your personal freedom?”
That’s an important question in “Hedda,” a sumptuous rethinking that moves the classic from a villa drawing room in late 19th-century Norway to a grand country estate in 1950s England, with a biracial, bisexual title character (played by Thompson) intent on spinning a web of deception, seduction and destruction.
DaCosta’s central twist is to transform Hedda’s former lover, the alcoholic Eilert Lovborg, into a woman, Eileen Lovborg (Hoss), whose announcement that she will attend a party given by Hedda and her husband, George Tesman (Tom Bateman), sets off a catastrophic chain of events.
(The movie has received love-it or hate-it reviews: “While DaCosta’s intelligence as a writer and director makes ‘Hedda’ a standout film, her penchant for play makes it a delightful one,” Natalia Winkelman wrote in her Critic’s Pick review for The New York Times. “Ridiculous,” Peter Bradshaw said in The Guardian. )
The Tesmans are in debt and the lavish lifestyle Hedda wants remains out of reach unless George can secure a lucrative university position. But that post seems likely to go to Eileen, who is about to publish a groundbreaking manuscript, which she brings to the party. (What could possibly go wrong?) Also in the mix is Thea (Imogen Poots), who has left her husband for the newly sober Eileen.
“Part of the reason I made Lovborg a woman is that I didn’t want to let Hedda off the hook too much,” DaCosta said. “Yes, she is trapped in this house married to a man she doesn’t love, she is pregnant — maybe — and so she does horrific things. But I am interested in how she has also limited herself. There is Eileen, who has made brave choices to live the way she wants to. There is Thea, who left her husband. These are things Hedda can’t do.”
In a telephone interview, Thompson said that the gender switch meant there were “reflections of other women front and center, and we see different pathways to agency and personhood inside a female experience. Hedda is hemmed in by herself as much as by society and her era.”
DaCosta first read the play in 2012, while studying for a master’s degree at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Over the years, she said, she kept thinking about “Hedda Gabler,” so endlessly reinterpreted by great actors (Maggie Smith, Glenda Jackson, Fiona Shaw, Cate Blanchett among them), and about why the play spoke to her.
Soon after the release of “Little Woods” in 2018, she found herself with two free weeks and wrote an adaptation. “I wanted to make people ask: Do you know why you do the things you do, why you are in the life you are in now?” she said. “For Hedda, it’s, how did I get here? Like waking up in a bad dream and trying to claw your way out.”
Joking that she had probably watched Robert Altman’s “Gosford Park” too many times, DaCosta said that she set the action in 1950s England because of her interest in the postwar era. “There was an impulse to go back to the way things were,” she said. “Women out of the work force and back to the home; men, who were traumatized en masse, back to roles they were supposed to perform. It’s a context in which everyone is in pain, everyone is pretending.”
Also, she added, “I love the English country house murder-mystery trappings — the hand that picks up the gun, the shadow on the wall.”
The film makes more of Hedda’s sexual identity than her race, which DaCosta said she wanted as “an element of who she is” rather than a driver of plot. She is isolated, and more so by virtue of her race,” DaCosta said. “The one time she brings it up, Eileen says, ‘Whatever.’ It felt more potent to be realistic about the way people ignore or can’t talk about these pieces of identity.”
DaCosta herself was raised in Harlem in New York City by her mother, Charmaine DaCosta, a singer with the group Worl-A-Girl, who took her two children to ballet, operas, plays and performance art. “My mother was really aware of how easy it was for Black girls to feel ugly or stupid or believe the lines that we are lazy,” DaCosta said. “She made sure I knew that beauty wasn’t one thing.”
Her love for film bloomed early. “I was a latchkey kid and I would get home from school and watch movies like ‘Full Metal Jacket’ and ‘Apocalypse Now,’” she said. “But I didn’t know what about it I loved, so I thought I wanted to be an actor. My mother said, No, you are a writer, you are sensitive. I think you want to be a director.”
DaCosta studied film at New York University while working as a television production assistant, and then applied to programs in England, where her father was born. “I realized here how important craft is,” she said, “and I fell in love with theater. It was a complete awakening.”
After returning to New York, she took jobs as a crew member and as a personal assistant on reality television shows like “Kesha: My Crazy Beautiful Life” and on Martin Scorsese’s series “Vinyl.” While she worked, she was writing scripts and applying to the Sundance Institute’s Directors and Screenwriters Lab, where in 2015, “I met all these amazing directors, Robert Redford was there, my head was spinning.”
She also met Thompson, who was one of the actors assigned to each filmmaker. Though DaCosta was among the youngest participants, “I was so struck by her poise and confidence,” Thompson said. “A few days in, she said to me, ‘When I make this movie, will you make it with me?’ She didn’t say ‘if.’”
That movie was “Little Woods,” which established DaCosta as a filmmaker of tightly edited, aesthetically coherent narratives. “It was clear that she could direct actors and make meaning visually,” The Times’s chief film critic, Manohla Dargis, wrote of the movie later. “She didn’t just clutter the frame with talking heads; she set (and exploited) moods.”
The industry noticed. Her first studio film, “Candyman,” followed, and then “The Marvels.”
“I want to make big movies of my own, so I thought I should make someone else’s big movie first,” she explained, though she was diplomatic about the experience of working on “The Marvels.” “Parts of it were joyful and parts of it were hard,” she said, adding that because of the pandemic, the film, a box-office flop, took three and a half years. “Anyone who goes in knows you have to let go of a bit of yourself,” she said.
With “Hedda,” she added, “I wanted to come back to me as a filmmaker, to my own writing and my own voice.”
The director and actor Janicza Bravo, who met DaCosta early in her career, said that “what Nia has most proven is her dexterity, her ability to shift with tonal ease from one film to another. Her signature is more elastic than not.”
Hoss, who has played Ibsen’s title role onstage in her native Germany, said that one of DaCosta’s strongest qualities was her ability to write for the screen. “I think my character has the biggest text changes in relation to the play, and yet I never felt it was far from the play,” Hoss said. “And then everything is thought out: the house, the costumes, the color palette, the camera language, the lights. You talk, you rehearse. Then she says, let’s see what you guys make of it all. She creates that atmosphere of trust to show yourself, to fail, to do it differently.”
The ending — spoiler alert! — is more ambiguous than it is in the play, in which, after burning Lovborg’s manuscript and engineering his suicide, Hedda kills herself.
“I thought it would be great,” DaCosta said, “if you had the thought, ‘Oh no, what will tomorrow bring?’”
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