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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. And today I'm talking with director Nia DaCosta, who's had a meteoric rise over the past few years. Little Woods, her first feature in 2018, was an intimate story about two sisters in North Dakota who turned to a life of crime to make ends meet.
It got a lot of attention, including from Jordan Peele, who later brought DaCosta on to reimagine the horror classic Candyman. That film made DaCosta the first Black woman to direct a movie that opened at number one at the U.S. box office. DaCosta made history again with the Marvels, becoming the youngest director and first Black woman to helm a film in the Marvel Universe.
And now she's turned to something even more personal. a project she wrote years ago and never let go of. It's called Hedda, and it's DaCosta's take on Henrik Ibsen's 1891 play Hedda Gabler. In DaCosta's hands, the story becomes a dark exploration of a woman suffocating in a life she never wanted, trapped in a 1950s English manor house over the course of one wild, unsettling night.
Tessa Thompson stars as Hedda, and here's a scene at the start of the film where police interrogate her about what happened that night.
Hedda Tessman. Is that right this is your husband's home?
Hedda is mine.
So could you tell us the events of the evening, the way you remember them leading up to the shooting?
You know, my memory's a bit fuzzy. It was a party after all. Certainly I can do my best. The first thing I remember seeing is a bloody mess of a person dragged into my foyer. Before that, please. There was a lot of yelling. Earlier. Where should I start?
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