Adapting Henrik Ibsen is an age-old tradition, so it’s exciting when an artist comes along with a truly fresh vision of the titanic playwright’s work. Nia DaCosta’s “Hedda” is one of those visions. Ibsen’s 1891 play “Hedda Gabler” stands tall above the history of stagecraft as one of the most provocative works in the medium, and it has drawn no shortage of brilliant artists over the decades. Both the play and its titular role, of a woman trapped in a house and a marriage she cannot tolerate, have been iterated upon since the 19th century.
DaCosta’s adaptation and Tessa Thompson’s interpretation of the character are both such strong new ideas of what this play and who this woman can be. DaCosta, an SFFILM Rainin Grantee Alumna for her 2018 debut “Little Woods,” also starring Thompson, has worked with the star three times now. Their collaborative effort is invigorating and “Hedda” is, on the whole, a glamorous and zippy affair that entices its audience just as Hedda entices her guests to a night of gossip, debauchery and high society drama.
In adapting Ibsen’s play, DaCosta introduces new elements into the fold such as setting it in postwar 1950s England, shifting a key character’s gender and having Tessa Thompson play the titular role, a role often played by white women. “Hedda” has been percolating in DaCosta’s mind for years and bringing it to fruition had no straight and easy path.
DaCosta screened the film at the Roxie theater with a Q&A on Tuesday, and on the day of the streaming release of “Hedda,” DaCosta spoke at length about her journey through the production process with Golden Gate Xpress.
Interview
(Here are the edited excerpts from our conversation.)
Hammel: What’s your relationship to Hedda?
DaCosta: I read the play when I was 22, getting my master’s in London. We read [Ibsen’s] “A Doll’s House” first. It’s basically a perfect play… “Oh, he’s so interested in complicated women,” and I read “Hedda [Gabler]” and I thought, “Wow, she’s beyond complicated.” She’s hard to get on board with and hard to understand. That’s part of her tragedy. She has a hard time understanding herself, and her boredom and also her repression and oppression is so catalyzing to her to do some sort of terrible things. As vicious as she is, she is vulnerable as well. I was trying to put a picture together of her and putting that picture together made me ask questions, not just about her and her choices and her life and if she was living her “truth” as it were. It also made me think about my own choices and my own life and, in general, how we all contend with the bodies we’re born into and with what that tells the outside world about us and how they treat us.
Hammel: When did you first conceptualize an adaptation?
DaCosta: I think the same year I read it. It was the fact that it was so compelling and she was so compelling, and confounding and controversial. When the play came out initially – it was 1891, it was Norway – everyone was like, how fucking dare you put this trash, this unrealistic woman in front of us! It was a strong negative reaction. It was like when “[The] Rite of Spring” went up for the first time. Everyone was freaking out. One of the first things I did was to make Ejlert Lövborg [into] Eileen Lövborg because, in the play, that character’s a man and I made that character a woman. I was really compelled by women trying to find personhood and agency in a world that tells them they don’t deserve either things, or those things are at best tertiary to the other roles they should be playing. Having another woman like Eileen would really be a great foil to Hedda and her struggle and journey. That made Thea, as a character, raise up more, so these three women are on these parallel paths of freedom or personhood. In 2018, I finally sat down and wrote it.
Hammel: Tessa Thompson is such a powerhouse in the movie. You have a history of collaboration with her, you wrote the movie with her in mind. What was it about Tessa that made you think of her for Hedda?
DaCosta: She’s really great at playing characters with a serene surface with a lot of turmoil going on under that surface. She’s so great at conveying a lot of emotion from behind the mask and there’s so much nuance to her performance and so much nuance to the way you see flickers behind the mask, when you see the masks change. There’s so much rigor to the way she works, she’s so specific and detailed and the research she does is immense and she’s a perfectionist, you know. All that’s such a great list of reasons to collaborate with someone and she has them all.
Hammel: How has [your collaboration] developed over the years?
DaCosta: It’s so fun! Well, it’s hilarious because it wasn’t like we worked together steadily over 10 years. We just became closer and closer friends over the past 10 years and then she was there for my first film, seeing me figuring out what the hell I’m doing on a big set. Then she was on “The Marvels,” the Marvel film I made, for a day and a half and that was fun, I think, for her because she doesn’t have to carry anything, she comes in, plays a character that she knows, and gets to watch me run this big set. I think that was fun for her. But then coming back to this, now we’re both – she’s at a certain place in her career, I’m in a certain place in my career – so it felt like meeting again as more mature, stronger artists and that was fun.
Hammel: You’re coming off “The Marvels,” and that was coming off “Candyman,” those are two bigger films, kind of franchise IP. Was the shift to something more personal and smaller in scale intentional?
DaCosta: Super intentional. Super intentional. I was really ready, like, “Okay, I have the experience.” I did my first movie, an independent film. I went to huge leaps up in terms of budget and size for the next two films, studio films, and then it was, “Okay. Great, I did that. I know what that is. Who am I again?” And I had “Hedda” and I’d been thinking about it over the years and I was just ready.
Hammel: Nina Hoss is amazing and the decision to make Ejlert into Eileen changes the text and it makes the dynamics between everyone richer, there is that undercurrent of bigotry and suspicion and it makes it more lurid for the men onlooking, but also so tense between the women. Centralizing women, also centralizing Eileen’s character, how did you come to that decision to make it a queer story and that relationship queer? Also casting Nina Hoss because she’s… (gestures ecstatically).
DaCosta: She’s the GOAT, basically. It was hilarious. I didn’t even think about it becoming a queer story or the characters becoming queer. It was just, “Ejlert should be Eileen, cool.” Now it’s three queer women at the center of the story and that so influences what will happen to them and how people will treat them and how all those conversations get weighted now. That’s really heavy now, actually… Same with Hedda being played by Tessa and being a Black woman… All those other shades are here that influence the way people treat her, the way she thinks about herself and her father. Nina Hoss was basically the first person we asked, like the first and only person for this part. She just is exceptional and operating on a whole other level than most people. If you’re going to make a strong choice in shifting a character, you have to have someone embody that character who can make all the naysayers go, “You know what, maybe I don’t like it, but I love that.” That’s what Nina Hoss brings besides her insane talent.
Hammel: Tessa, to circle back to her, she’s having fun, she’s enjoying everything just as Hedda is, but she can flip on a dime. What was it like working with her to create this iteration of the character? Because it’s such a storied legacy of a character, but this is so her own and your own.
DaCosta: It’s from melding our two understandings of the character and trying to have — I don’t think any two people will ever be on the same page about Hedda and Tessa and I were not — I think for me, it was about merging our circles so the Venn diagram was mostly one circle, but you have these little outer edges. What Tessa brought to the table, which I loved, was, in the same way that a child is capable of cruelty and can hit someone without knowing what it means or throw their toys off a pram, they’re also innocent. You have all these levels of her and there are moments in the film where she looks so childlike when she’s realizing what she’s done or when she’s being confronted by George in the study and she’s holding the manuscript. These moments where you go, “Oh, she’s just a fucking kid, isn’t she?”
Hammel: Just the way she moves throughout the entire house and the film itself is so, not animalistic, but she has this primal sense of…
DaCosta: She’s a predator.
Hammel: It’s so compelling to watch. How did you balance her being the center of the film with the ensemble? Because you have Nina Hoss, but also [Tom] Bateman and Kathryn Hunter — she’s so fun — how did you balance when to center her in the film versus letting it breathe?
DaCosta: That was all in the script. I knew that the movie would start slowly and then ratchet up and then the fucking chandelier would drop. And then, “Okay, now let’s go to a little monologue.” All of that was written into the script. Everything in Eileen’s act is my interpretation of what happened off-stage in the play. It’s not just important to watch Hedda do her thing. So much of the film is about consequences and how her whimsicality has its consequences. We had to see the consequences. In the play, Hedda doesn’t see any of her consequences. She hears about them. In the movie, I wanted to mirror that somewhat, so that’s why I knew that Hedda’s going to go away and we’re going to be with Eileen. At this point in the movie, a lot of people are going to go, “Fuck Hedda! I hope she falls down some stairs,” and your empathy or who you root for would probably shift to Eileen by that point.
Hammel: The dynamic between the two is incredible and you rarely, especially in films of this scale, get to see women be this unlikable, but they’re so dynamic and their performances are so controlled and poised, yet they can also be unhinged. Did you have fun with the opportunity to be able to do that?
DaCosta: I had so much fun watching them. It was really — like the scene where Hedda tries to get Eileen to drink — just watching the three of them go back and forth and bing-bing-bing.
Hammel: It’s like a tennis match.
DaCosta: It really is. I knew how I would edit it. I knew that I would be in the singles and go back and forth or do the two shots and singles and figure that out, but I wanted that rhythm to be there without me having to force it in the edit. It’s just so much fun and it is so nice to see, in the same way that Hedda wants everyone’s animals to come out in the movie, seeing these actors, seeing their animals come out in these scenes and just really go for it.
“Hedda” is now playing in select theaters and streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
