Chi­nonye Chuk­wu: ​‘I felt that the cam­era can­not be a voyeuris­tic lens’

Chi­nonye Chuk­wu made con­sid­er­able waves with her 2019 fea­ture Clemen­cy, and her sec­ond fea­ture, Till, focus­es on the true sto­ry of 14-year-old Emmett Till who was lynched in Mis­sis­sip­pi in 1995. His moth­er Mamie Till, played expert­ly by Danielle Dead­wyler, became a civ­il rights icon after decid­ing to dis­play his body to the world.

LWLies: I under­stand Till has been 18 years in the mak­ing in terms of gath­er­ing the nec­es­sary research. I’m inter­est­ed at what point you came on board, and how free you felt to add your flair?

Chuk­wu: The pro­duc­ers reached out to me three years ago, and asked me if I would be inter­est­ed in mak­ing this film. And so I told them that the only way to be inter­est­ed is if the sto­ry is about Mamie, and her jour­ney as seen from her emo­tion­al point of view. And it got me real­ly excit­ed at the oppor­tu­ni­ty to cen­tre a Black woman in her right­ful place in his­to­ry. And they believed so much in my artis­tic and nar­ra­tive vision, and also in my artis­tic abil­i­ties, that they gave me cre­ative auton­o­my, to tell the sto­ry the way that it need­ed to be told.

When I talk about your flair as a direc­tor, I think about the scene ear­ly on in the car where Danielle Deadwyler’s face changes and the sound warps. And I was won­der­ing if you could talk about those choices.

The emo­tion­al sub­text of that is the fore­bod­ing that Mamie is feel­ing that’s under­cut­ting the real­ly lov­ing, joy­ous moment that she’s shar­ing with her son. That sub­text was some­thing that Danielle and I talked a lot about, espe­cial­ly the sub­text through­out the whole script, we went through every sin­gle emo­tion­al beat, every nuance in every scene mul­ti­ple times. And so she had great clar­i­ty about what was going on under­neath Mamie and brought it out in such a bril­liant, expres­sive way.

Was there any rehearsal time?

Danielle and I spent months before shoot­ing going through every sin­gle beat mul­ti­ple times, div­ing into the research and talk­ing every day about the dis­cov­er­ies that were made and ques­tions we had. And then I had a much more trun­cat­ed ver­sion of that with sev­er­al of the oth­er actors. And then there were rehearsals for cer­tain scenes before shoot­ing. By the time we got on set, Danielle espe­cial­ly had an inher­ent emo­tion­al and psy­cho­log­i­cal under­stand­ing of what was going on with Mamie and what her jour­ney was going to be in the film.

I want­ed to talk about the cos­tum­ing as well, because Mamie as we see her in this film, is always impec­ca­bly dressed.

I want us to open the film with, you know, this beau­ti­ful pink dress, I just want pops of colour and vibran­cy. I want the clothes to be reflec­tive of the beau­ty and the vibran­cy that is in Black peo­ple and that exist in Black spaces and Black com­mu­ni­ties. We also drew inspi­ra­tion from the actu­al clothes Mamie wore in cer­tain scenes and Mar­ci made exact repli­cas of that. Mar­ci just knocked it out the park, it was so cohe­sive with the pro­duc­tion design and with the light­ing too.

Being so metic­u­lous in your approach to the whole sto­ry, how did you approach reveal­ing the body?

So the first thing I knew is that every direc­to­r­i­al deci­sion I make is tied to sto­ry and what’s going on in terms of what’s under­neath the words on the page. I knew that I want­ed that scene to be human­is­ing not objec­ti­fy­ing – that the cam­era can­not be a voyeuris­tic lens. We need to expe­ri­ence Mamie’s emo­tion­al jour­ney in see­ing her son’s body. That’s why we open the scene with the body obstruct­ed, we’re pre­serv­ing the pri­va­cy that Mamie is hav­ing with her son. And then I knew that I want­ed to reveal the body as Mamie is see­ing it, and allow us to cap­ture the care and love that she is expe­ri­enc­ing. That’s of course inter­min­gled with the pain of it all.

And I believe that in us doing so we were able to real­ly human­ise the expe­ri­ence. It was tough. I restrict­ed that scene to two takes ahead of time and I told the crew to make it as great as pos­si­ble, but what­ev­er we have in two takes that’s what’s going to be in the film because I don’t want to put Danielle through that mul­ti­ple times. And that’s what we did. And it was a very som­bre day, we real­ly were silent and respect­ing the seri­ous­ness of what we were doing and mak­ing sure that Danielle felt as sup­port­ed as pos­si­ble to go there.