Nia DaCos­ta: ​‘Can­dy­man turns the white-sav­iour nar­ra­tive on its head’

In an indus­try where Black female direc­tors are few and far between Nia DaCos­ta is unprece­dent­ed. Her first film Lit­tle Woods pre­miered at Tribeca and won the Nora Ephron Award. After direct­ing some of the finest episodes of Top Boy she was cho­sen by Jor­dan Peele to write and direct Can­dy­man. Next she will helm the upcom­ing Cap­tain Mar­vel 2, the first sole Black female direc­tor on a Mar­vel film.

LWLies: Before embark­ing on this project, how did you process the racial pol­i­tics of Bernard Rose’s 1992 film version?

DaCos­ta: That film is a prod­uct of its time. I love Bernard’s work and I think he did such a great job with the first film but it’s def­i­nite­ly told from an outsider’s point of view. To expand the racial pol­i­tics and reimag­ine this story’s con­tin­u­a­tion a lot of it was about shift­ing the point of view. Being a Black direc­tor I was able to look at this sto­ry and do some­thing new with it, some­thing more expan­sive, that was very impor­tant to me. But for me when I first saw the film I wasn’t real­ly think­ing of the racial pol­i­tics, I was think­ing, ​‘Oh my god there’s a scary guy that lives in the projects’. When I watched it again I was could see there were so many dif­fer­ent lens­es through which you can watch this movie, through a fem­i­nist lens, through a white fem­i­nist lens, through the lens of race and gen­tri­fi­ca­tion and I want­ed to expand on all of that.

When telling a sto­ry cen­tred around a lynched Black man was it uncom­fort­able hav­ing his lega­cy be pre­dom­i­nant­ly ter­ror­is­ing a Black community?

Re-watch­ing that movie I didn’t get why he was killing Black peo­ple, and chas­ing after this white woman. We want­ed to be a bit more spe­cif­ic in our film about exact­ly how Can­dy­man oper­ates. At the end of the first film you realise he’s going after this woman as she’s the rein­car­nat­ed the love of his life who got him lynched in the first place and he’s going to return the favour. We talked a lot about how to shift from that film to this one.

Clive Barker’s nov­el picks at a priv­i­leged white sav­iour-nar­ra­tive. Was that some­thing you want­ed to address?

The first film has this white-sav­iour nar­ra­tive with Helen at its cen­tre. We talked about that when it came to con­tin­u­ing its lega­cy. We talked about it a lot with the crew and the actors. With­out giv­ing any­thing away, the film turns that white-sav­iour nar­ra­tive on its head.

This film has been described as a ​“spir­i­tu­al sequel” despite being set at Cabri­ni Green and hav­ing return­ing char­ac­ters. Why the distinction?

It gives us the room to do some­thing new and dif­fer­ent with the source mate­r­i­al. Bernard Rose took Clive Barker’s sto­ry and changed it whilst keep­ing the essence, and we want­ed to do the same thing.

Eddie Murphy’s jokes in Raw that you can’t make hor­ror films with Black peo­ple because we would imme­di­ate­ly leave a haunt­ed house. It came to mind in your trail­er when Tey­on­ah Paris asks who would sum­mon Can­dy­man and the trail­er cuts straight to a young white girl. Are those con­trasts key to mak­ing a Black hor­ror film?

In a film like ours that is so much about race and about Black peo­ple being in a space of ter­ror vs white peo­ple being in a space of ter­ror, that is a con­trast that you can play with. But I also don’t think that all hor­ror films by Black film­mak­ers have to be cen­tred around race-based trau­ma. Some peo­ple do just have a lot of free­dom and some peo­ple don’t, and in a film about black trau­ma, it’s some­thing you can have fun with.

The Can­dy­man teas­er reframes Can­dy­man him­self as an unwill­ing mar­tyr. I picked up ref­er­ences to George Stin­ney Jr and James Byrd Jr. Are we to view Can­dy­man as an anti­hero rather than a villain?

I always felt he was an anti­hero. He is a vil­lain in that he is doing bad things to peo­ple but it more than that. What I want­ed to do instead of just cre­at­ing a char­ac­ter who is bad and who’s sto­ry gets cal­lous­ly told over an intel­lec­tu­al din­ner is turn him into a real per­son and a real human being and see how a mon­ster gets made. For that short I def­i­nite­ly want­ed to allude to real peo­ple but the peo­ple in the shad­ow pup­petry are not specif­i­cal­ly real peo­ple. I don’t want to sug­gest that George Stin­ney Jr is Can­dy­man but his sto­ry is one that real­ly haunt­ed me. He was 14 when he was killed by the state and that real­ly informed how I thought about Candyman.

Peo­ple were so excit­ed when the Can­dy­man trail­er dropped, but it was framed it as the new Jor­dan Peele film. How did you deal with that erasure?

I get it. Jor­dan is the rea­son this film got made and the rea­son I got hired. He’s the one that every­one knows. Hav­ing said that, there is def­i­nite­ly a ten­den­cy of eras­ing female film­mak­ers. On a per­son­al lev­el I’m not super invest­ed in being a well-known direc­tor, but abstract­ly it was mov­ing to then see peo­ple try­ing to set the record straight.

How did the col­lab­o­ra­tion with Jor­dan work?

I had to be able to express my own aes­thet­ic and vision. We have very dif­fer­ent aes­thet­ics so it was hard to bal­ance what I would do with the movie that we were all mak­ing. He always treat­ed me as his equal rather than some­one who should be learn­ing from him. It was very inter­est­ing and there was a lot of nego­ti­a­tion along with lots of sup­port for some of the weird things I want­ed to do. He real­ly pushed to put me for­ward, to empha­sise that this was Nia’s movie. He’s mind­ful to not steal the spot­light or dis­tract from what I was doing.

As a genre fan is there any­thing else you would like to cre­ate a spir­i­tu­al sequel to?

The Cab­in in the Woods by Drew God­dard. At the end of the movie the gods from below come up and I would love to see what hap­pened next.

So many writer/​directors make their work semi-auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal. Are we going to see some­thing about a young woman from New York?

I’ll prob­a­bly nev­er make a film about a young woman from New York. I think my next film is going to be very, very dif­fer­ent from every­thing I’ve done so far.

So now you are in hor­ror you don’t think you are going to stay there?

I nev­er real­ly saw myself as some­one who would direct one type of movie or have a par­tic­u­lar brand, y’know? It’s not what inter­ests me. I don’t set out to do things very dif­fer­ent­ly every time, it is nice to have some variety.