Nikyatu Jusu: A Conversation

[lounge music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] On Story is brought to you in part by the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation, a Texas family providing innovative funding since 1979.

"On Story" is also brought to you in part by the Bogle Family Vineyards, six generation farmers and third generation winemakers based in Clarksburg, California.

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[waves] [kids screaming] [wind] [witch cackling] [sirens wail] [gunshots] [dripping] [suspenseful music] [telegraph beeping, typing] [piano gliss] From Austin Film Festival, this is "On Story."

A look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators, and filmmakers.

This week on "On Story," emerging writer, director and recipient of Austin Film Festival's 2022 New Voice Award, Nikyatu Jusu discusses her early short films as well as the process behind creating her debut feature horror-thriller "Nanny."

- Some filmmakers would say, I think Cronenberg has a quote about filmmaking being very expensive therapy for filmmakers.

And so, you know, I was sorting out what it meant to be first-gen American in a culture that is very xenophobic.

I think Black immigrants occupy this in-between space of being both Black and immigrant, that is not talked about a lot.

[paper crumples] [typing] [carriage returns, ding] [Narrator] Jusu expands on both the career and creative steps that led to her film's breakout success.

[typewriter dings] - I'd love to get to know about your start with storytelling a little bit.

What drew you to stories and maybe more specifically film and visual narratives?

- You know, I think if you're lucky in this life you stumble into your passion.

A lot of people are still wandering through life unsure of what their passion is.

And I feel like my passion found me in the sense that I was not thinking, you know, first-gen American, Sierra Leonean immigrant parents, nobody's gonna say to you, "You can be a storyteller when you grow up," 'cause that's not tangible.

And so, I was a voracious reader as a child.

I grew up in a household of voracious reading and my mother in between the jobs that she did, including domestic work self-published two novels that she just was passionate about writing.

So it was around me and I went to undergrad.

I went to Duke University for biomedical engineering because tangible and real and I was miserable.

Sophomore year, I stumbled into a screenwriting course, you know, by mistake, and I fell in love with the craft.

But I really fell in love when I realized that I could, the words didn't die on the page, in the way that they do with novels that aren't adapted.

I could make motion picture.

I could create imagery based on what I write.

Storytelling is so pervasive for some of us.

Like you always have an uncle or a parent or somebody who's telling stories and we consumed films growing up and you know I grew up in a household with my cousins, my uncle, like we had multiple family members living in one house and we would congregate in the basement and watch, I'm about to age myself, but my uncle used to work at a place called Turtles, similar to Blockbuster, and he would just bring random movies home like there was no voting.

It was just whatever he brought home, we would watch.

And so it was very prevalent and yeah, my mom was just also a voracious reader and writer.

And so her first, her second novel "So Pretty and African" was really about her displacement as an African woman in America.

So, it was just always around me in terms of that storytelling.

- I'm curious where genre or fantasy stories may have intertwined with your sort of upbringing that way also, because there's just such clear visualization you have within that space exemplified by "Nanny" and - Thank you.

- "Suicide by Sunlight," which we'll of course talk about.

But I'm curious if you could talk about that?

- Octavia Butler is a major inspiration, science fiction novelist who conceived of worlds that are very prescient and resonant today.

Zombie canon just is a vessel for making commentary on the human behavior and the ways that we treat each other and ourselves.

So I find that genre, I've always found that genre was a way into the truth.

- Your first short film, "African Booty Scratcher" [Nikyatu laughing] I did not make up that title.

That is the title.

- He did his research.

- Always try to.

[Ayo] I would like to announce, [upbeat music begins] Queen Isotu.

Queen Isotu.

[upbeat music] [Nikyatu] Basically, it's about a young girl who is going to prom but doesn't wanna wear traditional African wear like her mom wants her to.

So it was the most basic distillation of me maneuvering what it means to be Black American, born to African parents, and having gone through a period where I was ashamed of my culture because of, you know, what I experienced in school and people hearing your parents' accent and smelling the food and making fun of you.

And so it was like, you know, all filmmaking, some filmmakers would say, I think Cronenberg has a quote about filmmaking being very expensive therapy for filmmakers.

And so, you know, I was sorting out what it meant to be first-gen American in a culture that is very xenophobic, especially, you know I think Black immigrants occupy this in-between space of being both Black and immigrant, that is not talked about a lot.

And so, you know, I grew up around a lot of African diaspora people and it was an experience I wanted to see on the screen.

- But with regards to "Flowers" what was it like developing that narrative?

It felt so raw and powerful, but also personal in a way.

- So "Flowers" is about two girls who are in high school who basically frame their teacher for pursuing one of them sexually.

So it's a thriller, revenge thriller with two black girls at the lead framing their teacher.

That was, "Flowers" was bred out of desperation.

So one of, me and one of my grad school classmates decided to work backwards based on our resources, what we had access to, because we were tired of waiting for permission to make something.

I was teaching.

She had access to a, you know, a DP that she really liked who had amazing equipment at the time.

And you know, we worked backwards from that and we made a short film that was experimenting with the thriller space, you know, with two young black girl protagonists and, who were crafty and funny.

And it wasn't about being a Black girl, it was about two girls getting revenge on a teacher.

- Okay.

- Whatever.

- He'll do it babe, when you not around.

So this where he has it?

- Yes.

- So wait, did his lips like actually touch yours?

- No, because I pulled away.

- Don't do it this time.

I'm gonna need you to let him do whatever it is he wants you to do.

All right?

That's the only way this is gonna work.

- And then we move to "Suicide by Sunlight."

What did you feel like you're exploring with those characters especially the protagonist and the mother?

- "Suicide by Sunlight" is about, is a short film about day-walking Black vampires who are protected from the sun by their melan-- their skin, their melanin.

And so I knew I needed to hone in on a singular character who existed within this world that I was crafting.

And I was very inspired by Octavia Butler.

She has a novel called "Fledgling."

And so that was the springboard.

I was like day-walking Black vampires.

I got nominated for a grant called Through Her Lens through Tribeca Film Institute and Chanel that finances, nominates a few-- a handful of women filmmakers every year, and you compete for the grand prize of a, I don't even wanna say the number 'cause it gets less every year.

And I wrote "Suicide by Sunlight," the short after having gotten nominated for this grant.

I had the feature ready.

I had the series ready but I wasn't getting the support.

So I wrote this proof of concept short film based on the bigger world so that I could garner attention to the larger world that I wanted to create.

And so "Suicide by Sunlight" the short film has been really good to me.

- Hey, they're my goals too.

Listen.

- Nah.

[door slams] [door rattling] - What the [beeping] are you doing?

- I wanna see him.

- No.

- Langston.

- Not today.

- You see me, I'm here in the flesh.

I'm begging you.

- If you don't control yourself, you'll never see them again.

I swear to God.

Everybody will know.

- Everybody will know what?

- Stop.

Not today.

[dogs barking] - You have someone.

Who is in there with him?

- One of the things I loved about "Suicide by Sunlight" and "Nanny" within the context of your filmmaking career is there's such, at least to me, a clear world building through-line.

And it seems like you really were, became interested in building up worlds and mythologies.

- I love world building.

I love science.

You know, I still have that bio-biomedical engineering background in terms of thinking about everything being grounded in fact.

And so what I love about Octavia Butler's work, for instance, on the page is that no matter how fantastical the world is she grounds everything in science, and in the same way like melanated day walking vampires, you know melanin having additional melanin protects you from the sun in a way that it doesn't with people, you know, with less melanin.

So fantasy is a conduit for real, for truth.

There's so much truth that it's so rich in terms of fictional storytelling and fantastical storytelling.

So I love to ground things in that.

All of that informs strong world building because you have to have an internal compass that's like okay, the audience is gonna ask why this character was able to break this rule and this doesn't make sense.

So you're trying to get ahead of the audience in that regard in terms of really strong world building, but I also assume my audience is intelligent.

[typewriter dings] - And now moving into "Nanny," it's awesome to see some of the support you got from the industry in the development stages or process tied to that.

And I'd love to give you an opportunity to speak to what it was like to go through the Sundance writers and directors lab with the project.

- I was lucky enough to get, garner the attention of Sundance who has been pivotal in my trajectory because they elevate artists who the industry has ignored but they elevate some of us to a degree that the industry can no longer ignore us.

And that's what happened with "Nanny."

Had we not won the Grand Jury Prize for "Nanny" in January of this year, I do think that I may have been buried.

'Cause we didn't, we were one of the few films that didn't have distribution, going in.

So Sundance has been kind of like a guardian angel for my trajectory.

And Tribeca Film Institute, Creative Capital, Rooftop Films, these are all independent granting resources that support historically marginalized voices in this industry.

The industry is just very, even now I'm just like I don't know what kind of career I wanna have in the industry because the industry is just, it's a separate way of thinking about filmmaking.

Hollywood is, there's a reason why most of my influences are, are not American.

- One and two and three.

Let's go.

[Aisha making shooting noises] [laughing] Oh Rose is down for the count.

You beat me.

I have lost my title.

[knocking] - You two are having fun.

[giggling] - Go to mommy.

- I'm tired.

- Oh, too much play.

- I can see that.

[giggling] I'm tired, huh?

Hmm, don't go far.

[ominous music] - Anna Diop is an incredible force I feel like in this film obviously because of the nature of the film as a character study.

What was the journey like to find her?

Was she always sort of the ideated person you had in mind?

And I'm curious what it was like to create that sculpture of that character with her on set.

- When I wrote, was writing "Nanny" on and off for eight years, I was not thinking about anyone's specific outside of my mother's story.

So I knew I had to write it loosely enough because you know the beauty of being a writer director is that you have your producing hat on at all times.

So you know you're not writing something that you can't afford or you start to understand what you can't afford on the page.

And the script truly is a springboard.

If you treat it like a bible, you're going to suffer as an, as an artist.

So I knew I had to write this West African woman without specifying a country because my financiers would want, had to approve who the lead was.

This is not just me being nitty gritty.

This is other people's money.

So when you're using other people's money, you have to answer to other people and you should hope that those other people are aligned with the way that you see the world.

I wanted someone who was at least first gen like me.

She was born in Senegal, you know her mother, actually later I found out, was a domestic worker as well in Texas, here in Texas.

Anna grew up in Houston and she was also on "Titans."

So it was not an impossible sell for my team.

That's a really unique intersection to be African, first gen, have that authenticity and also be on a mainstream show that people can see and say, "Okay, she has a little buzz, we approve her."

But most importantly, Anna was willing to audition.

I'm never going to be the filmmaker who is going to say yes just because of a person's name.

You know this a-list system is sucking a lot of independent filmmakers' dry.

So she was down.

She did the audition.

I have people sending me offers only, like, we'll only take this role, offer only we're not auditioning.

I ignored those people and I went with the people who were willing to go through the process with me because I know what I want.

And so most importantly, we did chemistry casting.

So once I locked Anna in, I casted her with the Maliks and I casted her with the Amys and I casted her with all her different co-stars, the options, because chemistry's important to me, and I can tell when actors are on the screen, like counting down the seconds of they're kissing each other was like 5, 4, 3, 2.

I've seen so much stuff where the chemistry is [clicking] zero.

And so I wanted people who actually resonated with each other.

And she's gorgeous.

She takes up every pixel of every frame.

And you know, the luxury of her being able to act as well was like, I couldn't, you know, she was a clear choice.

- Welcome till you die, the American dream right?

[giggling] - Sallay, I told you about pulling on my edges.

- Sorry, sorry, sorry.

Have you thought about going back?

You know to live.

[Mariatou] To live, where?

With what money?

What are you talking about?

- I know.

Nigeria has definitely seen the last of me.

I'd rather be asleep in America than asleep in Africa.

At least here, when you work you, see the money.

[giggling] - Do it.

- You mentioned your mother as sort of a key point in cultivating this character and in a way, the bedrock of who this character is.

Were there other women who came to mind?

- So many women, I mean I, most of our, a lot of our communities are upheld by the women, I think.

No, not I think.

It's true.

No shade.

No shade to anyone.

But you know, women do a lot of the invisible labor of upholding communities.

Disproportionate domestic labor, still having to participate in capitalism, putting your body through childbirth, it's a lot.

And so I'm surrounded by, I'm surrounded by brilliant women.

I've always been surrounded by brilliant, hardworking women with agency who are not victims.

And so I never wanted to portray a victim.

I wanted to portray a woman who survived, is surviving a system that was never meant for her to thrive within.

And so, when people ask me like, "How did you focus the gaze on her?

Like how did you?"

This is organic.

This is what happens when you usher in new voices into the industry.

We reflect a different way of seeing the world because this is the way we see the world.

But in terms of this being a film for mothers who are systematically excluded, domestic work has always historically been one of the most accessible forms of labor for Black and brown women.

And it is work that is made invisible by a society that doesn't value essential workers or essential work.

So, you know having a mom who was going into other people's homes, I was always worried.

Like, how are they treating her?

Who are they?

What is she eating?

You know, how are they talking to my mother?

I love my mother.

I adore her.

I'm fiercely protective of her and I, and it's odd to me that we live in a society where people don't think that they have to respect the person who is caring for their child.

Like that's dangerous.

This person is raising your child.

This person is potentially cooking your food.

[typewriter dings] [rumbling noises] [rain splattering] [rain splattering] [chaotic music] - You utilize water in a lot of really interesting and impactful ways throughout the course of the film.

There's a majestic and graceful nature to it.

- I'm a water baby.

I love water.

I've loved water since I was, you know my parents taught me how to swim, thankfully.

That was a blessing.

And ever since then I just, I love being in water.

I feel most serene when I'm near a body of water that's clean and you know, more abstractly, cerebrally water is a motif in some of my favorite writer's work.

Tony Morrison has a lot of water motifs because water, she has a quotation that says, "Water has perfect memory."

And there's another quotation from someone who I can't remember that says, "Never turn your back on water."

It's just such a powerful source of birth, rebirth.

It's a very prevalent motif, literally and figuratively in African diasporic people's history.

People were, people chose to throw their bodies over the ship into the water rather than be enslaved.

People were thrown over ships as they were carried from their original lands to the west.

So water is, it means something different I think to people who have been forcefully removed from their original lands.

But it also is something that is wreaking havoc on us now.

You know, I, what I love about Octavia Butler's work is that it's so prescient like it's so resonant now in terms of climate disaster.

So I just think it's a really compelling motif historically but also something that reminds us of the smallness of humanity in the grand scheme of everything.

- What was it like shooting those scenes?

- Oh, those were the hardest scenes to shoot.

[underwater muffled bubbling] [underwater muffled bubbling] So we ended up shooting at a YMCA in Brooklyn which is great because we had an underwater department.

Ian Takahashi, look him up, he's amazing.

He was our underwater DP and Rina Yang, my main DP had like a walkie.

He had a whole lighting team under the water.

Water's capricious.

It's hard to communicate, you know, people get tired.

You're directing behind a mask.

So those were our, some of our hardest days.

- Big scene at the airport where Aisha has to deal with the realities of things setting in that, you know, you guide the audience really brilliantly to that point.

What was it like developing that scene with, Anna Diop, in working in that space where there was so much vulnerability?

- The water work was really challenging, but the airport was also.

So we shot on location at JFK and again at the peak of the pandemic last year.

So at an airport, like it was just a lot of restrictions and we can only shoot in certain zones and people were traveling 'cause real life is still happening.

Nobody cares about your little production.

And so technically it was challenging but also it was challenging because Anna had a really big scene emotionally that day and she felt like she wasn't getting it.

Like she felt like she wasn't giving me the performance but because I wrote it and I could see the edit in my brain, I knew that she gave me what I needed.

[outdoor ambience] - There are a number of shots within the film that really stick out with that in mind.

For example, when she's jumping into the shower and you have her framed and we're seeing her back and her hair is beautifully laid out almost like a spider in a certain ways.

- I love non-traditional framing.

I don't always need to see a full face.

I love Lynne Ramsay's work.

She's always fracturing her protagonist.

Like you see half the face.

You see the side.

You see a French over the shoulder.

So I love stuff like that that kind of like wakes the audience up in a way, in terms of non-traditional execution.

- This quote is something you also said, "Write the story you can't shake, that you can't stop thinking about."

And you've heard sort of variations of that from other creators.

What about "Nanny" had such a hold on you?

- It's a very personal story.

You know, it's my, it's the story of the women in my family.

A lot of the women in my family did domestic work, but it's bigger than that.

It's like these are women who had their own dreams and their own aspirations and their own passions and had to put all of that to the side to survive.

So this is not something that was hard for me to make.

This was something I felt like I had to make, before I move on to vampires and zombies.

- I'll advance you some of the money till we can figure this out.

I'm sorry.

Things have been a little tight around here for everyone.

- This is not an advance.

It is what I am owed.

[typewriting dings] [Narrator] You have been watching Nikyatu Jusu, A Conversation on "On Story."

On Story is part of a growing number of programs in Austin Film Festival's On Story project that also includes the "On Story" radio program, podcast, book series, and the "On Story" archive accessible through the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.

To find out more about On Story and Austin Film Festival, visit onstory.tv or austinfilmfestival.com.

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