The Marvels director Nia DaCosta broke her silence about her dissatisfaction with the Marvel filmmaking process during an interview with Mark Kermode at London’s British Film Institute (BFI).
DaCosta, who previously directed the reboot of Candyman (2021) before heading into the Marvel canon, is gearing up for the release of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, which hits cinemas in January. She’s also promoting her Amazon Prime film Hedda, a modern adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler, which is currently in limited release and arrives on the streamer on Oct. 31.
‘Marvel Kept Going and Going…’
DaCosta wrote Hedda back in 2018, around the time of her debut film, Little Woods (2018), and had intended to make the low-budget indie her next film. But Hollywood had other plans. When asked why it took so long to realize the project, DaCosta replied: “I wasn’t trying. I wrote it in 2018, and then I came to the U.K. and did two episodes of Top Boy. And then while I was doing Top Boy, I got Candyman. And then, while I was doing Candyman, Marvel happened. And then Marvel kept going and going and going, and felt like it would never end, and then somewhere in, like, year 100, I said, ‘I have to make Hedda next, because I have to come back to my own voice.’”
The Marvels flopped at the box office, netting the lowest all-time opening for any Marvel film upon its release. It grossed just $84.5 million in North America and $206 million worldwide. DaCosta called the experience of making Hedda “the best experience ever, [just] super amazing for myself and my crew,” after spending so many years toiling away at the Marvel factory.
“Did it feel to you, doing [Hedda], that you’re in control?” Kermode asked as DaCosta laughed. “I don’t know what it’s like working in a huge [studio], but I can guess it’s not the easiest experience.”
Marvel Studios
‘What Is This Film Now?’
“It’s an interesting thing, and I think it’s different for everyone, especially at Marvel,” DaCosta explained. “I will say, the shoot was so much fun—or, our initial shoot, our principal photography. And then as most people know, in post [production] things take on a life of their own. I think during our second round of reshoots my crew were kind of like, ‘All right, what are we doing? What’s going on? What is this film now?’”
DaCosta concluded: “I think with Hedda, it was nice to know—not just that we all loved the script and that it’s finite—that we had a limited amount of money, so we knew there weren’t going to be reshoots…As we were getting close to [finishing], I remember my producers going, ‘We just want you to make the movie that you meant to make.’ I had done two studio films, and Hedda was where I remembered, ‘That’s my job. To make my film.’ And I got to do that on 28 [Years Later], which is a franchise movie, but with two director auteurs (Alex Garland and Danny Boyle) who are the producers. Instead of trying to get me to be them, they said, ‘Be you.’”
