DaCosta’s updated version of Hedda Gabler feeds into her fascination with characters on the margins
“I am intrigued by complicated women making not‑so-great choices,” says Brooklyn-born filmmaker Nia DaCosta, musing on what links her latest picture Hedda – a sensual, gender-flipped spin on Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler – to a varied CV that includes the neo-western Little Woods, stylish supernatural horror Candyman and a foray into superhero territory with The Marvels.
“I tend to want to tell stories about people on the margins, which I find really compelling,” she continues. “And Hedda is on the margins psychologically, for sure. Even in the Marvel film, the hero, she’s on the edge of space trying to figure out how to exist when she’s the most powerful being in the universe. I’m also interested in people who are isolated and lonely. That’s a common thing that we don’t want to talk about a lot, the extent of human loneliness.”
Loneliness is not the first emotion that comes to mind when watching a minxy, magnetic Tessa Thompson as Hedda, purring her way through the increasingly decadent and debauched English house party she is hosting with her hapless husband George (Tom Bateman). But thanks to DaCosta’s updates to Ibsen’s 1891 original, we get a sense of a woman who is at once at the centre of the action, a puppet master yanking strings for her own amusement, but also a perennial outsider doomed to be on the periphery of a world she longs to inhabit.
DaCosta’s relationship with the play dates from a stint studying for a master’s at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, which she attended after graduating from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2011. She read Ibsen’s A Doll’s House as part of a module on theatre, a work that resonated with her immediately: “It was so daring for a woman at the end of this play to decide to leave her family.”
She devoured Hedda Gabler next. “I thought, ‘Oh, wow.’ He was not stopping at [A Doll’s House’s protagonist] Nora. He was like, ‘What if she also was a terrible person?’”
Foremost among DaCosta’s changes to Ibsen’s play was to add a racial element. “I always knew I wanted the lead to be a Black woman,” she says. “Hedda, in the original, has a complex and intense relationship with her father. Hedda being mixed race and having a white parent in [her father] the General, who not only has a higher status than her because of his race, but also in society, in the way that she doesn’t feel like she has access to, added layers to the torture she experiences because that’s what she wants to be. She thinks she belongs there and it feels like it’s her birthright.”
Another key change to the source material was to shift the period from Norway in the 1890s to England in the 1950s. It is a choice, explains DaCosta, intended to make the story more relatable by tapping into the cultural residue that exists from that time. “We have an idea of what the period was like – repressed, buttoned-up, conformist, the pressure cooker that would lead to the ’60s and ’70s.”
But the most notable alteration to Ibsen’s play is DaCosta’s decision to change the gender of George’s professional rival Eilert Lovborg from male to female. German actress Nina Hoss plays Eileen Lovborg, a high-flying academic and Hedda’s former lover, in a switch that works on multiple levels. There is an antagonistic sexual tension between the pair. But Eileen also represents what might have been for Hedda, both as a romantic partner – Hedda’s choice not to be open and out is an indication of just how highly she prizes her status in society – and also in terms of career achievement.
It is clear from the outset that Hedda’s mind is as sharp as that of any of her husband’s stuffed-shirt colleagues. And that there are few things more dangerous than a brilliant, bored woman who has been underestimated all her life.
House-hunting
A single-location picture, set in an opulent mansion, the film takes on something of the grand and slightly eccentric personality of the house in which it was shot: Flint Hall, near Nottingham. Finding a suitable space to set the story required an exhaustive search, with production designer Cara Brower scouting around 200 properties. DaCosta was looking for a place with “nooks and crannies and hidden passageways; I wanted to play with public and private spaces”.
She pays tribute to the house’s easygoing owners. “They let us do crazy things. Like, we smashed a chandelier inside. We were shooting guns off the roof, shooting fireworks, racing up and down their lawn and tearing up the grass. We were in the lake. It was wonderful that they really let us make our movie.”
Brower, who worked on Candyman, was part of the creative team – also including cinematographer Sean Bobbitt and costume designer Lindsay Pugh – that DaCosta brought to Hedda from The Marvels. The foundational shorthand and trust between DaCosta and her collaborators paid off in a richly realised and visually striking picture.
DaCosta says of the use of light and colour: “I wanted the look of the film to degrade over time, and Sean took that and ran with it. We wanted to have this beautiful, sumptuous look, but we also wanted to feel things go wrong as the film goes on. It’s really warm when the party starts. Then as it goes along, things get darker and darker, the lighting gets less and less flattering and we just pull everyone into the darkness of this night.”
The costume choices tell their own stories. Hedda’s party frock, with its cinched-in corseted waist and wide, sweeping skirt, speaks of a character who is simultaneously confined and also takes up space in the lives of those around her. The choice of colour was inspired by rotten fruit “because Hedda herself is a bit of a rotten fruit”.
Eileen’s outfit combines the severity of the formal, male-dominated world of academia with a feminine flourish. It also becomes transparent when wet, giving Hedda the opportunity to humiliate and sabotage her former lover in one memorable nipple-based sequence.
The prolific DaCosta has already completed another film, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. It was, she says, something of a dream project, especially since 28 Days Later was a formative film in her teenage journey towards a career in filmmaking.
“To be given the opportunity to step into that world was special. I remember reading the scripts that Alex [Garland] had written for the first two in the trilogy and I thought they were amazing. The second script in particular, The Bone Temple, I thought, ‘This is really different and interesting and dynamic and bizarre. What a gift it would be to be the one to bring this to life.’”
Next up, DaCosta is toying with the idea of yet another genre: she has written a musical adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. “I really want to make a musical,” she says. “Everyone says that, but I love musicals so much. I love that they can be anything.”
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