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Janicza Bravo on Her Surreal Stripper-Superhero Movie, 'Zola'

Photo credit: Getty / A24
Photo credit: Getty / A24

In 2015, when director Janicza Bravo began reading The Story – a 148-tweet thread about a road trip gone wrong, which begins: ‘Y'all wanna hear a story about why me and this bitch fell out?! It's kinda long but full of suspense?’– she knew this was the material for her next film. Immediately Bravo, a 40-year-old New Yorker previously best known for the 2017 Sundance breakout Lemon, about the romantic misadventures of a failed actor, and for directing the acclaimed “Juneteenth” episode of Donald Glover’s hit comedy, Atlanta, was transported to the swampy, seedy underbelly of Florida that A'Ziah “Zola” Wells King was narrating from.

Six years and one global pandemic later, Zola finally arrives. This tortuous journey from Tweet to cinema release is apt, perhaps, given that the story centres around a nightmarish and relentless road trip. It begins when Zola (Taylour Paige) meets fellow stripper Stefani (Riley Keough) in a diner, and is convinced to travel to a club in Tampa for the promise of quick cash. As she gets further from home, Zola realises that Stefani’s foreboding pimp, X (Colman Domingo), has other ideas, and that her boyfriend, Derrek (played by Nicholas Braun, Succession’s Cousin Greg, with the same hapless gusto he brings to that simpleton) is going to ensure that calamity follows wherever they go.

The task, then, was to adapt the language of cinema to the social media age, to somehow reflect the sensibilities of characters who live as much online as IRL. The result is a surreal jumble of sequins and confederate flags that feels somewhere between a bad trip and the sensation of scrolling through a chaotic feed. Bravo envisaged Zola as the meeting of David Lynch’s sinister small-town classic, Blue Velvet and Cardi B’s lubricious “Bodak Yellow”, shooting on film and lacing the soundtrack with syrupy trap music. Earlier this month, she spoke to Esquire about bringing the sounds and motifs of our phones from the screens in our bags and pockets to the big screen, and why she doesn’t care how much of The Story is actually true.

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You have been waiting to release this film for so long, how does it feel to finally be letting it out into the world?

I think a good metaphor would be Synecdoche, New York, the Charlie Kaufman film where he’s working on that play for his whole life. I felt like my whole life was waiting for the movie to be released and I would die working on the movie. I know it’s real because I’m in London and you’re sitting across from me, but is it? Am I going to go back to sleep and still be in some version of 2020?

You’re not on Twitter, how did you first come across The Story?

I didn’t read it while it was [happening] live, I read it at the end of the day it came out in 2015. I’m reading that thread and I can feel it’s humid and sticky and I can hear some kind of music and there are neon lights. When I finished reading I sent it to my agent and manager and said, “I want this, so how do we get it?”. I never had Twitter, I did get an account when I did the movie but I don’t know how to navigate it and I’m not interested in figuring it out. I enjoy discomfort and feeling awkward, but not that.

Photo credit: Courtesy of Anna Kooris / A24 Films
Photo credit: Courtesy of Anna Kooris / A24 Films

How did you go about turning a viral thread into a story that still had the feeling of being online but wasn’t constrained by it?

We created a music to the way they wrote, using the sound of the letters they are typing and having them also speak in a staccato form which meant they were texting. It felt so effortless when it happened that it seemed normal. They aren’t talking on the phone but it has the quality of that kind of conversation.

I noticed you avoid having texts or tweets flash up on the screen, as other films and TV shows have done. Was that one of the rules of this world?

The culture of these characters is that they are young people who are tethered to their phones, so there is going to be a phone. But before I read any script I’ll search for phones and if it comes up more than four times I’m like, “No.” I am not going to shoot an insert of somebody holding a phone so you can read text, I’d rather jump out of the window. I realise it’s a part of filmmaking today, and a part of modernity, but it just wasn’t going to work for me.

Still, there are lots of motifs of our phones – the heart of a Like tapped onto the screen, the swoosh of a sent message, the deadpan text-speak voice saying “heart emoji, rose emoji” – do those help bring the online world and real world together?

The movie was born out of a digital landscape and so it felt necessary to have these digital gestures. It takes place in 2015 and even though that’s only six years ago it feels like a bit of a period film. We don’t do this now but there was a world in which our phones just used to be on. Both of our phones would be sitting on this table and yours would be going off and mine would be ringing and someone’s across the room would ring, and at some point we all decided to silence our phones. I wanted to be in this sonic landscape that had become almost Pavlovian: you know that [Twitter] whistle, or even the sound of a lock screen, and I found all of those sounds to have this magical quality.

The Twitter whistle comes in a lot. Is that to remind us that Zola is reframing the story for an audience as we’re watching it?

It’s only one person’s perspective, you know that in the beginning [but] I think you fall into it enough that you might forget. In the original script that [the playwright] Jeremy [O’Harris] and I worked on it says Twitter whistle every time a line of dialogue is directly pulled from the thread. When you read it it’s annoying because some pages are like Twitter whistle, Twitter whistle, Twitter whistle. I don’t know if that makes sense when you’re reading it but in the movie it becomes something else.

There is a “mostly true” disclaimer about the events of the movie at the start, did you care about whether The Story is actually true?

No, because I’m not a journalist and this isn’t a documentary. It’s hardly a biopic. You could call it that, but I wouldn’t because the movie is totally absurd and surreal. It’s curious to me because some people have asked me about truth and facts, and you know, I think if the film looked more naturalistic that would make sense, but to me it doesn’t look like naturalism. I’m not sure someone watches it and thinks it feels like a slice of life.

Photo credit: Courtesy of Anna Kooris / A24 Films
Photo credit: Courtesy of Anna Kooris / A24 Films

Even the characters feel like superheroes or fairy-tale exaggerations of people.

To me this was my Marvel movie, which isn’t to dismiss Marvel. It’s to say that Zola is kind of how I saw Pam Grier. I watched [Grier] work in Blaxploitation movies in my early twenties and to me she was a superhero. Her characters were always comfortable with their sexuality but had a good deal of agency, and I hadn’t seen women embody characters like that unless they were superheroes. So in some way this felt like a superhero film: all the characters will survive like the Power Rangers but we’re gonna push them to the extremes.

You’ve called Zola a stressful comedy, can you unpack that a bit?

I had seen a critic call Harold Pinter’s work menace comedy and that felt synonymous with something I wanted to embody. It’s mostly funny, but also feels bad while it’s happening. Which is being online, right? It feels good until it doesn’t. It’s like some kind of drug where you’re getting high and turned on, and then you’re sad and wondering how you got there. You keep going because you’re looking for it to get bad, and that’s a little like the movie.

Zola is out in cinemas on 6 August


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