Nia DaCosta’s five feature films may seem very different— from the 2018 Western crime drama Little Woods to the horror of 2021’s Candyman to the superheroes of 2023’s The Marvels to the trapped heroine of her new Henrik Ibsen adaptation Hedda to the survivors of the upcoming 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.
But what they all have in common is her empathy for outsiders.
“All of my films have to do with people who are on the fringes of society,” says DaCosta. “People on the fringes feel as though they don’t have the authority to fully live.”
Hedda, based on Ibsen’s 1891 play Hedda Gabler, stars Tessa Thompson — who also starred in Little Woods and appeared in Marvels— as a woman who feels trapped in her loveless marriage.
Over an intense night on a centuries-old estate, her desire for control and power leads her to manipulate those around her. The film is a study of the self-sabotage that can occur when one internalizes societal boundaries.
“Being a minority, I think that is something that we all wrestle with. But even culturally, in terms of class, there are parts of society that we’re told we’re not allowed to access,” says DaCosta. “Or there are goals and dreams for ourselves that we’re sometimes told we shouldn’t achieve. I think if we buy into those things, we do limit ourselves.”
Jumping from genre to genre, and across visual styles, DaCosta rejects limits. For Hedda, she closed herself off from more than a century of stage and screen adaptations, even stepping away from Ibsen’s original text after her first draft to ensure her film would stand on its own.
“I wanted to make sure that with the changes that I made, the movie could live as it was meant to live,” she says. Only then did she “re-invite the original text back into the process,” negotiating a dialogue between her vision and Ibsen’s.
One of her most radical changes was reshaping the film’s central rivalry by turning Hedda’s nemesis, Ejlert Lövborg, into a woman named Eileen, played by Tár actress Nina Hoss.
“I think making Lövborg into a woman shows yet another hard, scary path that Hedda could have taken. She’s smart enough to, but didn’t,” DaCosta explains. “You have another woman who’s choosing a hard path. There are so many paths to freedom that are open to her, but they’re hard and scary. I think having Lövborg be a woman brought that to the fore.”
The process of shedding expectation around a story to rebuild it anew is one of DaCosta’s signature moves. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is a sequel to Danny Boyle’s 2002 apocalyptic 28 Days Later, a story of the rage virus and its survivors, and arrives in January. It follows 2007’s 28 Weeks Later, directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, who co-wrote the screenplay, and Boyle’s own sequel, 28 Years Later, which arrived this past summer. Like 28 Years Later, The Bone Temple is written by original 28 Days Later writer Alex Garland.
DaCosta approached Garland’s script with bold ideas about the aesthetics of her film.
Photo by Miya Mizuno. Courtesy of Columbia Pictures.
Boyle’s original 28 Days Later was filmed primarily with a consumer-grade digital camcorder, and 28 Years Later was shot on cameras that included an iPhone 15 Max. DaCosta filmed The Bone Temple on the Arri Alexa 35, a top-tier digital cinema camera, eschewing Boyle’s gritty, handheld aesthetic to create a sequel that is visually and philosophically its own.
“Danny Boyle is a one-of-a-kind, brilliant, creative man, and trying to make something in his image is impossible, but also wasn’t interesting to me as a director,” she says. “And I have no curiosity about shooting on cell phones.”
She adds: “The gift of Alex Garland’s Bone Temple script is that no filmmaker would make it the same way.”
Nia DaCosta on Her Hedda Contributors
DaCosta’s interest in the arts was ingrained early by her mother Charmaine DaCosta, who may be best known for her work with the reggae group Worl-A-Girl. Charmaine DaCosta combined artistry and pragmatism, once telling her daughter: “You want to be an artist, I support that. But know you will be poor. Like, you will really struggle for money. But the money will come.”
DaCosta accepted her mother’s advice as she pursued degrees at NYU and London’s Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. She learned “to keep creating and not ask for permission,” committing not only to her own growth but to pulling her peers up alongside her.
“Your peers are so important to your growth and development,” she notes. “You hold hands as you come up together.”
One of those peers is Thompson, a foundational part of DaCosta’s creative world.
“I love her so much. She’s one of my closest friends. She’s like a sister to me,” DaCosta says. “We both really love what we do. So when we’re not talking about personal things, we’re also helping each other out with our careers. I like to call myself her shadow manager. I’m definitely invested in how she does.”
She has a similar bond with Hedda and The Bone Temple cinematographer Sean Bobbitt, who has worked on films including Hunger and Judas and the Black Messiah. Their relationship began when DaCosta was a young production assistant, shuttling him to a lens house in New Jersey. Instead of making small talk, she peppered him with questions about lenses and framing. Her eagerness left an impression.
More than a decade later, she sought him out to shoot The Marvels, valuing not only his experience but his humility.
“He is incredibly honest. He’s clear. He has no ego,” DaCosta says. “He’s so creative and approaches his work from a place of character and drama.”
Their sets become places of discovery, defined by curiosity. “In every job together, there’s this endless curiosity around how we can shape an image. It doesn’t have to be extreme. It can be something small, but impactful for the story,” DaCosta says.
Nia DaCosta Wants ‘Bad Behavior’ in Movies
Her films preserve jagged edges and the messiness of humanity rather than sanitizing or simplifying characters. That approach allows room for strangeness, subversion, and growth.
“I’m so drawn to people who are complicated and weird and left-of-center,” DaCosta says, explaining that the familiar tropes of a “strong” or “elegant” Black woman feel stifling.
“Those are boring tropes. They’re so static and one-dimensional that they can do more harm than good. So yeah, in my corner of cinema, I want bad behavior.”
She is drawn to horror, she says, in part because of how well it can hold contradictions.
In her version of Candyman, for example, artist Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is unwillingly pulled into the Candyman legend when William Burke (Coleman Domingo) seeks to use him as a tool of vengeance against racist violence.
But DaCosta can also find complexity in a comic-book movie: In The Marvels, Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) wields such immense power that she can’t remain in any one world for long. Her near-limitless strength isolates her, forcing a kind of cosmic solitude.
“I think about characters like that a lot to help me avoid limiting myself,” she says.
Hedda is now in theaters and on Prime Video, from Amazon MGM Studios. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple arrives in theaters January 16 from Sony Pictures Releasing.
Main image: Nia DaCosta photo by Meg Young. Background, clockwise from left: Hedda, Prime; The Marvels, Marvel Studios; Candyman; Universal Pictures; 28 Years Later: The Bone Garden, Sony Pictures Releasing.