‘Nanny’ Director Nikyatu Jusu On Her Ghostly Supernatural Thriller From Sundance [Interview]

Let’s discuss the performances of your actors, who are tremendous. Anna Diop, especially, is such an empathetic and compelling lead. What can you tell me about directing actors?
This is honestly one of my favorite things to talk about because I have so much reverence for actors. I got so lucky with this cast. I had my eye on Anna Diop at a very superficial level. She’s gorgeous, and I’m a sucker for a beautiful face. You have to look at the film for 90 minutes, so let’s give them something to look at. But besides that, I loved finding out that she just had all this depth, and she had this range that had gone untapped in terms of the work she was doing, that she’s known for. She just had this ability, this athleticism, and this very visceral understanding of the character. She had done some babysitting. She’s from Senegal and came here when she was six. We have similar backgrounds with our African cultures. She just got it on a very tangible level. 

And that’s part of what I look for in casting. In the process of casting and working with actors, I like to cast on sight as much as possible. I don’t really enjoy the process of taking someone who’s completely the opposite of what I wrote, and making them into that person. I prefer to cast people who have elements of the characters on the page. Michelle Monaghan just brought so much substance and flesh and fat to Amy — in such a way that I could have only hoped for because she could have easily been a caricature. But she’s brought so much humanity to any role, and I was really lucky. They all challenged me in different ways as actors: Sinqua Walls, Morgan Spector, and a bunch of kids under 10. I keep telling everyone, “Next film, no kids; I don’t even care if you’re 13. Everybody has to be 20.” But kids are challenging in a unique way. Rose Decker was amazing and mature, and she just wasn’t shaken by any of the visuals that she saw on set. Everybody pulled each other up and really stepped up to the plate. 

Tell me about your collaborators on this film and the experience of filming during the pandemic with them. 
I had so many amazing collaborators on this film. I wouldn’t be here without the people who chose me back: Rina Yang, my cinematographer; Jonathan Guggenheim, my production designer; Charlese Antoinette Jones, my costume designer; Risha Rox, my special effects/makeup artist. We just had a team of people who were down for the cause, who understood the vision and were just committed to figuring out these set pieces, in a pandemic, with minimal resources. So in that regard, I just got so lucky. On the page, this script could have been a whole different film, in terms of shooting it. It could have been a hot mess — everything from casting to the actual set pieces that we had in mind. But I was just like, “Fuck it.” I lost my dad to cancer in the midst of the pandemic, and there was just so much tremendous loss and reassessing our lives, what we value. I was just like, “Let me find people who are down for this cause, and let’s just just go for it and see what happens.” And I’m so glad I did. This is the best way I could have possibly introduced myself to the industry, because it feels so much like what I wanted. 

Without spoilers, “Nanny” references various figures from African folklore, including Anansi the spider and Mami Wata. Why was it important to you to include these figures?
There’s a huge void when it comes to Black folklore in American cinema. And there’s just so much story, so much there. And, as a voracious reader, it’s allowed me to just sit on all of these things that I’ve been thinking about, in terms of Black Diasporic folklore that I haven’t seen on the screen. People are really missing out when they ignore that canon of mythology. I’m always curious about the ways that we have resisted oppression, diasporically and throughout history. And now, with this talk of critical race theory and incorporating that into education, essentially us debating whether or not we want to tell the truth about the way that this country was founded, I think that folklore is a way to sprinkle a little magic on the conversation. That allows people to be more receptive to what we’re actually talking about. 

Anansi is a chaos agent, a trickster figure. And trickster figures are very prevalent throughout different cultures, but Anansi is a figure that I’m so enthralled by because I’m curious about the ways that violence has been used against violence, as opposed to fixating on non-violence and respectability politics. I’m really interested in the ways that violence is integral to the ways that we push back against oppressors. In school, we don’t learn about the violent resistance that has happened in history, where we fought back against our captors. We don’t learn about that, because we live in an institution and a paradigm that doesn’t want us to think about the ways that we’ve resisted. It wants us to all be very obedient and sedated.

Anansi is just such a rebellious figure. He doesn’t care if the whole ship burns down in the process of rebelling, as long as you rebel. And then Mami Wata, is a much more cunning figure. The mermaid is a prevalent figure, but Mami Wata specifically is a presence reflective of the way enslaved people have resisted oppression while going over treacherous waters, jumping into the sea as a means of committing suicide rather than being enslaved but also being rebirthed through that suicide, in the water. Water is also just a capricious form of nature. It can indicate rebirth, it can indicate destruction, and sometimes we don’t know about the depths of the sea.

“Nanny” opens in theaters tomorrow, on November 23, and then premieres on Prime Video on December 16.

A shorter version of this article ran during Sundance.