Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1541878
ans of Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler," first staged in 1891, are in for a wild ride with the new film version of the classic play and its timeless examina- tion of ambition, power and money, and the price paid by its trapped and tragic anti-heroine. Writer/director Nia DaCosta (Candyman, The Marvels) has rebooted and reimagined the universal fable in several radical ways. First, she moved the action from 19th Century Norway to an English stately home in the 1950s, where Hedda, now a black woman (Tessa Thompson) is throwing a decadently-lav- ish and increasingly-chaotic party to celebrate her entrance into society with her new husband George Tesman (Tom Bateman). And then she also turned the character of Ejlert Lövborg, Hedda's ex-lover, into a woman, Eileen. To make the acclaimed film, DaCosta assembled a team that included DP and frequent collaborator Sean Bobbit, editor Jacob Schulsinger and Oscar-winning composer Hildur Guðnadóttir. Here, in an exclusive interview with Post, she talks about the challenges involved and her love of post. Turning any play into a movie can be a very tricky proposition. So, what was your approach to transforming this classic? "What's so interesting to me is that growing up and falling in love with film, my exposure to adaptation was that it could be as close to the original text as possible, or it could be Apocalypse Now. It could be anything. So it gave me a lot of freedom to really follow my instincts and what shook me about the original piece, and that's what informed all my decisions and wanting to lean further into the themes that really resonated with me, and that's how we got the sort of crazy fantasia that you watched." What did prep entail, and what were the main technical challenges of pulling this together? "Setting it in this incredible mansion looks deceptively simple, because it's one location, but you have to find the right period house with owners that will allow you to do all the things we needed, such as shoot a gun off the roof, drop a chandelier in their house, shoot fireworks off and disturb all their neighbors, take away all of their beautiful antiques, paint their walls and put up wallpaper. We had to find a place that would let us treat it as a location, and it wasn't easy, but after scouting over 100 houses we found the perfect house, and we got free rein to re- make that house in our image. And then, it's now a period piece set in the '50s, but the good thing is it's just one night, so we don't have to create a whole world that's period, with different locations and a thousand costumes. Pretty much every character has one costume, and to tell this story from beginning to end, it was a mix of being incredibly specific and incredibly detailed, but also being free enough so we could degrade everything by the end of the film." This is your third film with DP Sean Bobbitt. Tell us about the visual approach and the look you wanted, as it's definitely not Downton Abbey. "You're so right! It's a period piece in an English country house, and so many films have that look, they can be stuffy, and they can blend into each other, so we really wanted to make something visually distinct and not reference any other films. What I love about working with Sean is that we come at it a similar way, where we don't want to impose a style on the story, we want the story to tell us what the style should be. We really wanted to work from the ground up and think about this character, this story and this party, and how it goes off the rails, and that meant the look really had to de- teriorate over the course of the movie." Did you work on a LUT with Sean and the colorist? "Yes, Tom Poole at Company 3, who's the colorist that Sean and I use for all our films. He's a genius, great to work with, and he always creates this beauti- ful LUT at the beginning of the project, which comes from Sean and I talking about our visual approach. I usually have a sense of the way I want the colors to feel — some references in terms of how I want the light to operate. Do I want it to blow out in places, or do I want it to feel like maximum white? Sometimes I want the blacks to be really inky, or I want the reds and the greens to pop, so we have these conversations, and then they come back with this amazing LUT. And they've gotten so good at this that by the time we get to the DI, it's really a matter of fine-tuning, as opposed to creating a look, which is so gratifying, both to see Tom work, but also to know that we've been looking at something that's quite close to what it was during the shoot." Tell us about the shoot. "It was 35 days, which is not long for something this ambitious. We could have done with more days, but you've got to respect the budget and figure out how to balance your time and money. We shot all on-location and only left that house for one night to shoot in a maze, which was 20 minutes down the road at another house. It wasn't particularly hard, but the strikes pushed us back by six months. Despite all that, we finished on-budget and on-time, which is really important if I want to work again." NIA DACOSTA - HEDDA THIS DIALOG- HEAVY PLAY ADAPTATION GETS A NEW TIME PERIOD AND LOCATION F DIRECTOR'S CHAIR www.postmagazine.com 12 POST NOV/DEC 2025 BY IAIN BLAIR DaCosta and Thompson during production.