Michèle Stephenson and Joe Brewster have been crafting visual stories for decades. Their expressive storytelling counters stereotypes of people of color, showing their subjects drawing upon personal strength and culture while challenging the status quo.
The co-directing couple has gained acclaim for Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, a hybrid documentary celebrating Giovanni’s lasting impact as a poet, artist, and social commentator. This cultural icon gets her flowers in this film for being an outspoken truth-teller on racism, sexism, and other social issues.
BGN had the pleasure of speaking with these thought-provoking filmmakers via Zoom about their work on the Going to Mars project, visualizing Nikki Giovanni’s significance to the culture, and why telling our stories is crucial.
First, let me say that this film was beautiful. It is complex and rich with all the archival footage. Nikki Giovanni is so significant to the culture across generations. Can you speak about the plan for this film and how you wanted to frame the presentation?
Michèle Stephenson: We didn’t want it to be an expose on what happened to her at this point in her life, who hated her, or what was her reaction to this and those kinds of conventional devices we sometimes see, especially in the commercial space that we wanted to avoid. We wanted to still stay very intimate and emotional as well.
She is reckoning with the passing of time, as well as reconciling relationships with her son, granddaughter, and partner. It was evident that throughout the film that she has very clear boundaries about what she will answer or explore. How did you go about making that a seamless part of the film?
Joe Brewster: Well, it’s always an issue with every film. The characters have boundaries. Sometimes they will tell you and sometimes you have to learn by trial and error. I would say that hers were fairly clear; clearer than most. There were other things we discovered. But our process is to discover those and move beyond them.
What we discovered is that most of what we needed to know was in a poem somewhere. You hear very early on that these are obstacles she has with memories. It’s in the opening credits. She establishes those boundaries, and we’re very intentional about letting the audience know this is what we are experiencing. The beauty of that is later on we’re able to use that in the telling of the story. Case in point, when she completely refuses to remember one of her most famous poems about the death of Martin Luther King. We have a cornucopia of vehicles that tells stories on different levels, sometimes parallel.
MS: The seamlessness that you mentioned? It comes from a lot of hard work of clunkiness and being able to be self-aware enough to realize where the clunkiness comes in and whether something is working or not. You have a particular vision as a director but the end result is often out of a communal conversation because you want the guidance or the feedback that helps you get to the finishing of the film.
This is where we often debated back and forth of whether we were going to be not just transparent but to fully center her boundaries in the film. We realized this was very important. You’ll see that her explaining her boundaries happens in rhythms. We set it up with more of the dramatic ones. In some ways, that intentional insurgence is about her personality development revealing who is really is and how she negotiates her own vulnerability.
This is very important when we see this boundary come back not just in the audience discussion over Martin Luther King’s assassination but we see it in the boundaries with her son. Those moments are really important to explain her reaction to an audience member or her harsh boundaries with her son. We need to understand that refusal to be vulnerable in her most painful moments, being the driving force, is how she sets boundaries at whatever cost. The stubbornness comes from this place that’s quite deep that we reveal in the first few minutes of the film. It allows us to take the journey from a particular perspective that embraces complexity and contradiction.
Taraji P. Henson gives voice (so amazingly, by the way) to the poems, and she’s also one of the executive producers. How did she come on board for this project?
JB: We were gifted that via Nikki. Nikki would not read some of her older work but did not stand in the way of it being in the film. So, we initially found someone, a teacher here in Brooklyn, who was amazing but we lost her. We decided to broaden our search. Our producer, Tommy Oliver from Confluential Films, had a personal relationship with Taraji. She was very busy and on her way to Asia for a mental health break. She called and said she had a few hours, let’s go!
We found a studio there, tapped in via Zoom, and we had a session in which she read seven poems over the course of two to three hours. She knocked them out of the park. It’s a reoccurring voice that might be Nikki’s younger voice or interpreted as her younger voice. Taraji was so powerful. We’re deeply grateful for her collaboration because it definitely brought the film to a whole other level for us.
What are you hoping people receive from the film? What are you hoping people feel?
JB: There may be obstacles but there is a way to love, to grow, to be in community, even though there are hard knocks. Nikki’s relationship with Gus, her father, is about as traumatic as you can have as a child. But she took that and, in her own way, rose above that. Her work tells us that we can rise above. She will not discuss things that make her unhappy. But I was gifted with her work and it inspired me not to think about the trauma that we are bombarded with every day by the media. Instead was the reminder that there was a love in my community and excellence in my community. Hopefully, the audience will not lose sight of that.
MS: There is a moment in the film when Nikki is talking to her students, and she mentions that you can’t be happier, five or ten years down the road, when someone reads your poem and tells you how much it moved them. But you didn’t do that poem to teach or to lecture. So, I think it’s the soul of the film, in terms of us as artists. We were gifted with this experience and this artistry Nikki provided us. We did a remix based on our own sources of pain and search for healing that in some ways only art can provide as a balm. Then you share it out there and see how it lands. My hope is that as we share this, people are bringing their own interpretations and maybe see things we never expected. That is really what art is about and what keeps us surviving and thinking.
Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project coming soon to Max.
