TheCollider Ladies Nightsub-series,Collider Ladies Night Pre-Party, was made for creators likeNikyatu Jusu. It’s designed to put the spotlight on promising filmmakers in the early stages of their careers who deliver so big with a new project that their star is bound to soar. Mark my words; that will happen for Jusu and this industry is better off for it.
After winning the HBO Short Film Competition at the American Black Film Festival withFlower, earning a Short Film Grand Jury Prize nomination at the Sundance Film Festival forSuicide by Sunlight(which I highly recommend watchingright here), and finding other success in the short film format, Jusu finally got the go-ahead for her feature directorial debut,Nanny.Anna Diopleads as Aisha, a Senegalese woman living in New York City who starts a new job caring for the daughter ofMichelle Monaghan’s type-A working mom. The hope? That gig will give her the resources she needs to bring her own son, Lamine, to the US. However, the more Aisha works, the more she’s haunted by a violent presence threatening to destroy her American dream.
WithNannynow playing in select theaters and due out on Prime Video on December 16th, Jusu took the time to follow up our2022 Toronto International Film Festival conversationwith an episode of Collider Ladies Night Pre-Party to offer additional insight into exactly what it took to get her first feature off the ground.
Jusu didn’t always dream of becoming a filmmaker. “I don’t come from a family where anyone worked in the industry. I never even knew anyone remotely who had a career near the industry.” She added, “It wasn’t something that crossed my mind as something that was feasible.” While pursuing a biomedical engineering degree at Duke University, Jusu “blindly stumbled” into a screenwriting course and met a professor,Elisabeth Benfey, who’d help her recognize her love of the art of writing a story from scratch. From there, she was accepted into the one and only graduate film program she applied to, the program at New York University’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts.
“I secretly only applied to NYU grad film. I remember I was delivering sandwiches for my mom’s restaurant. [Laughs] I was on the way back rethinking my entire life and got the call from NYU grad that I got in. And I remember screaming in the car because at every step of your process, you think, this is the thing that’s gonna make me! Had I known everything I know now, I know for a fact I probably would have given up at some point because it’s just such a hard, serpentine journey, as you know. But here I am. Fast forward, here I am. Made a lot of shorts, made a lot of mistakes, essentially became a filmmaker in New York City working with different teams and learning at film school and learning in the streets, and finally made my first feature.”
Not only did Jusu do all of those things, but she also became an assistant professor in the film department at George Mason University. Given Jusu studied in a film program and now teaches in one, we discussed lessons learned at NYU that proved beneficial that now she strives to pass on to her own students.
“I had a really amazing screenwriting professor at NYU grad film named Mick Casale, Italian guy, screenwriter. He really took an interest in me and I remember writing my second year short film. That’s your first big film at NYU grad film. The stakes get really high, your rich classmates fly back to Beijing and make like a million dollar short, and you start to see the class differences and the resource differences, and you get intimidated. You get intimidated by resources, or lack thereof. And he just really was like, ‘You can really make people cry with this short. You can make people feel something at the end of this.’ And he challenged me to do multiple drafts and really evoke emotion. What I did have in my favor was that I was telling very personal, specific stories that no one else could tell.”
Jusu continued:
“What I did notice is that some of the most privileged students had nothing to say, had a lot of vacuous, vapid, gorgeous looking stories. And, at the end of the day, if you tell the story that only you can tell, it will rise to the top, and I still believe in that wholeheartedly. So I often challenge my students to think about, don’t attempt to dictate your storytelling based on what you think the industry wants because the industry doesn’t even know what it wants on any given day. You really have to hone in on who you are and what is the story that makes you feel something tangible, that wakes you up in the middle of the night, that you can’t shake for a really long time?”
Clearly Jusu graduated from NYU with some very valuable lessons in her back pocket, but in an industry that desperately needs to keep evolving, she also pinpointed a few school experiences she had that she knew she had to change for her own students in order to help them forge an even stronger path forward. She began:
“I had a producing professor who, with no irony, not even any sense of self awareness, [would] sit in front of my class of various students and said that films with predominantly black casts and black leads just don’t sell overseas. And he said it like it was just this fact. There was no follow up. There was no emotional supplementation. It was just like saying the sky is blue.”
Not only is it deeply upsetting to hear such a statement in an educational institution, but many of the NYU professors are actively working in the industry. Jusu pointed out, “Imagine if I was a hungry filmmaker and my script landed on his table.” Yes, Jusu found the experience disheartening, but now, as a professor and working filmmaker herself, she uses it as motivation to change things for emerging artists.
“I wanted to prove him wrong. I was like, who is he to say something like this? I just always think about the films and the ways this industry has these ebbs and flows of diversity, and every time we have these surges in diversity, it’s proven that the more diverse the content, the more lucrative the film [is] in terms of box office numbers globally. Anti-blackness is a thing. Racism is a thing. However, if you continue to believe a thesis statement as the beginning of your argument, you’re going to reinforce that thesis statement based on you believing it from the beginning. But if you’re working to effect change and you’re working to inspire students to believe that their stories matter, your thesis statement changes. It’s just a lot of responsibility that educators have, and I think oftentimes a lot of the damage that is done to young minoritized filmmakers is done in the academic space where they’re told that they don’t matter, their stories don’t matter. I literally went to film school with Asian students who were only casting white leads in their films at the time, Asian American classmates. And I knew that that was conditioning. It was thinking that your stories are not good enough, your representation doesn’t matter, and that’s conditioning that we all get in different ways. And so, as an educator, I just take my job really seriously and as a filmmaker to fight back against that really harmful messaging.”
Jusu is taking what she learned and using it to have a positive influence on this business, but that doesn’t mean it’s all smooth sailing. The filmmaking industry forces creators to face one hurdle after the next, and an especially high hurdle, particularly for newer filmmakers, is financing. When it comes to getting what you need to make your movie a reality, Jusu even admitted, “I’m always straddling the line of being honest about my path and not wanting to diminish people’s dreams or sap people of all the hope that they have in their paths.” But she also noted, “It’s possible.”Nannyis proof that it’s possible. Jusu went into further detail:
“Finding financing can be inherently soul-sapping because we live in a capitalistic society that bases the value of your art, your passion on capital and who decides the value of your film, who decides if your film is going to perform well based on theoretical algorithms and all of these things that are not real. It’s all very subjective. So in that sense, pitching the film with my producing partner helped me a lot in terms of having a teammate. I wasn’t alone, because a lot of the process feels very lonely. Finding a producing partner was the first step in Nikkia Moulterie who truly wanted to produce, was not secretly vying to take my spot as the writer-director, who didn’t secretly have this script up her sleeve that she actually wanted to get financed herself. She truly wanted to produce my film.”
Finding the right teammates then extends to pitch meetings. Jusu continued:
“You have some meetings where the person clearly doesn’t give a shit and clearly doesn’t see it for you because you’re two black women and it’s somebody across the table who’s not accustomed to seeing two black women peddling an idea that has value. It’s a lot of that. It’s a lot of navigating people’s predisposed ideas of who you are and what you’re capable of and whether your story matters or not. So that’s, I think, the most debilitating part of the process. But once you start to find people for whom your story resonates, that’s when these different light bulbs go off that your story does matter, that you just need to find your audience and maybe your audience is not a majority of the people reflected in these rooms, but you have to be a little bit creative.”
Jusu penned a story that only she could tell, assembled a stellar team of collaborators to bring it to screen in Moulterie, Diop and more, and nowNannyis finding its audience in theaters while gearing up to reach even more viewers come December 16th when it arrives on Prime Video. The future is bright forNannyand bright for Jusu, too. Not only isNannybeing showered in acclaim, but Jusu already has two more exciting projects lined up, a feature adaption ofSuicide by SunlightwithJordan Peele’s Monkeypaw and also a remake of theGeorge A. Romeroclassic,Night of the Living Dead.
If you’d like to learn even more about Jusu’s journey toNanny, be sure to watch our full Collider Ladies Night Pre-Party conversation in the video at the top of this article or listen to it in podcast form below:
