Nia DaCosta always watches ‘Apocalypse Now’ before her next movie: “I revisit it before I start”
Director of the recent Candyman reboot Nia DaCosta is certainly someone who gets deeply involved with whatever she’s shooting, in fact she wouldn’t even say the name of that movie five times just in case a very scary man with a hook for a hand started invading her bathroom at night.
Currently working on the quick sequel to Danny Boyle’s zombie franchise 28 Years Later, entitled 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, DaCosta has had quite a rise to eminence over the last ten years or so, despite something of a setback due to the performance of her superhero movie Marvels, which lost an estimated $250m at the box office.
It was still the most successful film directed by a black woman in history, however, and it wasn’t DaCosta’s directing skills that led to the film disappointing. She grew up as a film obsessive, enrolling at New York University where she took on internships in television, where she met none other than Martin Scorsese, someone she idolised.
Going on to earn a degree overseas in London, she began full-time work as a production assistant and then writing her own short films as recently as 2014, with her first film, Little Woods, being put into production thanks to a Kickstarter campaign.
After being called up to direct two episodes of Netflix’s highly-rated gang drama Top Boy, DaCosta co-created a web series called Ghost Tape before she got the job directing the Candyman remake in 2021. The original movie, a supernatural horror starring the late Tony Todd as the psychotic, vengeful ghost of a former slave was a big hit in 1992 especially on home video.
DaCosta’s reboot, which landed in the midst of the Covid pandemic, was also a hit, almost tripling its budget on release and starring Get Out’s Jordan Peele as a producer. DaCosta’s directing also received significant praise and led to her winning several award nominations.
As a student, she was a particular fan of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the book that would form the basis for Francis Ford Coppola’s sprawling and infamous Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now.
And that was a film that proved to be a game-changer for the young director-in-waiting, who explained to The Guardian: “Seeing Apocalypse Now was a formative experience. I revisit it before I start shooting anything. People don’t really make original epics on that scale any more. It’s like scale and idiosyncrasy have been sort of separated from each other.”
The 1979 film, which starred Martin Sheen, a semi-incoherent Dennis Hopper and a shaven-headed Marlon Brando shrouded in darkness, was one of the most controversial and long-winded shoots in cinematic history. Wildly over budget, Coppola pressed on with his artistic vision despite typhoons, lead actor Harvey Keitel having to be replaced by Sheen who then had a heart attack while filming and the helicopters in the movie being used to engage in actual warfare by Filipino pilots.
As Coppola himself said: “We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.”
DaCosta will certainly be injecting a sense of the epic into the second instalment of 28 Years Later, the first trailer for which you can see below. It was filmed back-to-back with Boyle’s first film and will hit cinemas in January next year, featuring the likes of Jack O’Connell and Ralph Fiennes. You can see the first trailer for the movie below.
