The director sees the Twitter thread-turned-movie as both a classic comedy and a singular white nightmare.
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Zolafeels simultaneously like anatural extensionof Bravos bent sensibility and a freshly weird direction for her.
Ive been thinking about it for a year and a half.
[Laughs]I have, too.
Ive been thinking about it for that long.
When did you first start thinking about it?
I sent it to my agent and my manager.
I think I sent it to them at four in the morning.
I sleep in weird shifts; Im both a night owl and an early riser.
Its a true garbage experience.
How does that work?
I think they said something like, Well get back to you.
But there are five bidders.
And Im not saying Im a bidder.
She had no cash.
It was a no-cash narrative over here.
So I wasnt a contender.
I dont even know that my name arrived on the list.
I dont know if the writers were announced then.
I found out at the top of 2017, afterLemonpremiered at Sundance, that the property was available.
And I made my shot.
References for character and design and tone and palette and texture.
I was fully in my process and showing them that.
We talked a little bit about casting, but not that much.
The thing we kind of all landed on onZolain particular was Heres an opportunity to cast an unknown.
And then you spotted Taylour Paige just walking down the street, right?Correct.
Id seen her in an ad on TV.
I was like, Shes black, shes hot, I think she dances?
And she was like, Great.
Thats truly everyone and no one at the same time.
Thats the one.I sent my casting director the picture, and she was like, Oh, Taylour Paige!
You toldRolling Stonethat you read it, and it was leading with its dick.
I can only imagine what that initial script was like.
What did you want to lead with instead?
[Laughs]It was hypermasculine.
It was written by men, and I think that version was maybe speaking to a different audience.
She introduced it to me with a lot of care but didnt dumb it down.
She was like,Heres the world.
Come along for the ride.
But [the original script] version was breaking down the world or simplifying it in some way.
I wanted to lean into the enigma.
Can you talk more about that aspect of it now?I mean, yeah.
Making movies is hard.
I think its hard for everyone, and I think its hard even when everything works out.
And we were talking and just saying, Its fucking hard.
As the director, there really isnt anyone who takes care of you.
A lot of your energy is spent taking care of others.
And that is really demanding and exhausting.
Sometimes you just want to be held, and there isnt anyone to hold you.
How did you meet and decide to write the movie with Jeremy?
I was in the kitchen doing some version of hiding.
Even though I read as socially very at ease, I take a lot of breaks.
I just saw that he needed someone.
And from that moment on hes been my little brother.
Hed describe how this happened differently, but thats how I felt.
I took him under my wing.
My partner at the time, Brett Gelman, and I made him part of our family.
He was our baby.
And hes been my baby ever since.
Hes significantly taller than me, but he is my baby.
How he came to be my co-writer Brett actually is responsible for that in some ways.
We were all hanging out together.
I had a shortlist of writers that I liked for the process.
And Brett was like, Why cant it be?
We were like, Because hes going to college.
Which, I dont know, were you at Sundance?
People were not generous [toLemon].
And Brett was like, Well, why not?
And here we are!
Sometimes it really does just take the confidence of a mediocre white man, as the saying goes.
Not that Brett is mediocre, but Brett obviously moves through the world very differently.
He was like, If thats what you want, say that.
I really do credit him with that.
Im curious what that was like from your end.
How difficult was it to make that happen?I think theres two parts.
One is: How difficult was it to include her in the creative process?
And another is: How difficult was it to double-check she was credited?
When I came onboard, I needed her blessing.
Taylour has a very similar story I co-signed Taylour, but she needed AZiahs blessing.
I was co-signed and blessed by A24, but I also needed AZiahs blessing.
I know you dont think we are, and you think youre not like me.
And I was like, No, no, no.
You dont know what Im thinking.
I felt we were very similar the day I read those tweets.
And thats why I felt I had to protect it.
I want to talk about the tone of the movie.
I remember being surprised by it the first time I saw it.
It was constantly veering in directions that I hadnt expected.
It feels like a horror movie in a lot of ways.I think that itisthat.
I think my comedy tone Id describe my place in that market as stressful comedy.
She wrote a trauma comedy.
A tragicomedy, if you will.
When I finally got the film, people would be like, Whats the movie?
Id be like, Oh, yeah, its a dark comedy.
And the person on the other end of that was always like, Thats supposed to be funny?
And Id be like, No, its so funny.
I know I just said sex slavery, but its really funny.
The truth is, without the humor, I wouldnt be the right director for it.
I dont have the range for it.
Maybe I do, but its not a space Id feel necessarily comfortable in.
In the world, we engage with whiteness as though its invisible.
I dont know if its just my own experience, but I dont find whiteness to be invisible.
I find it to be incredibly visible.
Every single thing that every character is wearing has been vetted by me.
Taylour is the straight man, and Riley is the clown or the buffoon.
Shes a white nightmare.
These things that were not celebrated in Black women.
But when white women took them and put them on and embraced them, they were celebrated.
I was really fascinated by that.
I wanted to speak to What is the comfortability of a white woman wearing what weve stereotyped as Blackness?
And why arent we comfortable with it when its actually embodied in Blackness?
So were minstrelizing her, in a way.
Shes in some version of blackface.
And thats the power of whiteness.
When white is invisible, we inherently root for whiteness.
Taylours performance is like you said much subtler, but its also really funny.
Just the way she says a single word or gives a single glance to the side.
I see myself in that character.
Its also a manifestation of the piece, right?
The story people read on Twitter is a story being told in the past tense.
Its equally in the past and in the present.
I wanted to present that in the movie.
Because theres a narrator, we have a sense that theyve made it out.
But I wanted to inject Taylours character.
Because Zola writes herself as the straight man; she recasts the story.
Shes very much next to the insanity.
But thats how she wrote it.
So much of Taylours character is manifesting in that way.
Youre seeing the writer watch to then later retell and present.
The filmmaking is the writer-making.
There are a few visual moments Id like to talk about.
Its this subtle visual joke.Thats one of the early ideas I brought to the draft.
[Laughs] I love body stuff.
Youve seen my work.
I think how Ive arrived at film is through that lens.
My approach can be a bit Brechtian.
A lot of the gestures in this world are really theatrical and are a bit larger than life.
[Sings]Crazy-making and really sad.
I spent last year mourning.
[Laughs]Ive mourned so much.
Im really sorry.No, its okay.
I really thought it was gonna be my year.
I was scared, and I was sad, and I felt like Id missed the boat.
I wanted to replicate that for myself.
I felt like I was robbed of it, and it was super-heartbreaking.
My parents have lost seven friends.
We lost our hairstylist onZola.He was the first person that we as aZolafamily lost to COVID.
I lost my stepfather at the beginning of this year.
So mourning the material felt so hollow and empty.
I didnt know how to make room for all of that.
Im sorry to take it there.
But theres a dedication at the very end of the film for our hair department head.
Im so sorry to hear that.
But Im glad that the movie is finally coming out.
AZiah has said that she had to see the movie twice to determine her reaction to it.
What was that like for you, that waiting period?
And what was her eventual response?Oh my god.
AZiah is a fucking rocket, right?
If she doesnt like the movie, shes gonna tell people she doesnt like the movie.
And if she doesnt like the movie, Ive failed.
Because I made a promise to her, implicitly and explicitly, that I would take care of her.
If she walks out of that theater not feeling cared for, I fucked up.
She cant see this in Park City in the Eccles.
Shed read the script, but from script to screen, it becomes a whole other animal.
So she came out, she saw it, and it was amazing.
I wish we had recorded her watching it.
It was like watching DVD commentary.
Yes, like man on the street.Yeah, so it was a version of that.
She was talking at the movie the whole time.
It was so magical.
And then at the end she started crying.
And I was like, Oh, no.
And we got up in silence.
And then we got outside, and she looked at me, and she just said, Thank you.
She told me what parts were really hard.
Thats where we started.
Will you pay attention to the critical response to it generally?
Im still here!Oh my God, I said that?!
I said, it’s possible for you to go fuck yourself!?
InInterview magazine.Oh, boy.
Well, I dont know what the whole context is.
Im not sure Im saying critics can go fuck themselves.Lemonwas really painful and hard to make.
Brett and I arrived at Sundance thinking, Were gonna be the toast of the town!
And thought everyone would get what we were doing.
And she got up before the movie was over.
And Im such a fan of hers, and it really hurt.
Manohla Dargis was in the theater, too, and just got up and huffed out of there.
You guys are weird.
And I think we wanted to be loved and embraced.
I understand the power of the critic.
I was like, Whos gonna be my Pauline Kael?
And in a way, I think Mark Olsen did that for Brett and me.
He wrote about our movie three times that year.
And Nick Allen at Roger Ebert.
But I think overall, the response was that we failed.
I think the New YorkTimescalled me anti-Semitic, which is a bummer.
Not to say that I cant be a self-hating Jew!
But they called me anti-Semitic, and I was like,Okay!It just felt bad.
And I felt like a lot of that criticism was really aggressive.
I was trying to make a living for myself, and I think they were saying,No.
You havent made a living for yourself.
And so that fuck you is more thats what I felt was being said to me.
And I was really hurt.
But Im grateful for that experience.
I dont read reviews or the interviews that Ive done.
I dont want to hear myself.
Ill judge myself too harshly.
But Im getting the energy that the movie is being liked more.
If Im going to read all the positive things, I need to read the negative things.
But then I have to disengage from it.
