Director Nia DaCosta on the power of Hedda
The Treatment
KCRW
4.6 • 656 Ratings
🗓️ 1 November 2025
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Director Nia DaCosta’s new film Hedda is a daring adaptation of the 1891 Henrik Ibsen play Hedda Gabler. DaCosta talks with Elvis about not treating the original text too seriously, using physical spaces to define characters, and what Hedda surprisingly has in common with DaCosta's previous films The Marvels and Candyman.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment. |
| 0:12.2 | It's the treatment. |
| 0:13.2 | You can also at KCRW.com slash the treatment. |
| 0:16.8 | My guest, Neanderthik's films about women and their proximity to power. We can see that and how women react to that and how they're treated because of that proximity of power. It goes from her, I think, her first studio film to her current film, Hedda, which reunites her with Tessa Thompson and her cinematographer, Sean Baudfer. So it was great to have you here. Thanks for doing this. |
| 0:38.4 | Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited. |
| 0:40.0 | We'll fix that. But it's interesting because they really are about, especially in Head is literally about the proximity of their power. |
| 0:47.3 | Because it's a play about power. And it's interesting, you don't start with the gun. |
| 0:52.9 | No, no, no. Well, I mean, it's about power, but it's also about agency. Which is proximity to power. Yeah, for sure. And how can you, in your own inner sense of power and authority? Can you own your own authority? I think that's something that had her struggles to do, which is part of why she suffers, her self-limiting sort of behavior. But yeah, no, I don't start with the gun, and I don't end with the gun. |
| 1:13.6 | You can't see that any production of it not think about Chekhov's gun. Yeah, yeah. You can't take it out of it. No. absent but it's it's we feel the presence of it before we see it which is I want to ask |
| 1:25.7 | you about because it's produced literally |
| 1:28.3 | in any production of the play. |
| 1:30.3 | Yeah. |
| 1:31.3 | But here's something we feel just because it's, there's when people circle her, talk her about the way she uses power. |
| 1:36.3 | Yeah. |
| 1:37.3 | And the power that she thinks she has versus the power she has. |
| 1:40.3 | It's also got a real jazz age feel to it. |
| 1:43.3 | I mean, and the first big song, it's also quite, if that's not a metaphor for the production itself, I don't know what it is. |
| 1:51.0 | Yeah. |
| 1:51.8 | With the checkouts gun on at all, we, what am I saying? |
| 1:55.6 | We, I guess I wrote it, but I. |
| 1:58.2 | Is this the Royal Weeks that you work in in the uk i just default to we when i talk |
| 2:02.0 | about the film because so many people work on it but the script was just me and you know in absence |
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