Janicza Bravo on bringing a viral Twitter thread to the screen — and to Sundance — with Zola
, but that attempt fell apart about a year later, and in early 2017, Bravo got the chance to try for it again. “I just did all of this research and basically auditioned for about three, three and a half months,” she recalls. “And then I found out, in May of 2017, myself and [distributor] A24 both got the project.”playwright Jeremy O.
Looking at the bare facts of the narrative, the story wouldn’t appear to be a comedic one: Zola befriends a fellow dancer, Jessica , who invites her on a spontaneous road trip to Florida to make some money in the strip clubs there. Before the journey is done, Zola has witnessed sex trafficking, murder, and a suicide attempt. Her singular perspective, however, comes through so strongly in the tweets that the unpredictable thread is undeniably funny.f—ed,” Bravo admits of the history.
That’s powerful, and while King’s storytelling is zany and shocking, Bravo was affected by the power of it. “I think that what that piece is, as a piece of art or a physical object, is a representation of an individual’s ability to process and exorcise their trauma [through] a narrative and find humor in what is really hard and awful. And that is a gift,” Bravo says. “She wrote from a place of an inner voice.
It was important to the director to retain the quality of Zola’s commentary; “I just basically wanted to go back to what it was that we fell in love with,” she says. “We would be doing a disservice if we were not leaning into what the texture of her voice was.” So, too, did she want to honor the platform where the story originated. “It’s a funny thing for me, because I don’t do Twitter,” she admits. “But [the film is] a bit of a love letter to people who grew up with phones in their faces.
Despite the low likelihood that you’ll ever see Bravo herself share a long, strange story on Twitter, “what was so radical about it, or I guess what spoke to me, was that I heard my own voice in it,” she says. She connected with King early in the process, and the pair have been “FaceTime pen pals” for the last two and a half years. “I remember my first phone call with Aziah, and she was like, ‘You know, you and I are the same,’” Bravo recalls. “And I felt that.
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