Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson on Breaking New Ground in “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project”

To hear Nikki Giovanni tell it in “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project,” when first contact is made with alternative life in the universe, no one is better prepared to make a connection than herself as a Black female poet, reasoning that the experience of having already been brought to a foreign land during a time of slavery and being attuned to rhythm provides a greater foundation for an exchange of ideas and as she always has over a six-decade-plus career, she makes a convincing case.

“The first thing that’s going to happen in middle passage is the spiritual because it’s going to give us the spirit to go forward,” says Giovanni, stirring the pot in her kitchen as she does the same for an audience. “It’s going to be that [humming]. We didn’t have any language that was universal, and the only thing that can be spoken is going to be music and [then] who’s going to communicate with them? Who’s going to be the one to say somehow we can make it through? It has to be a woman because when things went wrong, it was your grandmother who said, ‘It’ll be alright.’”

Giovanni will proudly tell you she’s not very friendly, keeping only a close coterie of longtime confidants around her and not suffering any fools at her age. Yet nearly anyone can feel at home in her words — while she suggests a kinship with aliens, you realize just how many martians are roaming the earth, perhaps not sharing any similar experience but pulled in by her poetry which transcends any linguistic disparities to reach another realm — and if filmmakers Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson were going to do the artist and activist justice as a subject, they’d need to go somewhere they hadn’t been before, taking their time over seven years and employing every cinematic tool at their disposal to have the impact of being in her presence. What took a tremendous amount of work now unfurls naturally in the powerful profile of Giovanni, a film that can feel like a visit to her home where framed pictures on the wall can overlap with one another and scenes of her family and friends commingle with spontaneous snapshots of her with former Fisk University classmate John Lewis or James Baldwin, all having an equal place in her life.

Nearing 80, Giovanni’s memory has begun to fade slightly when Brewster and Stephenson meet her, but she remains as spry and defiant as ever in speaking to the present and the filmmakers recognize that when her poetry feels as alive now as the moment she put pen to paper, it can act as vividly in describing turning points of the past (particularly when recited by Taraji P. Henson), having to take setbacks in the civil rights movement in stride despite her best efforts and withstanding all she did as a single mother to her son Thomas. If all this coexists concurrently in her mind, Brewster and Stephenson allow for it all to be presented on screen at the same time in concert with one another, layering spoken word, freeform jazz and precisely picked historical imagery to come across as an explosion of ideas that captures her restlessness and revolutionary spirit more than any standard accounting of her life could.

As likely as “Going to Mars” is going to inspire breakthroughs for those who see it, it already seems to have done so for its co-directors as far as cinema’s capabilities for expression and with the film that has now picked up Best Documentary Prizes from Sundance and Indie Memphis, not to mention an Audience Award at Blackstar, Brewster and Stephenson spoke about their search for a subject who could let them stretch their creative muscles after spending a decade tracking their own children’s matriculation in the longitudinal doc “American Promise,” how they could seamlessly integrate Giovanni’s poetry into the film and how all their work in recent years culminated in in this inspiring portrait.

It was interesting to hear that what led you to Nikki Giovanni was originally the desire to do something set in the world of music. Was it the desire to tell the story of an artist or a formal challenge in terms of expressing a certain rhythm in the filmmaking that you were after initially?

Joe Brewster: You know, we searched high and wide for a musical topic. We were looking at John Coltrane, and at a couple of hip-hop artists, and I don’t think we could have done any better because what this did for us is simplify the quest somewhat. It was not really about one kind of music. It was about the rhythm of words combined with these artistic pillars, which we like to think are culturally specific to us, where we use tone and polyrhythms and call and response. And it came one element at a time to the point where we noticed that people were leaning into the scenes more, so that discovery was something we wanted to do, but we weren’t really clear about how we were going to go about it.

Michèle Stephenson: And part of what was drawing us to doing a work around an artist was to do the opposite of “American Promise,” both delving into one profile of an artist and step away from verite material and dig into archive. But also I’ve had frustrations with watching films that are about artists that I love, and I don’t hear enough about the work itself, so that was an intentional challenge for us. Nikki Giovanni was on an NPR interview back in the day when we were trying to figure out [what we wanted to pursue] and when we heard it, we said, “Oh my God, she’s impacted us. Poetry could be interesting. Let’s move towards that.” But the idea of centering the work and its impact and leaving the space for that, as opposed to listening to others talking about it or about her [was exciting]. And poetry represented a challenge, but she was kind of hip hop before hip hop came around in terms of how she did her poetry with background music. She had recorded LPs in the past, so somehow it became a no-brainer in terms of what we wanted to do.

When you first meet her, given whatever you had in mind beforehand from her public persona and her work, were you surprised by anything?

Joe Brewster: We were surprised by many things. One, she has a joy for life and an obsession with information. You can see her [voluminous] library and she’s read all of those books, and she doesn’t read them once. She says, “A good book is like a good movie. You have to watch it twice,” and we’ve developed an appreciation for the way she lives her life, her love for food, and her humor. It is riveting. She takes an audience and leaves them spellbound because she is really following comedic and dramatic principles that have been laid down for centuries. She’s a master at that. I didn’t expect that.

It was interesting then to see how the tour becomes a bedrock for the film because not only are you able to hear her speak in a way she might not during a traditional sit-down interview, but you also see how she’s engaging with these multigenerational crowds. Did you know what role that could play in the film from early on?

Michèle Stephenson: This is where our observational skills of verite filmmaking kick in. She was doing her “Good Cry” tour, and we were just following her and filming it, not knowing at the time the kind of impact the poems in that book would have for the film. There’s a lot of material having to do with her personal life, and her relationship to her father Gus that came out in this book, and at one point, we were thinking about the title being around this book, but I’m glad it’s not, because there’s a bigger element that’s more collective around “Going to Mars” that gives us a larger feeling, but the intimacy of what she discusses [in “A Good Cry”] was really key. But I have to say we stumbled upon it because we were just there in 2017, shooting that tour and feeling like we needed to for our coverage and it only came about more later in the editing that we were able to cull some of those readings as pivotal moments of vulnerability that she shared.

Joe Brewster: And sometimes, [it was] matter-of-fact, vulnerability. I was in WHYY, the Philadelphia [Public Radio] station, and she’s talking about [her son] Gus and she mentions her mom, and after her mom was thrown against the wall, [she said] “What goes on in this house stays in this house,” and I’m thinking that is so riveting in terms of what it says about the family and about what Nikki had to endure — silence. So she was forced to to find another way to cope. Then soon after that, we hit you with one of her early poems about going off into space with the ants, so we know that her desire to go to Mars started as a result of this traumatic relationship. That’s all information that we were learning as we were going, and it helped design the piece.

We designed as much as we could, but we were constantly fed information. More importantly, we had to find ways in which it was best to reveal [what] to the audience. There has been some discussion about it not being a biopic and we proudly embrace that. We’re not giving you blow to blow on her life. We’re giving a cinematic experience and listen, we are trying to grow as artists and for that, we wanted to embrace as many tools as possible. We pitched this as “I’m Not Your Negro” meets [“Montage of Heck” about] Kurt Cobain, and it might be less that and more Arthur Jafa’s “Love is the Message, the Message is Death,” but the point is, we have new skills now that allow us to tell story without orthodoxy and entertain people.

Michèle Stephenson: And challenge emotionally. It was really serendipitous that we started to pick up the camera and follow her at a moment where she was coming to terms with being more vulnerable and confronting some of her childhood trauma. She was 74 at the time [we began filming], and part of the beauty of verite filmmaking and also sticking to it is the ability to be there in the moment and maybe not having a very intentional understanding at the time of what this impact is, but knowing that it has to be covered and seeing that later in the post.

This is where I slip in a compliment for your last feature “Stateless,” but when you were in production on this for seven years, I get the sense that there must’ve come a moment of creative breakthrough where you decided you didn’t have to tell a story the same way you had done before or the ways others would when there’s such a blending of narrative ideas. In retrospect, that film looks like it might’ve been a step forward to get you here where you blend an observational doc about the present day crisis in the Dominican Republic where Dominicans of Haitian descent feel far less welcome with a history that’s conveyed in the storytelling style of regional folklore.

Joe Brewster: There are elements of “Stateless” in this film, but certainly Michelle had decided that “Stateless” would be a change. There’s metaphor, there’s a magical realism in “Stateless,” but it’s more seamless in this film. It is scoped throughout. Maybe you should speak to that, Michèle.

Michèle Stephenson: “Stateless” was in part an experimentation with some of these notions of playing both with time and place, because in “Stateless,” we go back to the Massacre of 1937 through fables, but it’s grounded very much more in the verite, plot-driven [narrative scheme of] what’s going to happen to the main character. But we were flexing our creative muscles there, and there’s also another part of our work that definitely has a big impact on “Going to Mars,” which is the work we’ve done in virtual reality. “The Changing Seine,” the short that we did forced us to understand what the immersive experience is. There is this sound and music element that surrounds us, but that also is in conversation with the visual, so we brought all of that to the work on “Going to Mars.” And if you listen to the sound design and the music, there’s a very intentional way of immersing people and working with sonic triggers that hit us at an emotional level that’s not intellectual and we sometimes can’t even articulate.

We really maximize the 5.1 [surround sound], which is why we say you have to go see this in the theater because we’re hitting you with different things. For example, the sound of the boat creaking in the water as you watch space is a foreshadowing of this idea of the Middle Passage being a reference for space. The sound of young girls laughing when we talk about the outer space and the girls dancing, those are things that surround us. So in some ways, all of our work culminated into “Going to Mars,” and the fact that it took seven years is actually an indication of how all of this time helped us synthesize and break through certain things in the work that we were doing.

Joe Brewster: You’re articulating how this acts as emotionally, but I’m going back to the polyrhythmic nature of the edit. Because if you really look at the edit and listen to the rhythm of the edit, it’s not metrically the same. It would be the experience of me being a tambourine like this [pounding it slow and steady] versus what my aunt would do to a tambourine — she would drive you to a climax while she’s in church because she’s starting on 2/2 time and she’s going to 5/8, and that’s exciting [as the beat gets faster]. That was also intentional because we needed to get a minute of poetry, so cutting like this [in some measured way] was not going to do it. And I know it works because people say, “I watched that ‘Can You Kill’ poetry, or ‘Ego Tripping’ poetry [live]” and [this had the same rhythm. It’s about the edit, and even the slower, more lumbering poems, the archival is coming and it’s not predictable.

Michèle Stephenson: There’s also a polyrhythm to the transitions, right? They’re quick, they’re drum-driven in some cases to accentuate and punctuate, and be in conversation with what comes next.

I just thought there’s all kinds of poetry in this, some of which is Nikki’s and some of which is yours. And when it’s so infectious, what’s it been like to get this out into the world these past few months?

Joe Brewster: Well, it’s difficult because it’s not a star-driven piece, so we don’t get the same kind of press. But what we do get is that when people see this film, they tell five people and it’s gone from “What’s that film?” to you hear the rumble. And we can see the people responding and the intensity not only in terms of the quantity of calls we get, but in other ways. It’s very exciting, and we hope that it translates to our next film project or two.

Michèle Stephenson: Yeah, the momentum is building. It’s got its diehard fans that are spreading the word and we can feel the love, so we’re very excited by the reception.

“Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project” opens on November 3rd in New York at Film Forum and in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Royal.