With Clemency, Chinonye Chukwu was the first Black woman to win the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Three years later she returns with another story about justice, about a woman striving to understand our current systems, and about the impact that a single death can have on others.
Till, Chukwu’s third feature, focuses on Mamie Till, the mother of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old boy who was lynched in 1955. Emmett’s lynching became a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement, a symbol of the brutality facing Black communities in America. Chukwu puts all of it—the stress, the grief, the anger—onto Mamie, played with a career-defining performance from Danielle Deadwyler. The director handles this story with an immense amount of care, love, and hope. She’s only willing to share a certain level of violence, wanting to humanize Emmett, his mother, and the rest of their family.
Till finds its footing because of Deadwyler and Chukwu’s more-than-assured direction. Deadwyler gives everything as Mamie, communicating largely through her eyes, as Chukwu constantly puts her into the center of the frame. They make an undeniable duo in Till. Chukwu wants to be personal with Mamie—to be close, to attempt to understand what she’s going through and how she’s going to find justice. The drama spends most of its runtime after Emmett’s death, following Mamie’s long road towards closure, on her fight to create any semblance of change.
Till signifies something many critics and audiences likely already expected: Chinonye Chukwu is here to stay. I chatted with the director about carrying the weight of this story, how things have (and haven’t) changed in the last 70 years, and how she prepped Deadwyler for this massive performance.
The Film Stage: There’s a warmth and brightness in the way the film is lit. How’d you come to that decision, especially with the content of the story?
Chinonye Chukwu: I knew what I wanted when I started the process of constructing my directorial vision. And one of the first things that I thought about was: I really wanted to have a vibrant, bold, colorful color palette and world to reflect the vibrancy, the beauty, the brilliance of Blackness and Black people of Black communities and Black spaces. Doing so really helps to deeply humanize the people who were so often seen as just black-and-white photos. And so all of that really informed my deliberateness about that. That was something that I communicated immediately to my department heads, my cinematographer, production designer, and costume designer.
The scene that sticks in my mind is with Mamie playing poker with her friends. You see the brilliance of Danielle’s [Deadwyler] performance. Can you talk about the camera swirling in that scene, how you constructed that movement?
I wanted there to be a visual parallel to the scene before, where we are going through spaces ending on Emmett and his cousin. And in that one [scene], it also has a lot of movement to it. I wanted there to be, in the first act of the film, for us to always show the parallels and maintaining the tension between Emmett’s space and Mamie’s space in that first night, and so that was the first thing that I thought about. When the camera goes around them we push in as Mamie gets lost in her own private thoughts, right? There’s that tension between the public and the private, and we push in, and then we then pull back out when she steps out of it. And so I really wanted Mamie’s emotional moment and subtext to motivate the camera movement in that scene.
And can you talk about the impact of putting someone’s face directly in the center of the camera like that?
One of the things I think that’s so powerful about the language of cinema and the tools of cinema is not only just what’s in the frame, but also what’s out of the frame. And when you’re thinking about what and who’s in the frame. It is an opportunity for you to decide who you’re centering. And so I was very intentional about the visual language centering Mamie, and the other Black people who are part of her ecosystem, part of her community. That is a very obvious visual centering of Mamie and staying with her in her emotional moment, but it’s also a way of centering her narrative in the story. Doing those close-ups is one of the many reasons that I cast Danielle, because she is an actor who can communicate so much without saying a word. And so every time we are on her in a close up way, there’s a layered emotionality and a layered humanity that’s communicated just through her eyes.
Tell me about your relationship to Danielle Deadwyler. How’d you prepare her for a performance with this amount of emotion and depth?
Danielle and I were really partners in this and I made sure we were in constant communication about the emotional and psychological weight of this role. And I was really alongside her as she dove into the research for months. And we spent months digging into every emotional beat and nuance of the script, many times and having many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many conversations about every single beat, every single line, and what are the things that she will need to do to protect her well-being going into this performance. But also coming out of this performance. After months of prep work we also had rehearsals, with the different actors, or just her and myself, and those rehearsals were more so about getting underneath and in between the words, as opposed to strict blocking. So that really helped them think about the humanity and the psychology as opposed to “I need to hit my mark.” I think that really helps make the performances grounded and real and helps audiences feel or empathize with what they’re going through on an emotional level.
By the time we were on set, Danielle had an inherent emotional and psychological understanding of who Mamie was. Our conversations on site and my directing of her was more about adjustments or reminding her where we were at—mainly emotionally or psychologically—in that scene we were shooting, because we shoot out-of-order. Tweaking different emotional beats, or bringing out certain emotional layers, piece by piece by piece—especially in a seven-page scene of the testimony where there are so many different emotional beats and layers and emotional psychological navigations. Danielle and I would be on that set and just kind of take it piece by piece and just remind her of the work we did in prep. So she tuned in immediately, and it was just to give a just a reminder or a little bit of note or direction, and she just took it to a whole other level each time.
You mentioned the emotional weight of the performance and of the story. How much did that weight affect you and affect Danielle? How do you attempt to come down from shooting the film?
One of the things that I was really adamant about—and so were the producers—was having a therapist on set every day. Having a therapist on set to the cast and the crew was critical, and showed the cast and crew that we’re really being intentional about their well-being and their emotional safety. I was very protective of the actors and crew I work with, and so if they needed a break, then we needed to take a break. There was a scene we were shooting, the scene where Emmett is abducted from his uncle’s home and he asked for a break so he can get a hug from his mom in-between takes. So I stopped everything we were doing so he could get the hug and I didn’t resume until he was ready. There are certain scenes where… for instance, the scene where Mamie is looking at Emmett’s body for the first time. I told the crew, “We got this, we got to do this in two takes, no more. Whatever we get in two takes is what’s going to be in the film.” Because I don’t want to put Danielle through that more than twice. I’d had conversations with Danielle and prep. “When do you want to shoot that scene?”
When there were certain scenes where I knew the emotional weight was going to be greatest and I would have constant conversations with Danielle ahead of time. “When in the schedule will you be ready for that?” I kept the lines of communication very open. I was very protective of their well-being and we had a therapist and we had a culture on set that honored the emotional weight we were all carrying. I think all of that prep and production helped with the process after we wrapped up, which kind of reeked of emotional recalibration, and Danielle and I continued to talk many times after we wrapped and checked in with each other. We still have those conversations and ask each other how we can continue to support one another.
How did you attempt to strike a balance in terms of what violence you showed and what you didn’t? Specifically, in the scene in which Mamie sees Emmett’s body for the first time.
The key is that Mamie is our protagonist. We are following her point of view and her emotional journey. So that dictated to me what we see, how we see it, and when we see it. Because we are following Mamie’s journey, there was no need to see the physical violence that was inflicted upon Emmett after people abducted him. I also didn’t want to recreate it or witness it as a human being and especially as a Black person. That was also a way that I’m caring for audiences across races. But I knew that the way that showing his body after he was lynched was honoring Mamie’s decision of having the world see what happened to her son. And it was an extension of that decision. But I knew that when I do it, it has to be sparing yet effective.
When we begin the scene with the body for the first time, his body is obstructed for a period of time in the beginning, and we’re just with Mamie, respecting the privacy, in the quiet of that moment. My approach to that scene was to humanize and not objectify. I don’t want the camera to be an extension of the audience’s eyes because that will lead to voyeurism. But I wanted us to discover every part of his body with Mamie. We get to really center that moment through the lens of care and love. And it’s about Mamie’s connection to her son; it’s not about us, as an audience, looking at it as voyeur or objectifying his body. That was really key to my approach. We will make it human in that we will keep it respectful and about Emmett’s humanity.
There’s a sense at the end of the film that, though Mamie has made a large impact, it still takes decades for things to change. How do you feel about Mamie and her influence the more you have reflected on her and the recent anti-lynching act?
One of the things that I learned about Mamie in researching and my journey in this film and journey in building a relationship with her family members is that part of Mamie’s legacy is that she was tied to us having hope. Because even if the changes we want don’t happen in our lifetime, we must have hope that it can. And so we have to continue to do what we can in our lifetimes to help move things forward. Right? Even if that movement doesn’t result in all of the change that we want to see, the work we do is tied to the work that future generations can do. So we must continue to do the work that can be built upon. So hopefully we can get to that and we can create all the changes that we want to see. I think about that when thinking about how there’s so much that is still the same, right?
There’s still some progress that has been made, the work that Mamie has done, the work Myrlie and Medgar Evers have done. The freedom work that they have done has helped move some things forward and has been inspiring for people who’ve come after them. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks have referenced Mamie’s activism and advocacy as work that has helped inspire their own activism and advocacy. When I think about myself and the way that I want to be a change agent in the world, it’s very much inspired by people who’ve come before me and also people who continue to work to this day. And so that gives me hope. I learned that I hope that we can lean on that.
We should still celebrate those victories like the anti-lynching bill. But I also know that so much work is to be done. But we shouldn’t be so dejected by the reality that so much does need to be done. And there are still many other Emmett Tills in our present realities. But we must believe that change can and is happening and that we, ourselves, can be the agents of change. I also believe that joy can be a form of resistance. I wanted to communicate that through this film, that in spite of the inherent pain and sadness that can come with being in this world, we must still hold on to the joy and love and life that exists alongside it.
Till opens on Friday, October 14.