Nia DaCosta Says She Confided in Her Fellow Marvel Director When Stressed While Filming ‘The Marvels’

Nia DaCosta talks about her time directing the upcoming superhero movie The miracles.

The writer-director talked to Vanity fair before the November 10 release date of the Captain Miracle follow-up, starring Brie Larson, Teyonah Parris and Iman Vellani. In the conversation, she revealed that she mainly turned to one of her fellow Marvel directors during production when she was overwhelmed and stressed.

While she loved filming The miracles, she admitted that there were days when she texted Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings director Destin Daniel Cretton to vent how she felt.

“Sometimes you’d be in a scene and you’d be like, ‘What the hell does this mean?'” she told the publication. “Or an actor is looking at something crazy happening in space, and he’s (actually) looking at a blue

Marvel encouraged DaCosta to speak with some of her predecessors before putting the sequel into production to discuss some of her fears. So she contacted Chloé Zhao (Eternals), Taika Waititi (Thor) and James Gunn (Guardians of the Universe) and asked them, ‘Are they going to kill me and destroy my soul? Is Kevin Feige a bad man?” she joked. “And they said, ‘No, he’s just a good guy who was a nerd.'”

DaCosta also spoke Black Panther’‘s Ryan Coogler before entering the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He advised her to just be herself; advice that she wasn’t sure would be enough, but she trusted him anyway and often returned to his suggestion.

“There’s nothing you can do but be yourself, so bring that up,” she said. “They can choose to take some and leave some behind, but that’s what your job is.”

Of The miraclesDaCosta becomes the youngest director of the franchise and also the first black woman to direct one of the films. She explained that when she goes into a room to discuss her idea for a film, she only looks at what she wants to do, rather than what the company expects of her, which makes her stand out.

Before joining the MCU, DaCosta wrote and directed Jordan Peele’s Candymanwhich marked her first major film and made her the first black woman to have a film hit No. 1 at the box office.

As far as writer-director mentors go, Peele was as good as it gets.

“One of the most important things I learned from him is how to be fearless and how to navigate studio stuff,” she told the publication. “Not only is he critically successful, he’s also incredibly commercially successful, and that obviously comes with its own pressure. He was very good at holding both things at the same time.

While Peele had her back on set CandymanDaCosta revealed that there were times when crew members said “super inappropriate” things to her that were specific to her gender, race and age.

Fortunately, she had a different experience The miraclesbecause she could hire the people she wanted for her film.

“I realized that it would never be about how much power I amassed or how many great films I made, or that if I won awards it would always just be about the people I surrounded myself with,” DaCosta explained. “What I’ve been most surprised by lately is how much respect I get from these middle-aged white guys I work with.”