Back In early 2020, when Marvel was on the hunt for a director for The Marvels, a young director came in to pitch her vision for the project to executives and select talent. Four minutes into the meeting, Brie Larson sent an all-caps text to their mutual friend, Tessa Thompson. All it said was “NIA DACOSTA.”
DaCosta, who was 30 at the time, got the job, becoming not only Marvel’s youngest director ever, but also the first Black woman to helm one of its films. “When I go into those rooms, I’m really just like, ‘This is what I want,’ ” says DaCosta. “I’m not trying to figure out what they want, so I don’t have those kinds of nerves.” Her friend Thompson, who knows her way around the Marvel universe, having played Valkyrie in the Thor films, doesn’t think DaCosta is giving herself quite enough credit: “She has this combination of real humility and also this idea of ‘Why shouldn’t I be able to do these things?’ That belief in self—you need that, especially if you’re in a position where people are inclined to underestimate you.”
When she signed on for The Marvels, DaCosta had released just one feature, an indie made for less than $1 million that was galaxies away from a superhero blockbuster. Now she would direct the sequel to Captain Marvel, which had made more than $1 billion globally, and her movie would have to be plotted and positioned carefully since it was tethered to the brand’s other IP, both past and future. “We were just very impressed with her indie cred—and her nerd cred,” says Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige.
Dress by Molly Goddard; jeans by Cotton Citizen; shoes by Manolo Blahnik; jewelry by Bulgari.Photograph by Tom Craig; Styled by Ronald Burton III.
Working with Marvel had been a long-held dream for DaCosta, but there would be risks. The studio has tapped some inspired directors over the years: Ryan Coogler, Taika Waititi, Chloé Zhao, to name a few. Still, the Marvel Cinematic Universe isn’t exactly an auteur-driven Eden: The movies and TV shows are so interconnected that Feige sometimes seems more like an army general than a movie executive. DaCosta finished another studio film before she took on The Marvels—the horror hit Candyman—but she’s a writer-director used to a certain level of autonomy. “That’s where most of the real pure stress as an artist came from,” she tells me from her East London flat, pausing to shush her five-year-old dog, Maude, who’s attempting to attack a pigeon outside her window. “People are like, ‘Oh, it’s a Marvel film. Cool, cool, cool,’ but I also have my name on it, so I want to be able to be proud of it too.”
As DaCosta entered the MCU, Coogler suggested that she just be herself. Straightforward advice, but DaCosta didn’t know what to make of it initially: “I said, ‘Ryan, what are you talking about?’ ” It seemed unlikely that being herself would be enough given the scope of the task at hand. But DaCosta had been raised to trust her instincts, and she returned to Coogler’s words regularly. “You can’t do anything but be yourself, so bring that to the table,” she says. “They can choose to take some and leave some, but that’s what your job is.”
DaCosta grew up in Harlem. She was raised by a single mother—a singer whose band’s claim to fame was writing the theme song for Cool Runnings and who exposed her to film, music, theater, and performance art from an early age. “That was really my upbringing—just full acceptance, full of art, and a mother who really was like, ‘The world is your oyster. Go explore it. Have fun,’ ” she says. DaCosta took her first film class at 16 while in boarding school and wrote a feature-length screenplay even though, technically, her teacher hadn’t asked her to. She graduated from New York University, then moved to London to attend the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Her first job in the industry was as a production assistant on reality shows like Kesha: My Crazy Beautiful Life, but she was miserable: “I was like, ‘This can’t be my life.’ ”
Her mother encouraged her to write, and DaCosta’s screenplay Little Woods was accepted by the Sundance Labs, which had launched Coogler, Waititi, Paul Thomas Anderson, Lulu Wang, Quentin Tarantino, and more. Little Woods came out in 2019, with Thompson and Lily James as cash-strapped sisters who turn to desperate measures to save their home from foreclosure. It was a tense, nuanced debut from a new voice. In short order, DaCosta was hired by producer Jordan Peele to cowrite and direct Candyman, a sharp horror sequel about a Chicago artist (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) who becomes obsessed with the urban legend. The fresh take on horror, told from a Black point of view, earned $77 million worldwide and made DaCosta the first Black woman with a film that opened at number one. “That one’s crazy,” she says. She had assumed that another director—maybe one with the last name DuVernay, Prince-Bythewood, or Matsoukas—had already done it. “I thought it was Ava or Gina or Melina. I was really shocked.”
Postproduction proved to be most challenging. The Marvels shares a bloodline with Captain Marvel and the Ms. Marvel TV show as well as future films. Feige says he prioritizes individual movies over the grander sweep of the studio’s storytelling: “The overarching narrative is secondary to the narrative of the individual film.” But DaCosta was fully cognizant that she’d been hired by a powerful entity to do a job. “It is a Kevin Feige production, it’s his movie,” she says. “So I think you live in that reality, but I tried to go in with the knowledge that some of you is going to take a back seat.”
