In Nanny—the feature debut of Baltimore-based filmmaker Nikyatu Jusu, a Senegalese woman—Aisha (Anna Diop) gets a job as a nanny for a privileged couple on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The couple, named Amy and Adam (Michelle Monaghan and Morgan Spector), live in a luxe, minimalist apartment that seems somehow denuded of joy. They have a very strained marriage, they both harbor unspoken resentments, and they feed their preternaturally solemn six-year-old daughter, Rose (Rose Decker), a bland and regimented diet. They think Rose is a picky eater—instead, she craves the flavorful food eaten by her new nanny.
Aisha loves her new charge, but is suspicious of her parents, who treat their nanny with an almost condescending kindness without bothering to actually get to know her.
What they don’t know, in fact, is that Aisha is saving up money to bring her young son, who is living in Senegal with a relative, to New York. They don’t know that she’s navigating a new romance. They also don’t know she is haunted by nightmares, many involving water and Mami Wata, the African water spirit that can be a harbinger of things both good and evil.
Jusu’s film is part social commentary—a sharp satire of white privilege—part homage to her own Africa heritage (the contrast between the richness of Aisha’s world and the coldness of Adam and Amy’s is striking), and part horror film. I chatted with her about this exciting debut. (Number 17 on my Favorite Films of 2022.)
So I guess my first question is what is your Baltimore connection? Are you from Baltimore?
No, not at all. I’m actually still learning the lay of the land. I’m very new to Baltimore. I left New York three years ago to take a tenure track film professor position at George Mason University. And part of the reason I said yes to the gig, besides job security [laughs], is I have family in Maryland. They live in Montgomery County, so I bought a house in Baltimore. It felt like the closest thing to Brooklyn, which is what I’d been accustomed to for so long. And there are a handful of Black filmmakers and Black artists from cities like New York living here, so it just feels like a place of community and a tribe that kind of understands what I’m navigating.
Let’s talk about Nanny. Obviously, the film deals with a lot of issues—class, race, motherhood, the immigrant experience. Why did you choose to frame it as a horror film?
You know, some of my favorite films are in the darker genres of thriller, psychological thriller, elevated horror. One film that comes to mind is The Babadook. It deals with grief so intelligently. I think the best horror films navigate universal human themes in a really grounded, but slow-burn way. To me, the most banal and mundane things that we kind of overlook in the everyday can be filled with dread and terror.
I feel like Amy and Adam are the kind of people who would describe themselves as liberal. But they never once really considered Aisha’s interiority.
It’s interesting because it feels like I’m [depicting] a microcosm of what I’ve experienced, in terms of an industry that struggles to see my interiority as a Black woman filmmaker. This is something that I have encountered almost all my life, navigating predominantly white spaces starting in middle school. Like, you really do realize at a young age that certain people struggle to see humanity in people who don’t look like them. From the time we’re born we get this messaging that whiteness is the center. You learn to empathize with white children and white people. And everything you watch, for the most part, mostly centers whiteness, so we’re all conditioned to see the world through that lens. So sometimes it’s about decolonizing one’s mind, and most people don’t even think that they need to do that in the first place.
Food is obviously a big theme in the film. What is the significance of the really bland food that they’re feeding Rose?
How did you interpret it?
Well, I thought maybe it was just a little wink and a nod to this notion that, you know, white people eat bland food. But, then also, Amy and Adam are the kind of parents that think they’re protecting their child, but they’re also keeping their child from experiencing the fullness of life.
You said it better than I could, Max. I mean, it’s a combination of both of those. Of course, it’s a little nod and wink and a little jokey-jokey, like what is [up with] white people’s food? [Laughs.] But also I think, more importantly, the subtext is about how Amy evokes control in these little ways that allow her to feel like she has power in her own household, and it ultimately ends up limiting her child’s cultural exposure.
Tell me how you cast Anna Diop. What was your collaboration process like on the set?
She was an absolute dream. She has, obviously, a perfect face that takes up every pixel of every frame of every scene. But also, [when I first saw her] there was something behind her eyes that I was curious about. So after doing some research, and after reaching out, she ultimately was humble enough to audition. Because some actresses said “offer only” or “you can look at my reel,” but she was willing to go through the process. She was just down. She was down for the cause! I could tell she was really passionate about the project. And that’s really one of the most important things to look for as a filmmaker: Does the actor feel like they’re doing you a favor as an up-and-coming filmmaker? Or do they share your vision? Are they passionate about it? I want to work with her for the rest of my career. She’s super talented.
I thought her chemistry with child actress Rose Decker is really special. That must have been pretty amazing to watch that play out.
That was great. I got lucky. Rose’s mom is also amazing, because you’re casting the parents as much as you are casting the children. So, like, I would give them assignments—go to the zoo or go to the park. Anna and Rose spent time together which is so important because for kids, you can’t talk to a kid about subtext. You have to really get to know them and garner their trust. Luckily, Anna just made it so much easier for Rose to fall in love with her in real life.
And she’s not an overly cutesy child. I hate films with overly cutesy children!
She’s so stoic! Rose is like a 50-year-old woman in a six-year-old’s body. To the point where I literally had to get her to respond to the violence in the film—she was just so calm. But you would rather have a calm child than a child who’s freaking out. It’s always easier to bring kids up than bring them down.
So let’s talk about Aisha’s romance with Malik (Sinqua Walls). Because he’s a very nice man, but there’s this scene where he teases her, and he says that he has five children from five different women. And in that moment as a viewer you’re like, “Oh shit!” But then he’s basically like, “Psych!” So I’m just wondering, first of all, was that intentional?
Of course!
And then why do you think him being a good man was important in that moment?
Well, I like to play with audience expectations. I like to play with stereotypes. You know, if you meet the average Malik, who looks like him, you’d have these preconceived notions. Why is he single? Is he a womanizer? When a man is good looking and charismatic like that, the world is kind of their oyster. So, yeah, we’re rooting for Aisha to have a safe space. So I wanted to play with whether Malik actually was a safe space, or whether he was yet another variable adding complication to her life.
Tell me about the sets. Were you filming in friends’ houses? Did you choose a particularly saturated kind of palette for Aisha’s spaces and the reverse for Amy and Adam? Why was that important?
I wish I had friends that had houses like that! But no, one of the hardest locations to pin down was Amy and Adam’s condo in New York. If you want a money-looking location, you have to pay real money. And we needed a location that looked like New York money as opposed to Middle America money. The couple who lived in the condo in real life was this Scandinavian couple. I think the woman was an architect. They wanted to make a buck off our little production. So it was really hard to get that location. It ate a lot of the budget.
And then Jonathan Guggenheim, our production designer—he understood color. Charlese Antoinette, our costume designer, Rina Yang, our cinematographer—all my department [heads] talked about the color palette. So when Aisha’s immersed in her community, she wears a lot of yellows, oranges, reds, vibrant, warm colors, because she’s embraced by the warmth of her people. When she’s in Amy and Adam’s home, it’s relatively sterile, a little desaturated—color is still there. I’m never going to make a movie that feels totally desaturated because color is so prevalent in my culture. And I knew we were playing with audience expectations by making a darker film tonally that still had vibrant colors. I always like to undermine expectations in that way.
The film has a sort of heavily spiritual or even mystical quality to it. Were you worried that audiences in America and Europe were going to sort of find that alienating, or did that not even cross your mind?
It’s actually a much more European film, I think. Honestly, I try not to think about the audience too much when I’m creating. I think that when you’re a new voice like mine, who is introducing a different lens and a different way into these stories, you’re inevitably going to get a plethora of people who don’t get it, don’t want to get it, don’t want to engage. So I don’t care. [Laughs.] That’s the short answer. I didn’t care about that. I wanted to create a story that was true to who I am.