Actor/screenwriter Darrell Britt-Gibson has deep adoration for women. Over our brief 15-minute conversation, he points to their strength and double taps on their greatness and sacrifice often. It should come as no surprise that he's created a powerful character in She Taught Love's (Andscape/Hulu) co-lead, Mali (pronounced Moll-e) — a sports agent who's been diagnosed with a rare, fast-moving cancer.
"I just don't know weak women, and I have no desire to craft stories that depict weak women," says Britt-Gibson, who, in addition to writing the screenplay, also plays Mali's love interest, Frank. "Women have saved my life."
Mali, who is depicted beautifully by Yale graduate and accomplished thespian Arsema Thomas (Queen Charlotte), is the engine that drives this romantic drama. She gives the film heart while first-time director Nate Edwards provides a moody and dark aesthetic that's a fitting visual.
LEVEL sat with film principles, Gibson, Thomas, and Edwards, to dig into the mechanics of executing on a film genre that was ubiquitous in the 1990s. The result is a riveting deep dive on the art of love and freedom of death.
LEVEL: Darrell, I didn’t realize this story was based on your girlfriend’s sister. I couldn’t imagine what it feels like to experience that kind of loss and know it's coming.
DARRELL BRITT-GIBSON: I was able to live in [that experience]. So, it's like loosely based [on that]. I really homed in on this idea of the strength and the resilient nature of women in general. Women are just so damn strong. For my money, I don't see enough of that depicted in the films and TV that we consume.
I just don't know weak women, and I have no desire to craft stories that depict weak women. Women have saved my life, and especially in this space of showing this strong Black woman leading this thing and it being her story. Frank has to find his space within that story. It’s similar to how I felt like I had to find my space in that world in real life.
Knowing the backstory on how Darrell wrote the screenplay, how did you go about preparing for this role?
ARSEMA THOMAS: The moment that I realized it was something he held close to his heart and that he'd been holding for seven years in the making, it made it very important that I try to bench Mali's narrative in as much reality as I could possibly find. So I was reading books that would help me open my heart. I read Love by Toni Morrison. I read Salvation by bell hooks. Those two were the pillars for creating a love ethic for Mali. And then I interviewed my aunt. She has a similar story to Mali where she was diagnosed with breast cancer shortly after meeting her now-husband. It was really important for me to understand what type of dynamic and what goes on in one's mind when you are trying to build something quite positive and beautiful and quite scary at the same time.
So I asked her a lot about that, about where did that stress and that pressure sit in her body and what is it like to date somebody when you almost have a third member of your relationship being your health. All that was really, really important to me to get down.
I'm really curious as to how your aunt answered these questions.
ARSEMA THOMAS: I think she described it so well. She was like, being able to fall in love was the gift because it meant that she could focus on something else, and it's something that was driving towards the future. It's moving it forward rather than being surrounded by people who are looking at you as something fragile. She was able to be the queen in this man's eyes, this novel creature. And she's like, "At a certain point you also realize that you don't have a choice. You have to find the thing that keeps you going." And for her it was love.
Frank always sounds authentic to the culture. The words don’t sound like they were written by a visitor. Being that you wrote the screenplay, Darrell, did that make it easier to play the character?
DARRELL BRITT-GIBSON: It can feel like it is easier, but I think that there are moments it can be harder because you have lived with something for so long as the writer, that the sort of seeing it come to life, you're kind of like, "Wow, I know the character like the back of my hand."
At the same time, it's letting myself as the writer get lost in the character as an actor. Because I have to separate myself from being the writer to now inhabiting this character and his wants and his desires. And so I treated Frank the same way I treat every character that I've ever played in my career. I have this 10-minute rule that I live by where it's the five minutes before you see a character on-screen and the five minutes after they've gotten offscreen at the end of the film or wherever their journey ends in that particular film. I tirelessly live in those 10 minutes. And then when actually filming the movie, everything becomes so easy because I've worked on those 10 minutes.
You’ve worked with some of the best screenwriters in the business: Shaka King, David McDonough, and David Simon, to name a few. What did you learn about screenwriting from those legends?
DARRELL BRITT-GIBSON: They've all since become very good allies to me, big brothers, and I've learned so much. I remember when Martin said to me, because I had let him read the script early, and I was like, "Man, it's going to be great. He's probably going to tear me to shreds." And I remember meeting him and he said, "Man, you're a writer. You know what I mean?" I was like, "Oh, that's crazy." The greatest advice he ever gave to me was when he said, "Darrell, make sure every word counts." Be intentional with every word, because they have to mean something to someone and make them mean something to you first before they can mean anything to anyone else.
Nate, this is your first feature film. You center Black love as it relates to Mali rather than her other notables. It would have been easy to dial in on her successful career as an agent or over-index on the cancer.
NATE EDWARDS: Well, I got to give a lot of the credit to Darrell and the script. It was these elements to the story, which I think mirror elements to our lives. We always have big things that may be going on, issues, a number of things, but they don't define us. They just make a part of our story.
And for me, it was not having to have any preconceived notions of how to portray this or how to capture this. Black people aren't a monolith. We represent the vast spectrum of the human experience.
So, for me, it was more about making sure I provided a safe space for Darrell and Arsema to explore, ask questions and be vulnerable and get it wrong. [I wanted to provide] a space to explore and just play, because they're just so talented.
There’s a scene where Mali is in the hospital and she gets to act out the sci-fi characters that she and her father created when she was a child. It’s innocent and whimsical. There’s so much care in that moment. What was going through your mind as you were figuring out how to take that scene off of the page and make it really explode in film?
NATE EDWARDS: Oh, that's a great question. By the time we get to that moment in the story, that is really earned. And I think the first thing was our scheduling. Our producers, AD did a really good job of scheduling the theme at the end of a week that we had a lot of heavy, deep content that we had to get through. So, on a personal human level working through that week, it felt like now was this time where y'all can really let loose. We had all this hard stuff that we needed to get through that week and now here was their reward.
Everybody really committing to looking foolish and not caring about if they look stupid..it was just about me, it was about creating that safe space so that they felt that they can run around the halls and shoot this imaginary gun.
Arsema, there is the point where you decide to give your parents, specifically your mom, her joy back by telling them the cancer is in remission. It's a lie, but your father later reveals that he always knew that Mali wasn't in remission. Talk to me about the first time you read that scene and actually saw that scene, because it's so powerful.
ARSEMA THOMAS: That scene reminds me of my relationship with my father. I think that was the thing that really sold me on the project. I lost my father in 2016, so being able to have those moments with Edwin [Lee Gibson], to be able to build that relationship, it was like having my father back for just the brief two months that we were filming, which is a priceless gift. It made the relationship that we were able to build so much more real, because you see the way that he talks about his daughter when she's not there. You see the level of connection that they have, nonverbal, because he knows without her saying it, that she's still fighting for something because they're the same person.
I feel as though that's something so beautiful that we get to show is this beautiful relationship between a Black father and his young daughter. I wish I would be able to watch this with my father, but I know that many, many young girls will be watching it with theirs, and that gives me peace.
It’s a lovely moment when Frank tells Molly for the first time in the film that he loves her. Sometimes I felt that the character was incapable of loving another human.
DARRELL BRITT-GIBSON: He has had his guard up this whole time because that is just what life has given to him, has presented to him. And he realized that the only reason he felt safe enough to actually say to her that I love you is because she might not [be alive to] even be able to hear it.
At one point, Mali is reflecting on her death and tells Frank what she wants his post-Mali existence to look like. She’s adamant that a sad life is not what she wants for him and goes as far as to explain the kind of woman he should date next.
DARRELL BRITT-GIBSON: It was in that space of Black women always feeling the need to and also following through on the protection of Black men, even if it's at the expense of their own happiness and joy. And so she's this beautiful, strong, all-encompassing character that has everybody pulling her in every direction while she also fights for her life, and doing all that, she still will sit there and tell this man, "You need to be happy when I go."
In that scene, Arsema's out-of-this-world performance, you're watching her faith, and you can see that she's fighting it, having to do this, but of course she's still going to smile because that is what she has to do because she knows that she can't afford to show how she might really feel because Frank will spiral...it was really important to have a scene that sort of evoked that reality that I feel a lot of Black women deal with in protecting Black men, even at the expense of their own joy and happiness.
She Taught Love will be available for streaming on Hulu on Friday, September 27.