Filming Nikki Giovanni: The Directors of Going to Mars

What do you do when the woman at the center of your documentary tells you, plainly, where she will not go?

For Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson, the answer shaped their whole film. Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project is their portrait of the poet Nikki Giovanni, and Nikki was clear from the start that she would not relive her pain on camera. So they listened. As Joe says, every moment of pain she has lived through is written in a poem, and the poems became the road map.

In Episode 220, Christian sits down with Joe and Michèle, the married directing duo behind Going to Mars and Black Girls Play: The Story of Hand Games, both shortlisted for the 96th Academy Awards. Neither started in film. Michèle was a human rights lawyer who wondered how much change she could really make through legal cases. Joe was a psychiatrist, the son of a preacher in Los Angeles, who realized his father's sermons about Bible characters were really stories about the people in the pews. He decided telling stories could have more impact than his practice.

They call themselves tonal filmmakers. Michèle describes a Black Atlantic aesthetic in their editing, polyrhythmic rather than simply rhythmic, where archival footage, new footage and Nikki's poetry are "in conversation with each other" instead of one illustrating another. They talk about American Promise, the film they made over 14 years following their son and his best friend through school, and Stateless, about anti-Blackness in the Dominican Republic. And they explain why Nikki's clear boundaries turned out to be a gift, "much better than having to deal with passive aggressive yeses," as Michèle puts it.

WATCH THE FILM: Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project streams on HBO Max.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why Michèle left human rights law for documentary film
• How Joe's father's sermons taught him what a story can do
• What happened after American Promise reached families and educators
• What Joe means when he says they are tonal filmmakers
• What a Black Atlantic aesthetic looks like in the edit
• How they built the archival footage without Nikki's personal archive
• How they handled the ethics of not pushing a subject to relive trauma

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Who directed Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project?

Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson, a married directing team, wrote and directed it. The film premiered at Sundance in January 2023, where it won the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary, and it was shortlisted for the 96th Academy Awards. HBO Documentary Films released it, and it debuted on HBO on January 8, 2024. Taraji P. Henson voices Nikki Giovanni's poetry.

How did the filmmakers handle Nikki Giovanni's refusal to talk about pain?

Joe Brewster says Nikki made it clear she would not go to painful places on camera, so he fell back on his training as a physician: "shut up and listen." She gave them the road map. Every moment of pain in her life is written in a poem, so the film tells those moments through her poetry. Michèle Stephenson says that clarity was a gift.

What archival footage is in Going to Mars?

Michèle Stephenson says Nikki did not give them access to her personal archive, so only a few family photographs appear. Their archival producer dug into collections of Black family footage from across the United States and beyond. The directors stitched it together to show celebration, joy, dance and family, so that Nikki's personal poetry would be felt as a collective experience, with the images in conversation with the poems.

What is American Promise about?

American Promise is a documentary by Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson that follows their son and his best friend through New York's independent schools. Joe says they filmed the boys for 14 years. It won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance, and Joe says the award that mattered most was the attention it got from Black families and educators across the country, and he says laws were written to address the discipline gap the film showed.

DOCUVIEW DEJA VIEW PICKS

• I Called Him Morgan (2016), directed by Kasper Collin. Michèle's pick, about jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan, told through the recorded voice of Helen Morgan, the woman who loved him and killed him.
• Making "Do the Right Thing" (1989), by St. Clair Bourne. Joe's first pick, by the filmmaker who mentored him and Michèle early in their career.
• Slaying Goliath (2008), by Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson. Joe's second pick, their own early film following a team of fifth graders to a national basketball championship in Florida, which he says taught them the most.

See every guest pick on the DocuView Deja View page.

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ABOUT THE GUESTS

Joe Brewster is a psychiatrist and filmmaker. He earned his medical degree at Harvard Medical School before turning to film. His fiction feature The Keeper (1996) premiered at Sundance and earned him an Independent Spirit Award nomination. Joe on Wikipedia

Michèle Stephenson is a filmmaker and former human rights attorney who studied at McGill University and Columbia Law School. She is a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow. Her film Stateless was nominated for Best Feature Length Documentary at the Canadian Screen Awards. Michèle on Wikipedia

Together they founded Rada Studio, which supports Black storytelling. Their films include Slaying Goliath (2008), American Promise (2013; Sundance Special Jury Prize), Stateless (2020), Black Girls Play: The Story of Hand Games (2023, ESPN 30 for 30; Tribeca premiere) and Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project (2023).

About the film's subject: Nikki Giovanni died on December 9, 2024, at 81, later the same year this conversation was released.

ABOUT DOCUMENTARY FIRST

Documentary First is a weekly podcast about the people behind documentaries and how the work changed them. Host Christian Taylor, director of the award-winning The Girl Who Wore Freedom, talks with filmmakers, distributors, entertainment lawyers, actors and more, from Ken Burns and PBS American Masters creator Susan Lacy to first-timers, across nearly 300 conversations. Each week brings one of two formats: a long-form conversation with the people behind films for HBO, Netflix, PBS and independent film, or The Deep Dive, where Christian takes one insight from a recent conversation and follows it wherever it leads. Listen Notes ranks the show in the top 5% of all podcasts worldwide. New episodes every week.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• HBO announcement and film credits: WBD Press
• 96th Oscars shortlists: Academy press release