Better Off Dread:
A Janicza Bravo Story

She goes on to list all the ways she might notice Death coming: a shift in the wind, or the way it feels to be in a woman’s body that day, for example.

I was nervous as hell to interview Bravo over Zoom, for a few reasons. I consume her Instagram output like it’s a news source; her posts are irreverent and blunt, and extremely funny because Bravo appears to give no fucks. Also, her visual voice has been in my head all week: I’ve watched her entire oeuvre of short films, a series beginning with 2013's Eat!, which wrangles with the idea of people trying desperately, often creepily, to connect, and still not managing to do so. They crash into each other, or miss each other entirely, to comic and tragic effects. The viewer is left with the sense that another darker, more rattling story is just around the corner, waiting for Bravo to take up in her next film. The third reason is that I want her to...well...like me.

Bravo is in her new place in Los Angeles, a house she initially thought she would make “all beige.” White couch, neutral throws, sand-tone aura: a Nancy Meyers landscape with a Didion sensibility. Instead, “Caribbean through and through,” she ended up with what she calls “a clothesline, chipped paint, hot-pink aesthetic.” I see a glimpse of it on Instagram: her dog, Janet (a fixture of her account, some might even say the star), passed out on a daybed with big orange, pink, and yellow cushions, greenery all around. Beige was never really going to happen in the Bravo home.

Her family is from Panama; she was born in the United States in 1981 and spent her childhood in Panama until the age of 13, when her family returned north. Her cinematic style icons are Fosse, Cassavetes, Almodóvar, and Fassbinder—many of whom have a theater background. Her sartorial icon has always been Keaton (Diane)—high waists and wide legs, button-downs, vests, and blazers.

Bravo is sitting at a dining table, wearing a cozy, dark sweater and maroon lipstick, looking at me from her computer. She’s smiling, she laughs easily and gestures big, and I start imagining that we might be friends after this. She’s just started a new job—directing episodes of the reboot of HBO’s In Treatment, starring Uzo Aduba—and has begun being tested for COVID-19 three times a week so that she can spend her days around other people on a set again, for the first time in a year.

Over the past decade or so, Bravo’s career has been steadily burning. Her unrelenting interest in the absurd, the disturbing, and the gross has helped expand the kinds of images Black women make, are expected to make, have been allowed to make. In Gregory Go Boom, starring Michael Cera as a disabled racist, we follow him as he steamrolls through depressing and perverse family and romantic interactions—comically motoring for miles in his chair, cleaning his urine from a toilet seat with his bare hands—until the final scene, when he pours gasoline on his body and lights himself on fire. (I wrote “holy shit” in my notes when the film ended.)

Her cinematic outlook is immediately recognizable: strikingly stylish, surreal and real-feeling at the same time. In Man Rots from the Head, Cera is a door-to-door salesman who makes his way through the elegantly composed but fundamentally deranged, homes and lives of the residents of one apartment building, a fairy-tale ride with characters that resemble your own neighbors; her Woman in Deep takes the well-trodden story of a privileged woman (Alison Pill) and subtly explores the sexual and racial contours resting on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Bravo released her first feature, Lemon, about a white, male oddball loser, in 2017, and is expecting to send her second, highly-anticipated film, Zola, which she co-wrote with Jeremy O. Harris, into the world this summer.

Zola, distributed by A24, is based on a Black stripper’s viral Twitter thread about her exploits on one fateful night. It premiered at Sundance early last year and received a rapturous response—welcome, but one that differed greatly from the one Lemon received, which gave Bravo a somewhat misleading reputation.

Lemon, she said, was “talking to a kind of film that I had seen made a good deal” in indie comedy. That kind of movie always had a certain lead, a “spiritually ugly” white man who nonetheless seemed to do well for himself. As a viewer, Bravo could never see herself in that world, not even in the “blackground.” She wanted to dismantle that world, take apart its assumptions. Many critics didn’t seem to understand what she was doing in the film—but instead of interrogating their discomfort or alienation, they aggressively panned it. (One accused her of anti-Semitism; Bravo is Jewish.) “What hurt the most was that they never asked themselves, 'Is it possible I didn’t get it?'” she says. Since then, her protagonists have remained off-kilter, a little strange, coming off “a little hot.”

“A friend of mine told me that I was anthropologically dissecting whiteness. It’s just what I’m pulled to,” Bravo says. “It’s not a plan.” And whiteness is not even at the top of what she’s interested in, though it would be nearly impossible for her films not to deal with race—whose films could avoid it? “It’s always about race, as soon as I walk outside the door,” Bravo said. “It would be really hard for me to make work without being in conversation with race, as it is constantly in conversation with me. It’s forcing itself on me.”

Bravo spent a little time in Alabama as a kid, too, while her mother, Sonia, was stationed at a military base in the state. She went to school with mostly white people, directed mostly white actors while in school. And so one honest, if slightly crass, answer to the Black woman in the festival audience would have been that both of her actors, Brett Gelman and Katharine Waterston, were kind of famous, and that fame would help her film get into festivals and, hopefully, in with the studios. But the other, deeper answer was that Bravo hadn’t really thought about the race of her actors when she cast them. She was dating Gelman at the time, and Waterston was a friend. It was her first time directing, and she knew having them on set would make the whole thing feel easier.

But Bravo sees how having access to Kathleen Collins’ deliriously intellectual, intimate films, for instance, when she was younger could have changed the kind of artist she became, that she could have tried making films both behind and in front of the camera, and experimented with stories that were more personal to her. There was something else she came to see, that being in a, “position of power to tell people that we’re real,” that Black people exist, might be a duty Bravo wants to accept, or least reckon with. So much so that she half-jokingly told her agent not long ago, “I need more Black stuff!”

Being in her body has been a lifelong trip. She became most aware of her Blackness while studying abroad in Spain as a student at New York University, when she was subjected to racial harassment and attacks for the first time. In Hollywood, she showed up on television sets, and by virtue of what she looked like, was assumed not to know what she’s doing. Bravo never went to film school, but learned her way through making those shorts that continue to stun whomever stumbles upon them. When she takes on an episode of a well-known show—Atlanta, Mrs. America—her visual flair and narrative curiosity are immediately recognizable. “When I do work in TV, the episode work that I have been offered tends to be the episode that leaves the world a little bit, and I feel super grateful for that because it allows me to play within established rules, but add some of my own whims,” Bravo said. Zola may be the most fully realized of her deadpan journeys into the underbelly, that squirmy bottom soil, of the everyday. Before she even finished reading the Twitter thread that inspired the film, Bravo knew the story was hers.

She would have preferred Zola to come out six or seven months ago, if only to celebrate the end of not letting herself take a break, or have a good time, or appreciate small wins until the movie was released. When it didn’t come out last year, Bravo felt that victory was robbed, and she mourned it deeply. Zola now has a June release date, and Bravo is hopeful that people will get to see it in theaters. It’s anyone’s guess as to whether cinemas will have reopened on a wide scale by then, but Zola is a film made for an audience to experience together, much like its Twitter origin story.

During quarantine, Bravo has felt trapped by her physical environment, by the lack of chance meetings with new people. Many of her characters come from being outside and watching strangers, eavesdropping on their conversations. But she’s learned some things during lockdown, too. She’s tired of depriving herself of pleasure, of waiting to celebrate. And she’s learned that she just doesn’t like that many people, and doesn’t have to. “I was raised really hard, but I’m actually very soft,” Bravo says at one point. “But I don’t know that people know that, and I don’t necessarily want to show that, either—'cause it’s not for everyone.” Luckily for us, her films are.

Alexis Okeowo is a staff writer at The New Yorker and, in 2020, was named journalist of the year by the Newswomen’s Club of New York.