Aleshea Harris wrote “Is God Is” with the assumption that it would never be performed as a play, let alone turned into a movie. It was simply a story she needed to get onto the page: A tale of rage and revenge, an ancient Greek tragedy melded with Spaghetti Western tropes centered on contemporary Black women, twins, on an epic, violent journey to find the father who wronged them. She even rewatched Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” while she was writing.
“I’ve endured so many narratives in which Black women, they’re just sort of downtrodden victims, you know? They endure, they gain their strength and we love them because look at what all she can take. I think that’s horrific,” Harris said in a recent interview. “This was my antidote to that. This was my medicine to myself for that.”
That’s the thing about art that boldly flies in the face of taboo and stereotypes; Sometimes, it turns out, it’s on to something that audiences have been craving too. The Obie-winning stage play, which debuted off-Broadway in 2018, hit a nerve with audiences and critics, garnering comparisons to Tarantino and Martin McDonagh. Soon, talks of a feature film were underway. Harris never thought she’d be the one to direct it, having barely even been on a set before, but producer Janicza Bravo and their mutual friend, playwright Jeremy O. Harris, had other ideas: It was her story after all, she should be the one to tell it.
“It really was like the belief of those folks and that invitation,” Harris said. “It was like a switch being flipped. Of course, of course I’m in.”
The film, which is now playing in theaters, has garnered similarly effusive praise from critics and audiences. It stars Kara Young and Mallori Johnson as badly scarred twins who, after fending for themselves their whole lives, hear word from the mother (Vivica A. Fox) they thought was dead. Now dying, she has a mission for them: Track down and kill their father ( Sterling K. Brown ), who set her on fire many years ago, burning and permanently disfiguring all of them.
A cast of “newcomers” and unexpected turns
Harris knew she wanted quote-unquote newcomers as her twins, Racine the Rough One (Young) and Anaia the Quiet One (Johnson). While Young and Johnson weren’t plucked from obscurity, Young being a Tony-winning Broadway star and Johnson having led the short-lived sci-fi series “Kindred,” they’re also not big screen mainstays.
“They’ve been in the game, but I really delight in putting people on,” Harris said. “I delight in knowing that someone is very gifted and that they just need that opportunity to show what they can do for more flowers to follow.”
And they were both passionate about the opportunity. Young, who used a rare night offstage to see the play in 2018, said, “getting into the world of ‘Is God Is’ feels like an ancestral calling in some wild, beautiful, almost like indescribable way.”
Harris also surrounded them with some better-known names, including Brown, Fox and Janelle Monáe, playing the new wife.
“I knew she (Monáe) could embody both this sort of beautiful, conventionally beautiful, bougie, like newest wife archetype, and also the sort of nastier side of this woman,” Harris said. “She’s oppressed but also an oppressor.”
As for the father, Harris wanted to catch audiences off guard, casting a handsome and charismatic actor like Brown in the role.
“In the script, it says that when we finally see this man’s face, he’s giving Obama, right? He’s giving unassuming, the man in the suburbs. He’s got his khakis on. He got his deck shoes on. We don’t get what we expect at first,” Harris said. “It’s true to life that sometimes people who do these terrible things, they’re complex. They are charming … I wanted to open up a little more complexity there.”
The Tarantino of it all
The name Tarantino comes up a lot when people are writing about “Is God Is,” which Harris understands: “Kill Bill” is in its DNA after all. But so are many other references, including, first and foremost, Greek tragedies.
“I don’t want to be like a poor man’s Tarantino, you know? I am doing my own thing, and I hope that people recognize that,” she said. “It seems like they are.”
She loved the task of figuring out the film’s visual style, creating a world that is “three clicks to the left of center” and thinking about Westerns, fairy tales and a Southern gothic aesthetic and watching films like “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”, “Moonlight,” “Lady Snowblood” and even “Amélie” as preparation.
“I just sort of went on a feast, a buffet of like what did other people do that I loved,” Harris said.
The goal, she said, was to “land on a world that feels like realism, but like ratcheted up.”
The taboo of Black female rage
Harris wanted to write a story about Black female rage precisely because it’s taboo, because it’s been done so wrong in so many ways, whether it’s leaning into a flattening stereotype or insidious respectability politics.
“Being a Black woman, I feel and have felt the pressure to sort of ignore that rage or swallow it,” she said. “There’s a cultural mythology around Black women that is so effed up and so dehumanizing … I needed to give myself this in which Black women were free to feel that rage. They were fighting for themselves and each other, not for a man, not their child necessarily, but for themselves. It’s unapologetic and it doesn’t judge them for that anger.”
There’s catharsis too, in a climax that may leave the uninitiated in stunned silence, not just for the story but for the arrival of a new, exciting talent.
As Johnson said, the fact that it’s her complete vision on the big screen is “a very, very, very special opportunity for anyone, anyone who loves film, who loves storytelling, and who loves something that they’ve never seen before.”
