Published June 16, 2021Updated June 29, 2021
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In March 2015, when A’Ziah-Monae King was 19 and working at a Hooters in Detroit, she met a young woman named Jessica who felt like a kindred spirit. They bonded over stripping, money and internet culture. Jessica invited King to drive down to Tampa with her roommate, Z, and her boyfriend, Jarrett, to dance in the clubs. It started out as most youthful road trips do — fast-food breaks, blasting the radio, spring-break vibes. But it quickly devolved once Z’s true intentions for the trip emerged: He wanted the girls to trade sex for money, and Jessica was in on the scheme. King spent the weekend appeasing dual threats — Z’s escalating physical cruelty and Jessica’s psychological manipulation — until she negotiated her way into a plane ticket back to Detroit.
When King, who also goes by Zola, got home, she was shaken and started documenting everything that had happened. “Writing it down was my healing process,” King told me in a recent phone call. She knew it sounded fantastical (she could hardly believe it herself that she had narrowly escaped being sex-trafficked), and getting the story down helped her process and validate her experiences. She shared the first version, a visceral retelling, on Tumblr. She then posted it on Twitter, but it didn’t quite land; Twitter tends to be less hospitable to genuine emotion than Tumblr, so she deleted it. By late October, she had mapped out a new draft. It was funny and sharp, teetering between her own comical incredulity and the real terror of the trip. “I was ready to be entertained by it,” she told me.
The story opened irresistibly: “Y’all wanna hear a story about why me & this b-tch here fell out???????? It’s kind of long but full of suspense.” Over the next 147 tweets, Zola unfurled an Odyssean tale about a friendship gone sour, betrayals, shootouts, the sex trade and keeping your selfhood intact in the midst of chaos. She established a new modality of online storytelling: Zola is credited with helping to inspire Twitter to create a way to link multiple tweets together in a thread.
What made the tweets so captivating was Zola’s voice. Her self-awareness, her playfulness with language (she coined phrases — “vibing over our hoeism,” “hoe trips,” and “pussy is worth thousands” — that became canon overnight) and her unabashed love of her body and sexuality were delightful. She keenly understood the importance of a three-act structure and how to keep an audience engaged. The day the thread dropped, it felt as if the entire internet were following along. Missy Elliott tweeted that she was “reading the whole thing like I was watching a movie on Twitter.” Ava DuVernay chimed in to exclaim: “Drama, humor, action, suspense, character development. She can write!” (DuVernay also added, “There is so much untapped talent in the hood,” to which Zola replied, winningly: “I’m not from the hood tho Ava, Ima suburban bitch. Still love you tho.”) Other key characters from the story took to Facebook, Reddit and Twitter with their own versions. It was a modern-day “Rashomon,” and it went on for weeks. Almost immediately, there were calls for a film or television adaptation, with people sharing their fantasy ensemble casts.
One day, King answered the phone, and James Franco was on the line. “It was a shock,” she recalled. “Like, how did he even get my number?” He flew her out to California to make his pitch. By February, Franco was attached to direct and star in the project. The collective letdown was palpable. On the surface, Zola’s story may have seemed like an outlandish caper, but the real narrative engine was a Black woman using her wiles to narrowly escape exploitation. Zola carefully layered the violence and entertainment, and that diligence now seemed doomed, in Franco’s hands, to become a bro comedy full of bad pimp jokes that would very likely fail to capture Zola’s ingenuity and the complex racial dynamics of the group. (Zola and Z, the roommate, are Black; Jessica and her boyfriend, Jarrett, are white.) Behind the scenes, however, changes were afoot, and Franco left the project sometime in early 2017.
‘All of my work — “Zola” included — exists somewhere on a planet right next to Earth.’
Around that time, the director Janicza Bravo was coming off the debut of “Lemon,” her artful and disturbing feature, and was searching for her next film. When she heard that the project needed a new director, she leapt at her chance. Back in 2015, Bravo read the thread in real time and found herself as captivated as everyone else. She immediately envisioned how to adapt it for film; later, over email, she told me she felt the movie chose her as much as she chose it. “I was like, I am the best director for this, and when I say that, people think I’m saying that I’m the best because I’m Black and a woman, and I’m like, Sure, of course, that doesn’t hurt,” Bravo told me. “But I’m the best director for this because when I read that story, I was like, This is a traumatized woman who used the power of the pen and the power of her humor to recontextualize that which changed her.” She spent three months pitching herself for the job — she knew how she wanted to present the film, down to the cast, the patina and the score. In May 2017, she landed it. Taylour Paige, the actor who plays Zola, read an early version of the script and didn’t audition. “I wasn’t down,” she told me. “My agent wanted me to go for it, but it didn’t feel right.” She went on, “It didn’t feel like a Black woman’s voice.” Paige read Bravo’s script (which Bravo wrote with the playwright Jeremy O. Harris) and loved it. Zola’s “voice was undeniable,” she said. “It was brilliant, and it was aligned with the voice in the tweets.”
All of Bravo’s films (seven shorts and two features) are delightful and excruciating: Rapture and disgust go hand in hand. Parts of “Lemon,” a film about a middle-aged Jewish man on a downward spiral, are so difficult to watch you don’t know where to look. It starred Bravo’s husband at the time, the actor and comedian Brett Gelman, as Isaac, who starts the film covered in his own urine and ends it smeared in feces; and those are the easiest plot points to describe politely. Bravo described it as an “exorcism,” and it feels that way — a purging of fears, frustrations and bodily fluids. She was trying to challenge a broader genre of films about middle-aged white guys who always seem to fail upward.
The film was met with horrible reviews; one critic implied that Bravo was toying with anti-Semitic stereotypes, which amused Bravo because she believes they assumed she wasn’t Jewish (she is). “Not that Jewish people can’t be anti-Semitic, but I think the critic just couldn’t imagine my proximity to this world,” she said. “I think people felt I was treading in territory that wasn’t mine to tread. And rather than the audacity being celebrated, the audacity was met with hostility.” Despite the film’s difficulties, it established Bravo as a force, someone with a distinct visual style that is absurdist, critical and satirical all at once. One way to absorb Bravo’s slyness in “Lemon” is by watching everyone in the film but Isaac — to see how his awfulness leaches the life out of his wife, his love interest and everyone else around him.
“Zola,” which comes out on June 30, has a different center of gravity — rather than the main character’s being the site of the rot, it’s the environment around her that’s rotting — but the Bravo sensibility is still there, teeth sunk into the toxic underbelly of human nature. “All of my work — ‘Zola’ included — exists somewhere on a planet right next to Earth,” she told me. “It looks like Earth, it sounds like Earth, it mostly smells like Earth, but it is just left of center.” Her movies are reminiscent of being on psychedelics — the way even the most mundane interactions become revealing, exquisite and worthy of intense examination, and the way something humorous can seem sinister for a flicker of a second before shifting back into levity. Bravo specializes in exploring the way seeing clearly can happen in an instant and permanently alter your experience of yourself and your life. “The keys the movie is playing, those are my keys — where trauma and humor meet,” she told me, speaking of “Zola.” “All of my work leading up to it was already playing that music.”
Bravo and I were sitting on a little patio off the dining room in her airy and elegant home in Los Angeles. She only half apologetically smoked a cigarette. Several cloth face masks sunned on a drying rack nearby. When she paused to puff, the sound of tinkling wind chimes scored the silence. Bravo tilted her face to catch the waning rays. “I’m from Panama, I need this,” she said. Inside, a vase of bearded irises sat blooming on a lovely wooden dining table — a get-well delivery.
A few days before we met, Bravo, who is 40, was in a car accident that she re-enacted seconds after I walked into her house with the skilled gusto of a sketch comedian. Bravo mimed driving on a hot afternoon and nodding off — here, she snapped awake to yell out “highway hypnosis!” — before falling asleep again and the subsequent crash. When she woke up, the car was on its side. Friendly bystanders crowded around her, trying to help. One of them recognized Bravo and excitedly told her she couldn’t wait to see “Zola.” Bravo did an impression of herself bowing in gratitude as she simultaneously thanked the person and felt for broken bones. I found myself bent over in laughter, apologizing for laughing.
Later, Bravo told me that “Zola” was the movie she needed as a kid, that it’s “the superhero story I want; this is my M.C.U., my Marvel movie.” I took it to mean that she felt that the psychic dexterity Black women and femme people often have to cultivate — like being grievously harmed and still managing to perform social niceties so as not to offend or appear ungrateful — is worthy of a billion-dollar movie franchise, too.
Throughout the film, viewers watch as Zola’s life is successively endangered. There are many red flags along the road trip, but the brightest is the moment when Zola realizes that Jessica — who is renamed Stefani in the film — is complicit with Z (renamed X) and his degrading behavior. The insidiousness of what follows is age-old: Stefani feigns innocence and insists that she is in need of Zola’s care and protection. Zola obliges, out of pity and in the hope that it will lead her to escape. But the dynamic it reveals, a Black woman in danger attending to a white woman who is responsible, anchors the tension of the film.
Zola eventually agrees to help Stefani receive her customers, operating as a benevolent if deeply disturbed sentinel. “The whole Twitter thread is a ride, but there are pockets that are quite heavy,” Bravo told me. One of them involves more than a dozen men in a hotel room, one after another, responding to an ad for sex with Stefani.
Bravo spent a long time discussing this scene with her cinematographer. “The conversation started with how nudity looks in American films. It always feels voyeuristic and like the woman who was naked wasn’t in the conversation. There’s always something nefarious and naughty about it.” The challenge was how to portray the labor of sex work, the rituals of it, the shifting scales of power, the undercurrent of danger and ultimately the vulnerability of the exchange between client and provider. Bravo had already decided there would be no female nudity in the movie. “It was in the original pitch,” she said. She prefers a demure sensuality: “I’m most turned on and excited by what I can’t see. The shape of a breast, the shape of a buttock. A clavicle.” Bravo added a joke to round out the tenderness: “I’m attracted to edging overall,” she said. “Treating their bodies in that way has some version of edging to it.”
Man after man enters the hotel room and undresses. The audience is treated to a montage of male bodies, old and young, tight and wrinkled, and an array of penises that are impressive in their variety. (“I was like, this is crazy,” Bravo told me. “I am like, Someone is going to walk in and stop it.”) It manages to be slightly funny, even a bit tantalizing. And yet, there’s no mistaking that this is work.
Most mainstream movies depict stripping and other kinds of sex work as dazzling or even effortless — think of Natalie Portman in “Closer” or Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman.” Aside from rare features like “Tangerine,” the protagonists are usually white. Bravo wanted to reflect how taxing the work actually is in a way that didn’t shame or stigmatize the people who do that work. She and Paige regularly asked King via D.M. and text about how she felt during the particularly difficult moments of the weekend, what she wore, how she moved. “What does a woman see when she’s on the receiving end of contract sex?” Bravo told me. “She’s looking at their eyes, chest, gut, dick. And that’s what I wanted to see.”
Bravo was born in New York and grew up between Panama City and Colón, the town her parents are from. Her parents were skilled tailors, and occasionally they would sew outfits for her modeled after designs in fashion magazines, which she would wear on special occasions. In the 1980s, when Bravo was a baby, her mother enlisted in the American military, and she credits that station as offering them a type of privilege and stability that military families often have. The American flag her mother received during her service is preserved in a gorgeous frame in Bravo’s house, respectfully but discreetly displayed.
When Bravo was 12, her family relocated to the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. Bravo was elated, eager to fit in. But her references were dated. “If you’ve ever spent time in Central or South America, you know that it always feels 10 to 15 years behind,” she said. “I’d always be like, ‘You know that episode of “The Brady Bunch”?’ to a bunch of Black and brown kids,” she told me, laughing. She remembers going to an outlet mall with her mother and spending her entire allowance on two Girbaud denim outfits — one bright red, the other aqua blue — and how proud she felt wearing them to school. But her classmates were, as she put it, “sad for me.” The look in the ’90s was baggy, not tight, big jeans with Jordans. She expended a lot of energy trying to fit in, including dropping her Spanish accent. “I worked really hard to get rid of it, which I regret,” she told me.
New York represented a chance for reinvention and liberation. In Panama, there were always adults around, and the family stayed close to home. But as a city kid, Bravo enjoyed a newfound lack of supervision and the independence that came with it. Once, in middle school, Bravo was riding the train with friends, and a man exposed himself to the group. She was horrified — and thrilled, a duality she relished. “I have a warm memory of seeing a man masturbate for the first time, because it meant that I was free,” she told me. “It was obviously insane — he came on one of our book bags, and it’s such a giddy memory for me.” The event made a big impression on Bravo because she realized being able to recast life’s darkest experiences as comedy could restore some of the power lost in the initial exchange. “To be able to survive and tell the story was what was amazing to me.” It also shaped her cinematic eye: She told me this story in response to a question about her earliest memories of images that influenced her as a filmmaker.
‘Being in a Black body is to be incredibly vulnerable.’
In 1999, Bravo was accepted into New York University’s Playwrights Horizons studio at the Tisch School of the Arts. She wanted to be an actress. During her freshman year, her professor Fritz Ertl asked for students to volunteer as actors. Bravo’s hand shot up immediately. He ignored her, she recalls. At some point, Bravo frantically waved her hand around until he fixed his eyes on her and told her, “I’m sorry that you don’t know this yet, but you are inherently a director.” Bravo was heartbroken. “What I thought he was saying is that there isn’t room for you,” she said. “That’s how I heard it.” Ertl meant she was a natural auteur. “He completely changed my life.” Bravo would still pursue acting — even now, she flexes her skills on Instagram in small skits and cleverly choreographed videos. But from that day on she showed up in “director drag,” as she put it.
About five years after college, Bravo moved to Los Angeles and worked as a stylist while putting on small theater productions around town. “I kept waiting for this moment when somebody would give me a film to direct,” she said. But eventually Gelman, her partner at the time, who was an in-demand comedy writer and indie actor, put it bluntly: “If you want to direct a film, you have to write it.” She wrote several film scripts on the side. One night, a cinematographer she knew came up to her after one of her shows and asked if she’d ever thought about making a film. He offered up his production company, cameras and crew. Bravo played it coy (in the retelling, her voice pitched up several octaves, “Oh, I don’t know, maaaaaybeeeeeee,” she said) but was secretly elated.
The first short they all made together was “Eat” (2011), which featured Gelman as a lonely man and Katherine Waterston as his high-strung neighbor. Bravo made six more short films in succession, attracting a coterie of comic talent including Michael Cera, Gaby Hoffmann, Megan Mullally, Alison Pill and Jodie Turner-Smith, among others. She won the short-film jury award at Sundance for “Gregory Go Boom” (2013), and Bravo and Gelman started writing drafts of what would become her first feature, “Lemon.” Drumming up financing and interest was unexpectedly hard. “I’m using all the right words, and I’m presenting in the right way,” Bravo recalled. “But no.” Bravo sensed a general lack of interest in Black directors in Hollywood at the time — perhaps particularly those who don’t make work that fits neatly into easily digestible categories. It’s a coolness she still detects in the industry. “People certainly are more comfortable with me making work that had a Black woman protagonist at the center. It’s probably the first time I felt I was where I was supposed to be — or allowed to be — good or bad.”
“Zola” was shot mostly in Tampa, Fla. When Bravo’s team, composed of women and people of color, arrived on the set, they were to be supported by a local production company. On the second day of shooting, one man in the camera crew arrived wearing a shirt emblazoned with a Confederate flag. “It’s important to note that it’s the second day,” Bravo told me. “Because that means he went home, made the fashion choice and showed up wearing that.” Bravo asked him to turn his shirt inside out, and they kept it moving. A few weeks into the production, that same man walked up and congratulated her on the work they were doing. “There’s a part of me that could give two [expletive], but at the same time, I recognize that it was important for him to have that moment.”
Bravo told me that story in her backyard, sitting on a colorful lounger, surrounded by succulents and more drying clothes (this time, Pilates socks) and eating kumquats straight from her tree. As she talked, she slid lower, until she was lying all the way down. I was sitting beside her, a person in a chair with a notebook. She noticed our positions and threw her hands in the air, playfully — “See, I am now in therapy” — and continued talking. Listening to her, it struck me that “Zola” is a study in the particular type of neurosis that Black women and femme-presenting people regularly deal with: feeling undermined yet forced into performing grace to avoid harm. That the reality they are experiencing is different from the one everyone else is perceiving.
In 2015, after Bravo finished reading the Twitter thread, she printed out every piece and interview she could find about it. She noticed a disturbing pattern: “Every piece questioned the validity of the story,” she told me. “There was so much skepticism around what she was saying, and that really stuck with me.” (Two days after the thread was published, Zola tweeted “based on a true story,” in quotes, with an emoji of a heart lanced by an arrow, and directly acknowledged, in her own cheeky way, that she’d made some light embellishments for cinematic value.) Bravo realized that no matter how harrowing the story or how gruesome, some people would walk away from the movie believing that Zola was somehow at fault, a grifter even in her own story.
Bravo’s response was to build a movie in which Zola’s perspective and experience are irrefutably affirmed. During the film’s most dramatic and most tense scenes — when Stefani’s boyfriend foolishly decides to face off with X or when Zola and Stefani walk into a sunken basement for a call with a half-dozen half-clothed men — Paige, as Zola, is almost always positioned next to the action, body gone still with hypervigilance, eyes bright with alarm or annoyance. “She tells you how you’re supposed to feel in this moment,” Bravo told me. “It’s a way to remind us she is the storyteller. She is participating, but she’s also our eyes.” Paige’s microexpressions telegraph Zola’s intricate, swiftly changing emotions. Her body language is narrating, even when she is silent. That focus on exteriority feels like a means to treat her interiority as sacred and preserve it until she is safe.
Early in the film, Zola and Stefani spend an exuberant first night hanging out and stripping in a club, bonding in a way that’s heady and intoxicating. Later, while chatting outside, Zola drops the word “sis” in conversation. Stefani seizes on it eagerly, repeating it like a tic, each time more emphatically, until Zola can ignore it no longer. The atmosphere slides from camaraderie into Chappellean comedy. Zola pauses and pulls herself upright. The smile on her face stays intact, but her eyes widen slightly, transforming the grin into a grimace. It’s a slight shift but strong enough to communicate that Stefani has crossed an imperceptible line from affection into appropriation. The moment passes like a storm cloud, and the two resume conversation. To some observers, the moment might seem innocuous, but to viewers who have felt themselves trapped in a fun house of cultural mimicry, it validates an experience of reality that feels all but obfuscated to anyone else.
One of the best parts of the movie is a two-minute monologue in which Stefani tells her side — inspired by a rebuttal to Zola’s story that Jessica posted on Reddit — which is filled with racist digs at Zola’s hair texture and hygiene. Stefani is styled and framed as if she is in an infomercial for shady legal services, and she calls Zola a “jealous bitch” several times. The scene employs a distressingly silly use of garbage bags to address, brilliantly, the way Stefani sees Zola and how the world is primed to devalue her. It also firmly establishes how ludicrous that assessment is. Stefani tries to groom Zola, is an accomplice to X and still expects some level of caretaking from her — but, Bravo told me about Stefani, “A portion of our audience is going to root for you no matter how you present.” (Last August, one of the first articles written about the debut of the movie’s trailer centered on Riley Keough, the actress who plays Stefani, as the star. It didn’t initially mention Paige at all. This touched off a firestorm on Instagram, and the article was updated.)
Bravo told me that she feels our culture has been taught to engage with whiteness as if it were invisible, rather than a shaper of policy and social order. Earlier in her career, she felt drawn to the idea of exposing “how violent whiteness can be and how much space it can take up.” Stefani is an instrument of that violence and the many manipulative forms it can take and the anxiety it can induce. “Being in a Black body is to be incredibly vulnerable,” Bravo told me. “The decision to have Taylour as a straight man was to embody that because you can present as gentle and tender, and at the end of the day, people will still question the validity of what you told.”
The Zola onscreen is not the #Zola from the thread. The best line of the Twitter thread — pussy is worth thousands — which Zola exclaims in disbelief after realizing Z/X set the price for sex with Jessica/Stefani at around $100 — felt so gleeful and hilarious in the original thread that my friends and I shouted it in all-caps at one another in clubs and on group chats for a solid year afterward. In the movie, however, Zola says it earnestly, seriously. She’s simply stating a fact, as she understands it, and wants Stefani to understand her own value, too. Still, I felt let down — not unlike the feeling when your favorite band does a truncated or experimental rendition of their biggest song at a show.
But a few weeks after my first viewing, my perspective changed. I realized the film takes place before the Twitter thread — before King recovered from the horror of the experience and coped with it. Bravo wanted to preserve the fun of the thread but not veer into territory that would exploit it for entertainment value. It is the most delicate balancing act of the film, potentially sacrificing some audience expectations to uphold Zola’s dignity. That tenderness is most felt in the movie’s climactic scene. When X snaps at Zola that she’s supposed to be taking care of things, she pauses and asks him, “Who’s looking out for me?” But she’s posing the question to us, too.
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