“I read it one night and I just sat in my bed for a couple hours just ruminating on it because I had gone on such an incredible journey,” he says. “I felt like I climbed a mountain. And it was so generative and generous in so many ways. I just had all of these emotions. I had all these thoughts. I imagined myself in that circumstance.”

Pivotal for Duke was the idea that Will was not innately masculine in any way, exhibiting characteristics not often associated with the presentation of black men on the screen. If he was a different race, or gender, “it does not deeply change him because it’s just as vulnerable, it’s just as guarded, the relationship is just as meaningful,” Duke says. “Will is very universal in a way.”

Duke and Oda met and immediately bonded. They are both immigrants: Oda from Brazil via a Brazilian-Japanese family, and Duke from Trinidad and Tobago. They discussed “the similarities and the differences” between them, Duke says. And they talked about their shared passion for Japanese anime, and for Star Wars. “We’re both a little bit dorky,” Duke says. “Geeks, I think, is the more preferred term.”

Duke saw the film as an opportunity for Oda to reclaim the narrative of his uncle’s life, to rewrite the notion that his life was defined only by his death. “His uncle lived this beautiful life, but was only remembered for this one action that he took. And for Edson it was this chance to imagine his uncle in an afterlife with an incredible position of worth, of interrogating life while [at the same time] being in fear of the pain of life.”

Duke felt the film offered him a lot of room to explore. “A lot of the story happens in between the lines, and that’s my job,” he says. “My job is to communicate everything that’s in the empty space, and I loved the script because it felt like Japanese architecture, there was so much space in between things. There was so much minimalism, and in that minimalism there was a lot of meaning that I could interpret.”

There are several ways to unpack Nine Days, but perhaps the most effective, and the most relevant in the here and now, is that this is a film about the importance of small moments. Indeed, the timing of the film’s release is serendipitous, coming as parts of the world, including the US, are emerging from COVID-19 lockdowns, and others, including Australia, are finding themselves in some sense back at the starting line.

“The timing of the movie,” Duke says, “is pure, pure, just providence in a way, because our movie was supposed to come out last August, in the middle of this, and now it’s coming out the following August after we’re getting back to some semblance of normalcy, and we can process what we went through.”

By redrawing the boundary line from the horizon to the front door, Nine Days forces us to focus more on the little details, rather than the big picture. “We lost being able to hold hands, we lost being able to go to the beach, we lost being able to just sit in conversation next to someone, next to strangers,” Duke says. “We lost being our brother’s keeper and in a demonstrative way: we had to be our brother’s keeper by staying away from them.

“So it begs you to just kind of really reassess your attachment and your relationship to the micro and the macro,” Duke says. “They’re both meaningful. They’re both worthy of your consideration and experience. And it’s not really divorcing yourself from one or the other, I think that’s the important thing. It’s that they’re not mutually exclusive at all.”

The atypical tone of the film is deeply affecting. When I watched it, I felt compelled to watch it again, as did my colleagues. Variety’s descriptor, that this is unlike every other film ever made, far from hyperbole, feels spot-on.

Duke says: “I saw an opportunity to help add colour to how masculinity and black masculinity is portrayed on screen. I saw an opportunity to add a lot of depth and range into just masculinity, period, outside of my race and to do something that felt gender-neutral. I saw the opportunities of a male character that had a relationship with a female character that wasn’t driven by sex. And wasn’t entering into relationships that were transactional with any of the other characters.”

Instead, we are drawn into a world where Will spends his days monitoring the lives of souls he has placed, and becomes deeply affected by the death of one of his earlier placements, Amanda. While the film itself is not a polemic on social media, a reference by Will’s assistant Kyo (Benedict Wong) to “people watching people, watching people, and judging” seems to make an inescapable correlation.

“I don’t think, consciously, I thought about social media,” Oda says. “I was thinking more, almost, like watching, judging as if we’re the audience. As in, the audience in the movie theatre watching him speak that line, we’re like that, sitting in our chairs, judging him. But it fits so well with social media, I think somehow it adds another layer.”

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Duke says the audience becomes the final layer in that process. “It’s not really about Will. We’re all Will, so the scenes ended up becoming so much about the viewer of the entire film,” Duke says. “We’ve all experienced heartbreak. We’ve all had unrequited love. We’ve all placed too much importance on one type of relationship versus the other. We’ve all been pessimistic, overly pessimistic, or we’ve all been overly romantic in our view of the world. And we’ve all been self-deprecating.”

Duke also saw Nine Days as a curious hybrid of film and theatre. The script was about 115 pages and production was spread across 23 or 24 shooting days. And it was, extremely unusually, shot in scene order. “And not just the scenes, but how we were working in between scenes, working on the next scene, rehearsing it, going back to the scene before shooting while half of the crew was setting up the scene after; it was very much like a theatre company,” Duke says.

“It didn’t come together, too, until we got on the sets because most of it takes place in the house, and as you’re walking through each room, the events of what took place [in the scene before] stay with you, until you’re finally out of the house in the desert, which was the last thing we shot,” Duke says. “And in that same vein, where no play is complete until it’s finally in front of an audience, Nine Days didn’t feel complete until we premiered it at Sundance.“

One of the film’s pivotal scenes involves the poem Song of Myself, by Walt Whitman. Do you see, O my brothers and sisters. / It is not chaos or death, it is form, union, plan, it is eternal life, it is happiness. / The past and present wilt, I have fill’d them, emptied them, and proceed to fill my next fold of the future. The poem possesses an elegant simplicity: Whitman’s celebration of the self, and the wonders of the little things in nature.

As perfectly chosen as it seems for the film, Duke reveals that Oda gave him the option of replacing it. “Edson really loved it, but he said, ‘I know you come from a theatre background, so if there’s a monologue that you are familiar with that you feel communicates Will’s experience, go for it’,” Duke says. He combed Chekhov, Ibsen, Shakespeare and others, looking for something

“and it just came right back to this poem that just meant everything is everything,” Duke says. “A rose is a rose is a rose. The next thing you say, or the next thing you do carries the weight of everything that came before it. And it’s all inevitable. And it’s that inevitability that is truth and that is the only truth. And that poem almost did not happen, but it was inevitable.”

In the end, the film lives up to its complex tonality. It is sombre in tone and feels, at times, haunted. It is not a horror film, though it plays with shadows and silence to great effect. And while it comes with a difficult caveat – that only one prospective soul from the pool of applicants will make it, and the others must dissipate into nothingness – it is unexpectedly uplifting and full of hope.

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Debruge seemed to get a clear sense of it, writing: “While no film can possibly be an antidote to suicide, this one poignantly reminds us how lucky we are to be here. We’re a planet full of lottery winners.”

Oda says: “It is joyful. There are joyful parts, but also, I like to think that Nine Days is more like a reflection of how our lives sort of are. Because it’s so easy to say, after we did this monologue, Will was happy and fulfilled. But I don’t believe so. It’s uplifting but I also want it to be realistic. If it’s too uplifting, it’s less relatable. With that cathartic moment comes something else. The feeling of being alive.”

Nine Days opens on July 15.

Source: | This article originally belongs to smh.com.au

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