Letitia Wright reveals that Ryan Coogler predicted her directorial debut, Highway to the Moon, on the set of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. In the first Black Panther movie, which was directed and co-written by Coogler, Wright makes her first appearance as Shuri, who is a technological genius and the sister of T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman).
She reprises the role in Coogler’s sequel, Wakanda Forever, where Shuri ultimately takes on the Black Panther mantle after the real-life death of Boseman and the in-universe death of T’Challa. While she is playing Shuri again as part of Avengers: Doomsday’s cast, Wright has also made the pivot to directing and writing with her short film Highway to the Moon.
The coming-of-age fantasy drama follows Micah, a young Black man who finds himself in a realm between life and death. Wright has described it as a “love letter to Black boys everywhere” and it is up for consideration in the Oscars’ Best Live Action Short Film category.
In an interview with ScreenRant’s Liam Crowley for Highway to the Moon, Wright was asked when she first knew that she wanted to direct and when she felt ready to take this step. She admits that it was something she wasn’t interested in until Coogler encouraged and empowered her to pursue it. Check out Wright’s comments below:
If I’m honest with you, I didn’t think it was something I wanted to do because I love being in front of the screen so much, and I’m always in awe of my directors. They have such a huge task to bring a team together and be great leaders. So for myself, it was something I was kind of forced to do. There were a few things that happened. I was on the set of Wakanda Forever, and Ryan just out of nowhere was just like, “Tish, you’re going to direct one day.” And I was just like, “What are you talking about?” He was being a prophet and seeing things that I couldn’t see. When it came to finishing the script and giving it to my team, everybody was looking at me. “Do you want somebody else to make this beautiful film that you care so much about? There’s one, not enough women directing and two, it’s very, very important, and that you are the person that tells this story.”
It was just important for me to face my fears and to surround myself with the right team of people and trust the 15+ years experience that I’ve had in so many films, so many film sets. I learned a lot of things that I didn’t know I learned. So that’s how it came to be that I wanted to direct. And now that I’ve done it, I love it. It’s very hard. It’s not easy, but I got myself into directing school at NFTS and, yeah, just learning the craft alongside making more films as well.
While Coogler has not seen the short film yet, Wright explains that she is nervous for him to watch it, as she sees the filmmaker as “my all-time big brother” who she looked up to even before working with him.
No, he actually told me off about that the other day when we were at my brother’s walk of fame star (laughs). You know when you just still feel a little bit scared? He’s like my all-time big brother. I look up to him. I’ve been watching his work since Fruitvale Station, way before I ever worked with him. So Ryan is one of my favorite directors in the world next to Lynne Ramsay and Barry Jenkins. They are just my favorite people in the world, so I’m so nervous to show it to him. He hasn’t seen it yet. But no, I really just put my head down and wanted to make something and just wanted to go through the grafting of it, the learning of it. I feel like when I make a few more films, then I’ll be a little bit more confident to show it to him, but I know he would be proud of me. But it’s just one of those things, I don’t know if you have somebody that you look up to in the world of what you do, and you are always editing yourself and you always feel like you just need to improve a little bit more, which you do. We all do need to improve. But yes, I will eventually show him the film. I know he’s going to message me and say, “Send it to me.”
Letitia Wright Shares Personal Inspiration For Her Directorial Debut’s Dark Story
ScreenRant: This is your brainchild. I know it comes from a very personal place. Could you share how this story came together and what you hope audiences are going to take away from it after watching?
Yeah, it came together from that place of wanting to… Where do you place grief? Where do you place something that tragically happens to you or a loved one? Where do you place these emotions and feelings? I’ve been an actress for so many years, 15+ years in this business and telling so many great stories that I’m proud of. It was just a natural thing that came to me. That’s the birthing of it, finding the right team and then making sure that the north star that we’re following of why we’re doing it and what we want audiences to take away, especially young people, is that life is precious. My friend has lost a brother, and he is not coming back. So she feels that she carries that a lot. She misses him a lot, and her family does too, and that’s a process.
And just to teach young people that life is very precious, and we don’t have to wait for a purgatory experience to have unity, to have brotherhood, to have sisterhood, to have community. We should have it here on earth. And just to teach young people a different way of communicating, affirming each other, speaking positively to each other. Sometimes the words that we say to each other could be so harmful. Bullying in school is still a real thing. Kids get bullied in school, and then they’re not here. They feel like not being here on earth is a better choice, and that’s so heartbreaking, and it shouldn’t happen. So the main objective of this film is leaving us with a sense of how precious life is and how forgiveness is so important.
ScreenRant: I was going to say I smile when you gave your previous answer because the affirmations scene is one of my favorites. Some of the lines I took down: “I’m destined for greatness. I’m next up when I step up.” Hearing that and hearing it spoken as a community, I think is so special. I’m a big manifester myself. I write down all my positive words of encouragement, that kind of stuff. You wrote this story, so is that something you do in real life? Are you a big affirmation person?
Yeah, I am a big affirmation person. That’s how I was able to get here, prayer and affirmation, believing in myself. But I went to camps that work with young boys, and those are some of the things that they were doing. And sometimes I’d look at the script, and I’d look at what we’re doing, and I’d be like, “Are they reading my script and copying? (laughs).” But they weren’t. They were affirming each other every day, and I would pick different things that they would say and put it into the script to marry some of the things that I already wanted them to say. I’m a big believer of that, but seeing the young people do that was really, really beautiful.
ScreenRant: Do you have yourself a go-to affirmation? I have one. I write down every day: “I attract health, wealth, and prosperity.” That’s my go-to.
I love that. The one that I go to, it’s not really an affirmation, it’s more like a Bible scripture, but it’s very affirmative: “I’m fearfully and wonderfully made.” Life can be kicking your butt sometimes and you feel not great. To have that be a scripture that I hold onto like an affirmation, it’s like I’m fearfully and wonderfully made.
ScreenRant: I got such a vibe of the ancestral plane with the in-between, just in terms of how you incorporated lights and just the big depth of field shots with the valleys and all that. Could you kind of talk to me about your vision for the Inbetween?
Firstly, it came when I was thinking about the passing of my friend’s brother, and I thought about spiritually where he would be and where do you find a place like that cinematically? How do you do that? I kind of just thought about some of the movies that I love, and one of those movies is Tree of Life by Terrence Malick, and I loved how he would incorporate… like someone’s talking and there’s a random volcano going off, or the depth of the ocean. I just love that he incorporated nature in the way that he did into that film and that everything was just so vast and beautiful, and that was a big inspiration for me. Terence Malik was a huge inspiration for me for this film. I had to go on that journey of finding locations on Earth that still felt a little bit fresh to the eyes of cinema viewers. I didn’t want people to be like, “Oh my God, I know exactly where that was.” Maybe some people do, but oftentimes young people, especially kids that I show this film to, don’t know where this place is. So that was important for me to find the location and to find my own way of communicating what the ancestral realm or what a purgatory world looks like. I tried my best to use what I have here on earth and then add different effects to bring it alive.
ScreenRant: A common denominator for a lot of short films I find is sometimes it’s almost the ground zero for the ambition to make it into a bigger feature. Is there an ambition to expand Highway to the Moon to something full length?
It’s its own beautiful thing right now. It’s this beautiful 25-minute film, my little baby, with all the beautiful things I want to say to young black boys, and it’s just in this film. When I do do a feature, it’s going to be a totally different topic, and it’s most likely going to be set in the country that I’m from, Guyana, but I want to do more short films. I think the next short film I’m going to do, I’m going to self-direct, I don’t know how I’m going to do that, but I’m going to call Michael B. Jordan and see how I do that. I want to do something that can challenge me as well a little bit more. For Highway to the Moon, it’s this beautiful pocket of a story that means so much to me and has a beautiful message. It ties everything beautifully in it, whether it’s music, whether it’s cinematography, whether it’s just a story, it has its own life, but to expand it would be not needed in my view. I think it works perfectly as a short, but it is an example of something where I would like to make a feature in the future, but it would just be a different type of feature.
Highway to the Moon is available to watch on YouTube.
