Tribeca Fest 2024 Exclusive: Producer/ Director/ Actor Nnamdi Asomugha on making his feature directorial debut with ‘The Knife’
Among the films that made its World Premiere at the 2024 Tribeca Festival was The Knife, co-written (with Mark Duplass, produced, directed and starring Nnamdi Asomugha. A former NFL player who made the transition to producing numerous films and acting in some such as Sylvie’s Love, Crown Heights and Hello, My Name Is Doris, Asomugha is making his feature directorial debut with The Knife.
Also starring in the film are Melissa Leo, Aja Naomi King, Manny Jacinto, Amari Price and Aiden Price.
All Chris (Nnamdi Asomugha) wants is to carve a promising future for his beloved wife Alex (Aja Naomi King) and their two girls; a young family chasing the American Dream. One fateful night, Chris’ entire world is shaken to its core as a stranger mysteriously shows up in their humble abode. Distressed by the events of the night and the revelations seemingly at every turn, the family must also contend with the steadfast Detective Carlsen (Melissa Leo) who’s eager to solve the mystery of their intrusion.
Asomugha is producing under his iAm21 Productions banner, alongside Jonathan T. Baker and Ami Werges, with Mark and Jay Duplass, Mel Eslyn, Akbar Gbaja-Biamila, Chijioke Asomugha and Rao Meka serving as executive producers.
Blackfilmandtv.com spoke with Asomugha on directing his first film.
After Mark came to you with the project, when did you decide to not only to star in it, but make this your feature directorial debut?
Nnamdi Asomugha: I didn't have any idea about writing it. I didnt have any desire to direct. it's one thing when you're an actor, you know, you're taking orders, you know, you're following the script. But when you're a director and Mark says, go ahead. But now you have to delegate authority and get behind the screen. The training that I had was the school of hard knocks in football.
Did you tinker with the script initially from what Mark wrote?
Nnamdi Asomugha: The first thing I would say is the intruder comes in, and the intruder's white, so automatically it becomes a race thing for you, but not for everybody. The interesting thing about this film is that we see everything through the filter of our own experiences, right? So you're going to come into this film with your own experiences, and that's going to lead to your thoughts.
And when I gave this script to someone very early on in the process, this was a white male. He loved it, absolutely loved it. And then he started questioning some of the moves, and he said, yeah, but what's the big deal? Just call the cops, though. They'll come, and they'll fix it, and this thing should have been over very quickly. He loved the tension. But he didn't quite understand the reasoning behind what some of the characters were doing. It's allowing people to see things from the other side and see things from the other lens. I think the system doesn't allow certain people to feel like they can be safe or like they can be honest. And certain things can be tricky and subvert the truth in some sort of way in order to feel safe. But if you didn't know it coming into this, I hope that when you finish watching the film, you now have a certain level of empathy for what they could have been going through and what the whole night meant to them and their decisions throughout.
Can you talk about the casting?
Nnamdi Asomugha: It was my first film directing but I've been producing for some time and so I've dealt with this in every film that I've produced and I've now had people have said, you just picked up the phone and called the agent. You just picked up the phone and called the actor and you just picked up the phone. My agent says that people don't do that. And I didn't come from that world. With Asia, I already knew her. We had worked together on Sylvie's Love. In thevery first draft, the wife was a white woman. That was important for me to change when I started writing because I just felt that could be its own story.
There are certain things that come up from that, and that could go in a whole other different direction. But if I could pick the focus off of that and sort of leave it, let the family be this black family, I felt like it could be a little more succinct and nuanced in the way that we could tell the story and not have to hit so many things over the head in terms of race for everyone to see. And so Aja was the first choice there.
I just called her and we had worked together. I've said it before, I just love having her on set because with the hours that we had to shoot, I knew that she was going to be someone that would come in with a smile on her face and everyone would be happy outside of her doing a great job. With Melissa Leo, Melissa was funny because everyone kept saying, there's no way she's going to do it. There's no way she's going to do it. She won't do it. She wouldn't work with you on this for whatever reason.
And I called my manager again and she said, well, just call her. I said, yeah, I'm going to do that. So I called Melissa and we had a little conversation. She was very noncommittal. It felt like she wasn't going to be a part of it. And we hung up and I said, it was nice to talk to you. I told my manager, I said, yeah, it was good, but I don't think she'll do it. And it was 30 minutes later, I got a call from her agent and the agent said she's in. And so we were off and running. You would have to ask Melissa what the conversation was like and what made her say that. But to me, we were just talking. I wanted her to feel safe. I wanted her to know that I am an actor at heart. So I have her best interests in mind. And I'm only going to bring truth to this.
What went into making your character twitchy? Were those anxiety pills he was taking?
Nnamdi Asomugha: Yeah, they were anxiety pills. So the detective mentions the pills at the end and names them, and they're anxiety pills, but they're also pills for pain. And so they're very addictive pills that he's taking. And very early on, he's drinking a beer, and the daughter notices that or smells it on him, you know, and all of those things. We just wanted to add complexity to this character. It's a very difficult thing to do, to have a secret and have to play that throughout the entire film. But we also wanted to do that, you know, and I think the whole family has a big secret that they have to keep. But he has a secret that he's keeping from everyone.
And it's a difficult thing to play, because you have to have all the emotions on the inside, but we still have to feel him being sort of frustrated and tense and nervous. But we just thought it would add some great complexity to the character and just not let it be a very simple story. I think for me, the perfect people, and like a story that wraps up in a bow, and t's black and white and everything, by the end, all the answers are there.
My goal was, from the start, to spark some conversation from this film by the end of it. Can we talk about it? Does the fact that you get some information by the end of the film, I don't know how much I'm supposed to say, but does that information change how you saw the circumstances throughout the night? And if you got that information before the film started, at the top of the film, would that have changed how you saw the film as you watched it? And it's just these conversations. We go through a lot of things in this society.
Like we see a young black person killed, right? And then some of us watch the video of it, and we see that last moment where he, like, moves his hand before he gets shot. And then we say, ah, see, if he wouldn't have moved his hand, then nothing would have happened. You know, that's the issue.
So then, you know, he brought it on himself. And I wanted to examine that in a nuanced way. Like when you get to the end of the film, can you still have empathy for what happened, or do you feel like, oh, because I've gotten new information, this negates everything that happened before it, and and I'm done. How much empathy can we have for a complex situation? And I think that was the goal for me the whole time.
What's your takeaway having now done your first film as a director? Would you rather produce, act, or direct?
Nnamdi Asomugha: It's tricky, it's tricky for anyone trying to get into this business, but coming from a different place in life, you're really not given much of a shot as the other person. You have to find your own stuff and give yourself a shot. And so I think for me, acting was always first. I had to produce to act, I had to direct to act. I just want to bring that to the table. And then producing is, that's now in my DNA.