A key scene in Amazon MGM Studios’ Hedda influenced where the film, an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler, was shot.

At Deadline’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles, writer, director and producer Nia DaCosta expanded on the criteria the filmmaking team presented property owners when scouting the location for the 1950s England-set film. Production designer Cara Brower, who couldn’t be there, laid the foundation of the search.

“The house had to be old and have a gravitas to it. And so [Cara] looked at 200 houses, and I looked at five in the end because she did a lot of the groundwork, But the questions were, ‘Can we shoot a gun off the roof? Can we shoot fireworks and annoy your neighbors?’ Can we drop a chandelier in your home?” DaCosta said. “And that takes a lot of houses off the list pretty quickly. But then she found this amazing house, and designed that chandelier, and we dropped it in there, protected, listed original stone, original glass, 300-year-old orangery.”

(L-R) Deadline’s Antonia Blyth interviews Nia DaCosta and Tessa Thompson about ‘Hedda’ at Contenders Film: Los Angeles

Jesse Grant/Deadline

Star and producer Tessa Thompson added that they weren’t allowed to drink water in the house, but they could drop that chandelier.

DaCosta revealed that she wrote the adaptation in 2018 with Thompson in mind for the role.

“It came from a lot of passion and energy. One, because I was writing it on spec, it was just something that I really wanted to do, and an adaptation I really wanted to tackle. And two, because I was writing it during the Sundance I did not get into,” she said. “So I was like ‘Instead of being angry and being on Twitter, I’m just going to be using all that energy and write the first draft of the script.’ And that’s what I did.”

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The making of the film was delayed several times thanks to the pandemic, the double strikes in Hollywood and casting shifts. DaCosta was behind the tentpole pic The Marvels (2023), then reteamed with director of photography Sean Bobbitt on Hedda.

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“In that process, I was like, ‘Oh man, I really want to get back to my voice and my authorship and in a more direct way. Hedda kept popping up. And Sean Bobbitt and I just became really close [on The Marvels],” she said. “And his movies are all very dark, so we both would like be making up really dark things on set about what was happening to the characters as opposed to what we were shooting. And I was like, ‘Oh, he’s gonna be great for Hedda.’”

Check back Monday for the panel video.