Q&A with Tajayona

“White Girl in Paris” delivers its powerful images of a carefree young black woman prancing around France unburdened by her blackness, as a send-up of France female archetypes. We asked director and star Tajayona about the inspiration behind the project, the development process, and what it was like embodying this character…

1) Can you talk a bit about your background, and how you became interested in movies initially?

I’m currently a film student about to graduate from NYU Tisch. Before coming to New York, I grew up in a small town in North Carolina where I spent my free time watching movies, writing melodramatic TV scripts, and sitting in cars with my friends. I thought I wanted to be a photographer or a poet but then I realized filmmaking could encompass all of those talents. The movie that made me realize that filmmaking could be such an amazing group effort was The Social Network. This is a part of my lore that I’m trying to erase because it’s the whitest movie ever, but delving into the behind the scenes and hearing Fincher, Sorkin, and the actors all talk about the energy and time they gave to creating that piece of work together made me feel like filmmaking was something that I needed to do. It also gave me an excuse to apply to a school in New York.

2) What was the spark for “White Girl in Paris” — the first inspiration or element, and how did you get it going?

I was studying abroad in Paris in a course called “Black in the City of Lights”. It was my first experience in a predominantly black, female class, with a black female professor, and we were taken on several tours of the city and taught about the history of the black expatriates like Richard Wright and James Baldwin and Josephine Baker. The entire trip I teetered between a feeling of awe for the very specific experience I was having with these black women and the also the immense sadness that came with being constantly reminded that the history of black people in France is one of slavery and fetishization. After seeing “Portrait of a Negress” in the Louvre, the only painting where the subject is a black woman in the entire museum, I felt the need to recreate the painting in a film, which led to me exploring all of the other wild feelings that I had in “White Girl in Paris”.

3) What was your process in the development / writing? It’s beautifully written—it could definitely stand on its own as a written poem. How long did it take to write, and form it into its final shape? Did you get feedback at the script stage? Were there changes you made based on that?

I took a day to myself during the trip to Paris to watch as many French New Wave films as I could. Breathless was the most entertaining to me and I decided I would appropriate the soundtrack and the editing tricks that defined that movement and use it to tell a story about a black expatriate running down the same streets. I shot the film before writing the poem, but the editing, writing, and narration all happened in one day because I needed the film to be finished in time to present as a final project for the course. Since it happened so quickly, most of my feedback has been based upon the final product as I’ve grappled with whether I should expand it or leave it as it is. Though the creation of the project was so spontaneous, I’d been thinking about some of the imagery as far back as two months before traveling to Paris.

4) In addition to writing and directing, you also star in the film. What was it like embodying this character?

I always wanted to be the kind of person that could act in my own things. It was scary, especially with the partial nudity at the end. The original product was supposed to be much more serious and moody, but once I settled on performing it myself I knew I couldn’t authentically do that since I have conditioned myself to deal with my heavy emotions through humor. I hate the idea of taking myself too seriously. I feel like the character isn’t me, but maybe an adjacent version of my consciousness. Me if I was still trying really hard to be something/someone. Me if I had been pushed passed a point of delusion that my professor at the time wouldn’t allow when it came to understanding what race is and what it is meant to do. The character is an embodiment of the endless search for self-love and acceptance that I think most black people go through when realizing that who they are to others isn’t based on personality, but on the nature of their bodies.

5) What else are you working on at the moment?

I just finished and released a music video, Can You Get Me High? With my friend Murielle who is an amazingly gifted performer and artist. I think it is in my nature to stick to short, entertaining and afrocentric things, so I am currently developing a short Blaxploitation/Western piece that currently is just an amalgamation of all of my favorite black aesthetics. I am in my final semester of undergrad so I am very excited about having the space and time to focus on my craft this summer.