Interview: Chinonye Chukwu on 'Clemency' and Alfre Woodard's astounding close-ups
Thursday, December 26, 2019 at 5:10PM 
Anchored by a staggering performance from Alfre Woodard, Clemency is a powerful, precise and scorching indictment of capital punishment. We follow Woodard as prison warden Bernadine Williams, as she prepares to execute another inmate (Aldis Hodge), and deal with the toll, years of carrying out death row executions have taken on her life and relationships.
Director Chinonye Chukwu won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival last January. She started working on the film after Troy Davis was executed in a Georgia State prison in 2011, when “the sounds of the hundreds of thousands who protested against his execution kept ringing in my ears, and I couldn’t help but wonder: if so many of us struggled with what had happened to Mr. Davis, what about the people who actually had to carry out his execution? What if some of them were also grappling with having to kill this man?”
We recently met with Chukwu in New York. [This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.]
Murtada Elfadl: Congratulations on the film. You start your movie with an execution, you end it with an execution. So it's these two bookends. That was a bold, strong choice. Can you talk about why you made that choice?
Chinonye Chukwu: I did that for a couple of reasons. One, to show Bernadine's arc and that she's not in the same place at the end as she was at the beginning of the story. Also, I wanted to get at the cyclicalness of the space of a prison that with or without her, this cycle of capital punishment is going to go on.
This film is very performance driven. Did you write it with Alfre Woodard in mind?
