Everyone tells filmmakers to write what they know, so Nina Conti wrote a movie about a woman who can’t stop pretending to be a monkey.
If you know much about ventriloquism, Conti’s name should be instantly familiar to you. The actress and comedian, a fixture in the worlds of live theatre and comedy for the past quarter century, is best known for her signature Monkey puppet, whose sweet and unexpressive face masks an unfiltered, cynical personality. She’s performed with Monkey in a variety of stage shows, and incorporated it into a performance in frequent collaborator Christopher Guest’s 2006 film “For Your Consideration.”
Now, she’s adding a new job to her monkey-centric resume: filmmaker. Conti directs and stars in the new film “Sunlight,” which she co-wrote with comedian Shenoah Allen, who stars alongside her. The film follows a suicidal man who befriends a woman who refuses to take off a full-body monkey suit as they team up to dig up his dead father and sell the watch he was buried in.
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The pitch-black comedy explores deeper ideas about mental health and human connection, but it stems from a simple place: Conti’s lifelong bond with her Monkey character and her gradual realization that she felt most like herself when speaking through the puppet. During a recent conversation with IndieWire, she explained the chaotic journey that led to her debut film.
“I started doing [the Monkey character] around about 2001. Which is kind of cool because of the monkeys in the film ‘2001.’ I started doing ventriloquism with him back then and very immediately found another voice coming out of me that I hadn’t had previously and it was very liberating. And over the years, that grew stronger and stronger and stronger, and I felt like this is actually a more truthful version of who I am than the one I present socially,” Conti said, adding that her small role in “Solo: A Star Wars Story” that was ultimately cut led to her realizing that the monkey could work as a full-body costume. “And when I met the creature department of ‘Star Wars’ and they told me that he could be as big as Chewbacca and look exactly the same, I commissioned it straight away and just went in and so actually went inside a character that I’d been doing for years, but suddenly had the right exterior.”
Conti soon began teaming up with Allen for a series of improvised comedy gigs that saw her performing in the full monkey suit. The character was the same, but she no longer had to appear alongside the puppet as a separate character. That removed a creative safety net, but it created endless opportunities for even wilder behavior like crowd surfing in tiny comedy clubs.
“We never had material,” Allen said of the gigs. “We were improvising these gigs and it was totally unpredictable and I could never tell what was actually going on under the mask, like how Nina was feeling or what the actual look on her face was. I just had to try my best to read the situation looking at Monkey’s blank stare.”
Conti suggested, “You want to write a love story about a woman who doesn’t want to come out of a monkey suit?” And the rest was history.
In many ways, “Sunlight” is a buddy comedy about two broken people who find each other at the right time in their lives. But it’s also a love letter to a character that has defined much of Conti’s career. She explained that the juxtaposition between Monkey’s blank face and her own unpredictable thoughts represented the core of her comedic persona, and “Sunlight” gave her an opportunity to show it off on the biggest canvas of her career.
“I’ve always loved that face,” she said. “I’ve always found it very wry, very dry. Looks like he’s thinking or not, at all. He’s either having a big thought or no thought. It’s so reliable, comedically, because it’s not needy. Whereas I always find with my own face, the needy stuff seeps out and I can’t do anything about it. But that face is a suit of armor.”
That suit of armor made the logistical experience of shooting the majority of a feature film inside of a hot, heavy monkey suit in New Mexico worthwhile. While showing me photos of her looking at a camera monitor dressed in the suit, Conti explained that she wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else — even if her next directorial effort likely won’t involve animal costumes of any kind.
“There’s a lot about that suit that was very difficult,” she said. “There’s little oxygen. It’s very hot, very heavy, very limited visibility. And yet once I was in it, I thought, ‘This is kind of my happy place, this hellhole underneath the fur. I’m feeling incredibly anonymous and free.’”
A Vertigo release, “Sunlight” is now playing in select theaters.
