“Is God Is” Writer/Director Aleshea Harris on Faith, Fury, and Igniting a Scorching Revenge Odyssey

Writer/director Aleshea Harris unleashed a fiery, ferocious original with her directorial debut, Is God Is. Granted, Harris is working from source material, but the material is her own—her play that debuted in 2018 at the Repertory Theatre. Her film adaptation, however, is a singular cinematic experience. It’s a revenge movie and a road movie, a genre-fluid scorcher packed with thematic weight, questions about time and loyalty, and what it really means when God asks a child to pick up a hammer and smite an enemy.

It’s a film, like a good Bible story, that thrives on suggestion and questions. How Harris poses those questions is electric. There’s intense drama and tragedy in Is God Is, but there’s an equal share of revenge-thirsty entertainment. Twin sisters, Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson), are told by their mother, Ruby (Vivica A. Fox), to hunt their father, The Monster (Sterling K. Brown). The Monster earned that reputation by setting fire to Ruby when the girls were just kids, leaving her and little Anaia with third-degree burns on their faces and bodies. Now Ruby’s on her deathbed and delivers her request to her girls. It’s what they do with this terrible ask that sets the movie on the road to revenge.

Harris packs every frame with genre influences and peculiar characters, and she unpacks for us here how she brought this scorcher to the big screen.

Is God Is is a road movie and a revenge story, with shades of biblical and fairy-tale storytelling. How did you make these different elements come together, and what was the overall effect you wanted them to create for an audience?

Honestly, it was being specific about what the story needs were from moment to moment and not getting caught up in wanting to make sure that there was a genre flourish. You lead with the story. There are these other things that I love, but they should feel organic. The villain, I’m getting to play with some things that we know in cinema, the low angle on his feet, the kinds of shoes that he’s wearing, the sound of his feet, the posture, and the cigarillo, and all of that. But it also feels organic to the story. It feels delicious and doesn’t feel like I’m getting my writerly rocks off by doing that. I think that was the way to manage. To be honest, the tone was something I was really concerned about.

How so?

How do I get people to believe that this can be humorous, that it isn’t strict realism, that it’s expressionistic, but also honor the pathos because it’s so dark and it’s so heavy? It was conversations with the actors and department heads. How do we curate the visuals and the sound? When are we larger-than-life with Erika [Alexander]’s character, Divine? But that character has deep pain within. How do we express all of those colors?

How’d you want the sound to express those different colors?

I was inspired by the specificity of sound in Kill Bill. You know when O-Ren Ishii and the Bride have that big fight within the snow, and there’s that water mill? It’s a tremendous use of silence. We’d had all this noise with the big rumble prior. And then, Once Upon a Time in the West, there’s that famous scene at the beginning with such careful use of sound. I mean, there might’ve been a more extreme sound moment in this movie if I’d had my druthers. But I tried to think carefully about when we were building suspense, when we needed to let things breathe, and when the absence of sound would be impactful.

For example, The Monster casually makes a sandwich and munches on chips in a bloodbath.

It was really important to me to hear all of those bits – the sound of the refrigerator, cutting the sandwich, and the chips. I love chips. Every day, people eat chips, but in this context, that sound becomes menacing. People are going to remember Sterling K. Brown eating those damn chips.

His actions are horrifying, but how crucial was the contrast of his outwardly calm demeanor?

In my lookbook, I have this phrase: the confluence of beauty and terror. Let them meet. The frame is gorgeous, but an awful thing may be happening. It’s another balance that I was trying to strike throughout.

Taking Once Upon a Time in the West into account, Is God Is does have a very western structure: two characters out on the harsh open road, meeting a variety of characters as they chase their prey. Is God Is also a Western for you?

For the play the movie is inspired by, I have notes at the beginning that spaghetti westerns are a source of influence. When it comes time to turn this into a film, great, we can lean into this sense of expanse. We have this revenge tale. What are our villains, what are the stops along the way? They get the information here, then they get back on their “horse.” It helped to think about things like their steed, their car, the color of that car, and the job of that car. Leslie Shatz, the tremendous sound designer, played with having a bit of a horse sound inside the engine.

There’s something very Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia about their mission.

Exactly. That’s the vibe. “We promise God we’d bring back a piece of you.”

You tap into the parental idea of, “I brought you into this world, I could take you out of it.” Even when you began writing Is God Is as a play, did you set out to write a story about parents as creators?

I didn’t have a bird’s-eye view, like I’m going to do this and explore these things. It really was about thinking about how Racine thinks as I write about what her mother means to her – the first person who affirms her existence after a life in the shadows. They think of themselves as not really people. They don’t fully come into full flesh until Racine meets her mother. Once I discover that this young woman thinks of her mother as God, we have a mission. We have questions about fate versus free will. What kind of God is this? We’re thinking about resurrection, fires, healing, and destruction. So, it writes itself.

Whether it’s the mute lawyer or the other set of twins, did you discover those characters while on the road with the twins?

I’m a writer who finds the story through the writing. I try to outline, but it’s always more delicious and rich when I’m writing and have a character say something like, “You ready to meet God?” And the boy twins, I didn’t know that they existed. I knew sort of how it would end, but I had the idea while I was writing the lawyer’s office. I got lost and trapped in the writing and then I had this thought, what if we twin these twins with another set of twins? When I have an idea that I think is good, a thousand doors open in my mind. If the story tells me I have a new idea, here’s what’ll make this better: I have to honor that.

You worked with the crew in New Orleans to tell the twins’ story. What did you appreciate about the crew there?

If I get to make another movie, I want to work in New Orleans. The sense of community on that set was tremendous. There was a real commitment to the movie. You can feel the difference between people doing a job, phoning it in, and people who say, “We want to get this right because we love this project.” There was a lot of respect on set. People knew their jobs up and down. It was like everyone around me knew more about filmmaking than I did, and they were still very gentle and patient with me, introducing me to this world. I love the crew in New Orleans. I can’t say enough. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, they were tremendous.

There’s a Danny Boyle quote about how debuts are often a filmmaker’s best movie, because they don’t know all the rules yet. Did you also have that sense of, this is my first movie, let’s try everything I dream?

I’ve said that if I’d known how hard it was going to be, I wouldn’t have done it. I have said that. There’s a lot that I really am glad that I didn’t know, honestly, because I didn’t have that fear. I was like, “Let me just go in here and do these things.” I think I got on some people’s nerves with my lack of knowledge, but there’s something about what he said that’s special about coming into it not knowing and not knowing what rule I was breaking. I thought anything was possible.

Catch Is God Is in theaters now.

Featured image: Mallori Johnson stars as Anaia and Kara Young as Racine in IS GOD IS, from Amazon MGM Studios. Photo credit: Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios © 2026 Amazon Content Services LLC. All Rights Reserved.