Woman Up
HE reader Jenny Frankfurt submitted this Cannes-related guest piece yesterday — one that may not endear her to women who’ve complained about the lack of a female-directed film at this just-concluded gathering. She’s basically saying that discrimination is a problem, but that it serves a kind of Darwinian purpose. Frankfurt is with the LA-based High Street Management, a division of Bohemia Entertainment. [Note: I trimmed the original down a bit.]
“There has been some discussion that none of the 18 films chosen for the 2012 Cannes Film Festival were directed by a woman,” Frankfurt begins. “The suggestion was that festival organizers might have deliberately shunned such films. Perhaps, but perhaps there weren’t any female-directed films that were good enough for Cannes.
“Granted, it’s harder to make it as a female director than a male. Studios are less willing to take risks and for anyone, male or female, independent financing is difficult to find. Some have made it through and the road has been long for their films to be recognized by commercial audiences or even to get anything but very limited distribution. Kathryn Bigelow, Nicole Holofcener, Lisa Cholodenko and Debra Granik have made it through, but many more female filmmakers throughout the world are making films that are not getting seen. Why?
“I just have to throw out the idea that perhaps, in this male dominated business of
filmmaking, men make better films. It is still a ‘male sport’ and women are catching up. I know many females who have graduated from film school and haven’t produced anything of great note. It might be worth considering that there is something called ‘positive discrimination.’
“The head of Women in Film and Television has said that the gap between male and female filmmakers is a ‘cultural thing’, and that it will take time for women to catch
up with men for many reasons. One is that women make more short films as calling cards, because ostensibly they are not given the money for a feature or cannot raise it. Can an independent producer not raise money on the back of a talented female director? I hardly think so. I have represented female directors and they have worked. I have represented male directors and they have not.
“Women directed 7% of last year’s 250 top grossing films. The year before that is
was less and the year before that it was less. So as slow as it may be, as in every
industry, it is building. Women started off at the back of the bus and are working
their way forward. It takes time for every minority to catch up.
“It is mostly ardent feminists who call out what they describe as discrimination
of women at Cannes, and while they are not wrong in that there were no female
directed films, I challenge them to find one that should have been there but wasn’t and really should have been there. There is never any point in laying blame; one always has to look within when something is seemingly amiss. One cannot always blame those in charge for having tunnel vision; the creatives have to produce material that is of quality, and because there are more male filmmakers, more men get recognized.
“It must be known as well that this is a worldwide issue. All films this year that won
awards were not from the U.S. so it is not a Hollywood issue but as mentioned, a
cultural one. And yes, it is a problem.
“Hollywood and the rest of the international filmmaking community need to be open to women, but I don’t believe they are closed. I am in it every day and the door is open, it’s just that the talent has to be strong enough to walk through it.”
If you look at all the pieces of action, horror, and sci-fi drek clogging up the video store racks and cable schedules you’ll probably see that 95% of them are directed by men. Could it be that one reason for the lower visibility of female directors is related to a lack of interest in becoming hacks for hire and dirtying their hands in the genre trenches?
I mean, give me a million five to make a movie and I’ll probably crank out a cheap horror movie I can use as a calling card so I can maybe someday do a project from the heart (which would probably also be a cheap horror movie. Sue me.). But give a female director the same money, and you’re probably more likely to get an intimate drama , that if it’s REALLY good, will play a couple of regional film fests and never be seen again. Whereas the cheap horror movie will probably be turning up at 3:00am on the Cinemax schedule for years to come, and will lead to me being offered first dibs on the half dozen sequels and rip-offs that will follow it. The female director would keep her integrity, but I’d be the one working, and if that doesn’t sound like Hollywood, I don’t know what does.
She’s a writer/actress, not a director, but I think Brit Marling is one of the canniest people out there producing low-budget indie films at the moment. Both Another Earth and The Sound Of My Voice are character-based dramas, but both have a fascinating sci-fi hook that gets your attention.
More low-budget directors who want their movies to be seen should follow this model. Not by making sci-fi movies specifically, but having a bit of a low-brow hook that gets people interested, which could be any sort of promise of adventure or excitement or comedy. Want to make a relationship drama without abandoning your integrity? Go nuts. But remember that a spoonful bit of genre helps the medicine go down, and if you want your movie to actually be seen, a bit of pandering to the masses will always help.
The Brit Marling point is a good one. Just having that science fiction hook gets her press on dozens of websites that wouldn’t care otherwise, like io9. So her movies get mentioned right next to big blockbuster geek movies like the Avengers and Prometheus, at a minuscule fraction of their budgets.
I wonder if the lack of female directors in the past means that fewer young women are influenced to choose filmmaking as a career. Most wannabe writer/directors try to enter the industry because they want to do what Scorsese does, or Hitchcoks, or Woody Allen, Tarantino, Wilder, Payne, etc. For women, there’s a much smaller pool of influences of their sex, and even if a female director wants to make “male oriented” flicks, there might be a sense of discouragement that comes from not having much of a precedent to look for.
I’m going to have to agree with Jeffmc up there. Today I saw about 40 minutes of a cheap Syfy movie called Mutant Chronicles. It actually had a decent cast (Ron Perlman, John Malkovich, Thomas Jane). Granted, it had a $25 million budget, but I’m sure most of that was salary.
Anyway, while the script was what you would expect to see on Syfy, Simon Hunter, the director, did a really good job. Sound was mixed well (during a scene inside a rocket blasting off, the dialog was near impossible to hear), a variety of obviously-but-tastefully used filters that helped give the areas a certain feeling (and cover up some of the CGI backgrounds), interesting and well-used shots, and shaky cam used only when it really should have been (like when they crashed through a building at terminal velocity). It wasn’t perfect directing, but for a Syfy movie, it was damn good.
If it wasn’t for Hunter’s direction, I wouldn’t have even bother to watch more than 5 minutes of it. I’d definitely like to see what else Hunter will do, and wouldn’t mind taking a little bit of a risk with him on a better script and bigger budget. And it’s all because he directed some schlock that was perfect for Syfy to run at 10AM on a Tuesday.
DZ SAYS
So, Simon Hunter is Zach Snyder, and Mutant Chronicles is his Dawn of the Dead?
I watched the whole thing and I remember hating it. I think that was the movie where I said, “Thomas Jane is just not going to happen.”
Here’s a possibly related thought: Why are there so few female billionaire entrepreneurs? Aren’t all film projects essentially entrepreneurial ventures, in a way? Is it less access to funding? Or are men simply more likely risk-takers and/or more likely to stick with the risks they take?
I suspect that whatever the reasons, they’re similar.
It’s not all about women directors being averse to genre material though. I thought Lexi Alexander did a kind of a kick-ass job with Punisher: War Zone and she hasn’t been seen since. Even though it wasn’t a hit, just as a calling card I would have thought that would have opened some doors for her.
@Krillian
Like I said, the movie as a whole sucked. But as a low-budget genre movie, Hunter did a damn good job with the pieces he had to work with (the script was from someone else). I’d be curious to see if he got some funding and a decent script.
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