Here are words that film executives use to describe their ideal director: a general. A captain. A fighter. Someone in the trenches. They’re describing GI Joe, and until recently, 93% of the directors they hired fit that masculine mold. Women didn’t, so – consciously and subconsciously – female directors weren’t imagined as being hardy enough to helm a big blockbuster. The stereotype has been tough to shatter. Yet, the movies are an art form stitched together from creativity, empathy and connection. “What we need is a communicator who can lead,” says film-maker Karyn Kusama in Amy Adrion’s inquisitive documentary, Half the Picture, which screens this weekend at the Sundance London. “This isn’t a war.”
It isn’t. But it has been as the women of Hollywood have publicly waged a battle for fair hiring practices, with a boost from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the ACLU who led separate investigations into the drastic gender disparity in 2013 and 2015, which culminated in official government letters informing the studios they must correct the imbalance or risk lawsuits. Two months into the EEOC inquiry, Adrion started filming Half the Picture, interviewing over 40 female film-makers, and her feisty documentary feels like getting the inside scoop.
“The problem gets logged as this Hollywood elitism, that it’s a privilege to work in this industry at all,” says Adrion on a drizzly afternoon in Los Angeles. “The bottom line is, you can’t just hire white men for jobs when there are qualified women. Whether that’s for a cashier or a bank teller or for Hollywood movies, it is illegal.”
“For a long time, it took people who were at the end of their career to tell their stories because they were like, ‘What do I have to lose?’” says Adrion. Today – and together – the women are able to be brave. Half the Picture sparkles with star power: Ava DuVernay, Jill Soloway, Catherine Hardwicke, Miranda July, Lena Dunham, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Kimberly Peirce, Sam Taylor-Johnson and Penelope Spheeris make up just a fraction of the wattage. “Women at the top of their game don’t have to talk to me on the record about how the system is broken,” says Adrion. After all, Half the Picture is her first feature. “It’s not like, ‘You have to speak to me!’” she says with a laugh. “Things are changing, and they’re leading that change.”
Half the Picture plays like a cocktail party where everyone’s had a glass of wine and is ready to get real. Adrion bounces between interview clips as though the women are having a conversation. It’s not a screed – it’s fun and surprising, and Spheeris, a self-described “smart-ass punk attitude bitch” has the best zingers. They joke about macho meatheads challenging their authority on set and questions they’ve parried – Do you want a family? Are you willing to insert four scenes of naked breasts? Can you start a week after you give birth? (Answers: yes, yes and yes) – and in a lovely through-line, point to the other women in the documentary who inspired them to push forward. DuVernay applauds Prince-Bythewood for advising her to deal with on-set sexism in public so that everyone can see the offender grovel. Otherwise, notes DuVernay, “I would have lost control of the set.”
The women trade stories about the tiny ways female directors get undermined even after they manage to land a job. Chris Hegedus sighs that after 40 years making Oscar-nominated docs with her husband and partner, DA Pennebaker, journalists still only want to interview him. Lucy Walker’s own Oscar campaign for her doc Waste Land was dinged by reporters who accused her of not directing it at all. American Psycho’s Mary Harron rolls her eyes at critics who assume her male editors and cinematographers “saved” her films. “I didn’t sit around doing nothing!” she groans. Brave’s Brenda Chapman opens up as much as she legally can about proving herself in the all-male meetings at Disney, only to have Pixar strip her from her passion project and attempt to ban her from speaking at the Academy Awards. And in a jaw-dropping anecdote, Patricia Riggen recounts how her producers on The 33, a drama about the Chilean miners, prioritised the schedule around pleasing the second unit AD – and when he squandered three weeks of filming, gave her three days to redo his unusable footage.
“A lot of the women were pretty vulnerable in talking about their experience,” says Adrion. “We interviewed Patricia Riggen the day after the presidential election, so the whole crew was emotional wrecks. Everybody was wearing our heart on our sleeves.” In one of the film’s most raw segments, Me and You and Everyone We Know’s Miranda July fends off tears admitting that motherhood is currently crippling her career: “I wanted to be a director just as much as my husband [Beginners’ Mike Mills] did, so it’s also the first time in my life that I’ve had a real wrench in the plans.”
Half the Picture is hunting for solutions. (Adrion notes that the EEOC is now overseen by attorney general Jeff Sessions, who’s no champion of equal rights.) Film festivals play a major part in amplifying new voices, especially Sundance, which premiered Half the Picture in January (and recently hired Kim Yutani as its new director of programming).
“If you get into Sundance, that is the golden ticket, period,” says Adrion. “Our experience with this film has been kind of meta that way,” with her debut about how to fix filmmaking taking the same path her subjects described. In fact, it’s been too meta. Half the Picture includes a section where her directors explain that the crucial trade publications that make or break a movie are mostly written by a small group of male critics who are inclined to connect less to female-driven stories. Adrion inserted an image of one important critic’s review, and then heard he’d been assigned to review.
“At a few of the Q&As, men have said, ‘How do we be allies?’” says Adrion. Listening to these directors speak is a good first step. These smart, resolute women make their own argument for success. In 2018, we should all question the tough-guy stereotype of leadership. On, off and behind the screen, it’s time for GI Joe to retire.
Half the Picture premieres at Sundance London on 1 June.