10 Female Directors Who Deserve More Attention From Hollywood - Page 3 of 3

null

Tanya Hamilton
Best Known For: “Night Catches Us” (2010)
Last Film: Night Catches Us” (2010)

What’s the story? A quiet portrait of ex-Black Panthers trying to readjust to life after the movement’s dissolution, Tanya Hamilton’s debut, and so far sole feature film, picked up a little heat at Sundance in 2010 and was nominated for a fair slew of awards. It features two terrific performances from then-emerging stars Anthony Mackie and Kerry Washington, an assured grasp of the relationship between small personal stories and their larger historical context, and a painter’s eye (Hamilton is also a painter) for composition and color that makes it a beautiful film to look at. Yet, since this promising debut, the result of ten years of development and research by the young filmmaker, we’ve heard very little from her since. Of course, as a black female director she’s operating at a double industry disadvantage, one she herself identified in this interview, where she talks about the “hole in the middle” by which very few films that look at African-Americans in a “varied and complex and layered way” get made. The fact that nearly four-and-a-half years have gone by without so much as a whisper of a second film from the undeniably thoughtful and smart Hamilton speaks to that lack. We hope that that higher profile of women of color such as Ava Du Vernay (who we don’t mean to keep on pressuring into being some sort of a paragon, but there just aren’t that many examples out there) will help open doors for people like Hamilton. Because “varied and complex and layered” films about the African-American experience are needed more now than ever.

In Her Own Words: “[The film industry is] just a proven formula, and I don’t blame the system for being the way it is. It’s like, if you show me some money, I’m going to open the door, but if I have to guess just by looking at your thing and not knowing who’s going to like it, well then the system wonders how they can trust you.” [Insightnews.com interview]

null

Brenda Chapman

Best Known For: co-directing “Brave,” (2012), being removed from “Brave

Last Film:Brave” (2012)

What’s the story? All the way back in 1998, Chapman became the first woman to (co)-direct an animated feature for a major studio when she helmed DreamWorks Animations’ “The Prince of Egypt.” So in 2003, moving to the even more successful Pixar must have seemed like an almost inevitable step in the right direction. And sure enough, soon after, the tortuously long development process began on a project called “Brave” and Chapman was involved with that for the next six years before she was announced, with great fanfare, as “Pixar’s first female director” in 2010. Then a few months later she was replaced by Mark Andrews following creative disagreements, leading to a notoriously awkward shared podium moment when the film (in not a particularly classic year for animation, it should be noted) won the Animated Feature Oscar. Whatever went on behind closed doors we can’t know, but Chapman was reportedly heartborken over being replaced (and after seven years of work and not a little fanfare about the director’s chair announcement, we can understand that) and soon after the film’s release returned to DreamWorks. Of course, in the weird demi-monde of animation, where individual films can take seemingly millenia to develop, it’s not as easy as someone waving a magic wand and anointing Chapman director. But let’s not forget she’s one of the few women to have picked up an Oscar for a narrative feature film she directed, though that might be mitigated by the fact that, since the Pixar bust-up, she has been refreshingly forthright/brazenly outspoken (depending on how you look at it) about her views on the business. But other female animation directors have since forged a path, not least Jennifer Lee, co-director of the all-conquering “Frozen” and Jennifer Yuh, who we suppose is the first woman to solely direct an animated studio feature, with “Kung Fu Panda 2” and next year’s “Kung Fu Panda 3” to her name.

In Her Own Words: “[Animation as a whole] is run by a boys’ club” [Oct 2013, Time]

Tamara Jenkins The Savages

Tamara Jenkins

Best Known For: “The Savages” (2007)

Last Film: The Savages” (2007)

What’s the story? The memorialization of some of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s less well-known films that happened in the wake of his untimely death drew attention to a few neglected gems, and Tamara Jenkins’ “The Savages” is one. While the film saw no shortage of praise lavished on it at the time, particularly for the performances (Hoffman’s co-star Laura Linney was Oscar-nominated), in the years since it somewhat faded from memory, perhaps because of the stony silence that gradually fell as regards any news of a follow-up from its talented writer/director. Indeed, in the seven years since its release, there’s been nothing at all from Jenkins, and we haven’t so much as heard rumors of her being attached to anything. In the mold of the family/relationship dramedies of Nicole Holofcener or Jill Soloway, Jenkins also directed the micro-budget indie hit “Slums of Beverly Hills,” starring Natasha Lyonne and Alan Arkin, which was just as well, if not better received, so why she hasn’t been courted since, even as a episodic TV director, is a mystery to us. Like many of the women on this list (Patty “no relation” Jenkins and Debra Granik, for example), her films feel like they’ve done a lot more good for her actresses than they have for her. And while Jenkins keeps busy with theater directing and rewriting gigs, it’s not like she doesn’t have other film projects she’d like to mountan extended period working on a rival Diane Arbus movie more or less ended when Steven Shainberg’s “Fur” got made (though we’d suggest there’s room for a more definitive Arbus movie), and back during press rounds for “The Savages,” she was reportedly working on her next script already. However a joke she made back then seems more eerily prescient than any promise of projects to come: when asked what was next, she replied with a laugh, “I’m taking nine years off!”

In Her Own Words: “[What Hollywood producers look for in scripts is]…’a sympathetic character, we need to have them save a child in the first ten minutes of the movie and do something noble,” but I’m actually sort of alienated from those sorts of characters. I identify much more with people that are flawed, because I guess I am. Maybe those producers aren’t flawed and they can only identify with heroes.” [November 2007 interview]

Alison Maclean Jesus' Son

Alison Maclean

Best Known For: Jesus’ Son” (1999)

Last Film: Persons of Interest” (2004, documentary)

What’s the story? This is another case where the paucity of feature film credits is somewhat outweighed by the number of TV titles and short films that she’s directed. Still it’s surprising that Alison Maclean is such a relatively unknown name, and that she’s not been given the go ahead on a narrative feature film project for fifteen years. And this is all after her first short film “Kitchen Sink” debuted at Cannes and won eight international awards. We could (maybe) understand that if her last time at bat was a stinker, but “Jesus’ Son” is a well-performed, endearingly loopy, occasionally dreamy adaptation of the short story collection of the same name by cult writer Denis Johnson, featuring great early roles for Billy Crudup and Samantha Morton, as well as Holly Hunter, Jack Black, Denis Leary and Dennis Hopper. As Roger Ebert put it, “It doesn’t glamorize drugs or demonize them, but simply remembers them from the point of view of a survivor.” Canadian New Zealander (apparently there is such a thing) Maclean has since worked steadily, picking up even more effusive notices for 2004’s controversial documentary “Persons of Interest” on Muslim Americans in the wake of 9/11, and also directing episodes of ”Sex and the City,” “The Tudors,” “Carnivale,” “The L Word” and “Gossip Girl.” But with two such strong features under her belt, as well as debut “Crush” starring Marcia Gay Harden, which is a bit more wobbly but not without promise, it’s sad that she hasn’t made a return to the big screen since. Though she did direct the music video for Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn,” so there’s that.

In Her Own Words: “Since I moved to New York it’s been a frustrating six years trying to get work as a director and for a long time I only got script development deals. I wrote three features in a row and hit a huge wall of frustration.” [July 2000 Nitrate Online interview]

Winter's Bone Debra Granik

Debra Granik

Best Known For: Winter’s Bone” (2010)

Last Film: Stray Dog” (2014, documentary)

What’s the story? We’re slightly bending our own rules by including Granik, as she does technically have a 2014 film under her beltthe terrifically compelling, intelligent documentary about Vietnam veteran biker, “Stray Dog” (review here). But while anyone who has seen that film can tell you that it’s clearly a labor of love, and of Granik’s already recognizable precision and authenticity, it’s a self-generated project that, despite festival success, still has no release date, and even when it gets one, it will be for the limited audience that feature-length documentaries get. Now, “Stray Dog” is no trade down in terms of quality, but in profile, as the first subsequent film from the director of a 4-time Oscar nominee that broke out an actress who is probably the hottest property in the world right now, it feels like it will be too easy for the powers-that-be to ignore. And that’s the main issue: Granik has been busy on this tirelessly shot doc in the years since “Winter’s Bone.” Though in that time has also tried unsuccessfully to launch a HBO pilot, to mount a Pippi Longstocking movie and to get an adaptation of Russell Banks’ “Rule of the Bone” off the ground (she drily refers to it as the potential third, after “Down to the Bone” with Vera Farmiga and “Winter’s Bone” in her “osteo-trilogy”). Even beyond those projects, where has her name been in the conversation? How many Hollywood offers has she fended off? How many impassioned commenters have suggested her name be added to the mix for “True Detective” season 2 (the chatter about which is fast becoming practically the only reliable barometer of who’s “in” right now)? Ok, we’re being a little facetious, but when we can fill whole features with men who’ve made impressive leaps from small-scale, independent films, often ones with a lower level of critical/commercial impact than “Winter’s Bone,” to much bigger things, why not Granik? It’s not so much that we want to see her helm “Revenge of the Planet of the Apes” or whatever, (though now that we’ve said it, it makes a crazy kind of sense), or that she’d even be vaguely interested, but even getting wishlisted for that sort of property keeps your name ringing in financiers’ ears and makes it a tiny bit easier to get funding for the films you do want to make. Basically, we just want Granik to make more films.

In Her Own Words: [her advice for other women directors] “Work on thickening the skin.”

Folks, we know we’re only scraping the surface here, and we haven’t even glanced overseas, but this is one time when we’d really like you add your two cents to the conversation. Feel free to use our comments section below to talk up any of the women that have been absent a while and who you’d like to see get back behind cameras. Who knows? Perhaps someone with actual clout might be reading…