Lexi Alexander
Best Known For: “Punisher: War Zone” (2007)
Last Film: “Lifted” (2011)
What’s the story? To be best known for Marvel’s biggest box-office bomb is a pretty disheartening thing for any one-time Oscar nominee (Alexander directed 2003 Live Action Short nominee “Johnny Flynton”), but it’s certainly not the whole story. While many can point to the film’s abysmal box office take for the reason the one-time kickboxing champion has not made a major studio feature since (2011’s “Lifted” was a smaller project that went to DVD soon after a very brief limited bow) in fact, Alexander’s direction, particularly in the action scenes, came in for quite some praise. The film is categorically the best of the three “Punisher” films, placing at a very respectable 16 on our ever-controversial ranking of all 36 Marvel movies, and more importantly, in its way-OTT, gross, grubby violence (it’s only one of two Marvel films to end up with an R-rating), it proves that women, or at least this woman, can have chops in an action arena almost solely dominated by male directors, something that her previous feature, “Green Street Hooligans,” also did. But Alexander is not just languishing in a kind of director’s purgatory because she made a film that didn’t make money, she was, wait for it, “difficult” (see Lynne Ramsay). The filmmaker reportedly clashed with Lionsgate, but while she has acknowledged her “uphill battle” on the movie, she has said she’s “extremely happy” with the finished film. That said, she has subsequently been outspoken about her disappointment with her studio experience and her views on Hollywood’s attitude to movie piracy and to the gender imbalance within the industry. In fact, in January, Alexander posted an impassioned plea for Hollywood (and journalists/bloggers—we are not exempt) to get serious about gender diversity within the industry. It makes an awful lot of sense, and contains some jaw-dropping from-the-horse’s-mouth anecdotes (it was reposted on “Women in Hollywood,” and since we can’t find the original blog, here’s a link to that). It’s quite clear that Alexander knows that sticking her head above the parapet in this way is not going to win her many powerful friends, which is a shame, because while many of the women on this list probably have a shot at getting another low-budget indie made sometime before they die, Alexander is probably the one with the most readily applicable skill set to take on a summer tentpole or a franchise.
In Her Own Words: “I don’t care if Hollywood dishes out the same impossible odds, I don’t care if they built a wall as thick as the commies did in East Berlin, and I don’t care if I have to be ten times as good as a male director to get 1/8th of the opportunities he gets… as long as people are honest about the game we’re playing, the tournament we’re fighting. But don’t tell me I’m not a wildcard when I so obviously am, and don’t tell me you’ve been working diligently to eliminate the wildcard system, when in reality you’re not.” [From her blog]
Lynne Ramsay
Best Known For: “We Need to Talk About Kevin” (2012), and for being “difficult”
Last Film: “We Need to Talk About Kevin” (2012)
What’s the story? To cinephiles, Ramsay is also pretty well known for the two features that came before ‘Kevin,’ both totally unique and unmistakably hers—“Ratcatcher” and “Morvern Callar,” and fans may have also sought out her trio of early shorts, (“Small Deaths,” “Gasman” and “Kill The Day”) the first and second of which won a short film Grand Jury Prix at Cannes. We’d say that even her most vociferous detractors can’t possibly argue with the Ramsay’s sheer artistic vision, and her completely individual, auteurist approach. But it’s very possible, and deeply wrong, that more people might now know her name because of two high-profile films she didn’t end up making—“The Lovely Bones” and the upcoming “Jane Got A Gun.” Her criticism of the “weird, Kafkaesque nightmare” that was her time on ‘Bones,’ to which she had been attached since before the novel attained bestseller status (she worked on her script from galley proofs), was surely at least partially justified by the horrible mess that was Peter Jackson’s adaptation. And while we have yet to see what Gavin O’Connor has done with “Jane Got A Gun,” the doldrums release date of February 20th doesn’t inspire much confidence in what was once a thrilling-sounding project. Whatever credence one gives to the lawsuit that producers of the latter film filed against her, the fact is all this chatter has surely negatively impacted her Hollywood rep and makes always gun-shy investors doubly nervous about backing her projects. But Ramsay is one of the most unique talents out there, and is working on a terrific sounding project, “Mobius,” which is something about “Moby Dick” in space in which “Ahab is the monster.” By our reckoning she’s working at a 100% hit rate so far for features films, which makes her, in fact, a pretty good bet. To describe her in Ezra Miller’s words, “She’s a punk rock lady, but also a fastidious perfectionist.”
In Her Own Words: “I think life is infinitely complex and film is in some way a beautiful, dark dream sequence. I’m essentially a dreamer, but I’m tough as old boots as well.” [The Guardian, 2011]
Julia Leigh
Best Known For: “Sleeping Beauty” (2011)
Last Film: “Sleeping Beauty” (2011)
What’s the story? Enormously divisive when it finally made it to Cannes, (we were more positive about it than many critics) Australian Julia Leigh’s feature debut, starring Emily Browning, had been kicking around as a script since 2008 when it landed on the Black List. Whether or not you like the film, you have to admit that somehow going from a standing start to being one of the hotter ticket premieres at that year’s festival was an impressive trick. And all seemed on track when Leigh, who also has two novels under her belt, announced her next film would be an adaptation of of of those books, titled ”Disquiet.“ But there hasn’t been a lot of word on that since, considering at one point it was rumored for Cannes 2013. Leigh is one of the newest of a crop of Australian women directors, including Cate Shortland, Gillian Armstrong, Jocelyn Moorehouse and others, who seems to have benefitted from that country’s more progressive stance on gender in filmmaking (Shortland gives some insight into that phenomenon here), but it doesn’t appear to be making her sophomore film any easier to mount. The slow, poised and extremely stylized vibe of her debut may not be to everyone’s taste, but it is uniquely hers, and any woman who can land a Competition slot in the notoriously male-skewing Cannes, with her debut film no less, has got something that the film industry needs more of.
In Her Own Words: “Be very persistent.” [Dec 2011, Women in Hollywood interview]
