‘Leave No Trace’ Director Debra Granik Discusses Her Film’s Unique Script And Time’s Up [Interview]

Who’s one female filmmaker that you think doesn’t get the attention she deserves?
I think she’s well-known in Europe, but I would say Celine Sciamma. She’s really doing some robust work. I would also say Anna Muylaert. I thought her film, “The Second Mother,” was outstanding. 2015, Brazilian film. I thought that was one of the strongest films about the microaggressions of class, but with a really cool, believable twist.

I’m curious, as a female filmmaker who has had her films nominated for Oscars, you are making these very robust projects in a time of reckoning in the industry in terms of gender. You’re kind of doing whatever you want outside of the Hollywood system, but I’m wondering if you’ve felt those reverberations?
It’s really a battlefield out there, and I do really feel like the east is the zone of tolerance. You actually don’t have to be defined by your gender. Completely. It’s interesting, ’cause like, I need to find words, I need to talk to other feminists. I feel that women have a huge role in changing some of this, not just on the maker side, but also on the performer side, what women agree to do. Not just inclusion riders, but also exclusion riders, meaning like, “Unless other people are also removing their clothes, I won’t. If I don’t want to do this, does that mean I don’t get hired?” Maybe not wearing the gowns at the red carpet, if they don’t want to.

Reverberations are really there, and as I like to say any time I ruminate on this or reflect on it, it’s not surprising. All waves of women pushing for change are always inextricably linked to civil rights, and that happened in the first wave, that’s happened in all the waves of insurrection and incursion and pushback. So, to me, it was just an interesting confluence. We’re saying time’s up on this form of naked, racially-based police brutality, this ever-steepening pyramid that’s the hardest one to penetrate or to knock at; and we’re also saying time’s up on the way that a big industrial system operated for many decades. It’s so funny, it feels so monumental when it’s happening now, but when you reflect, culture always has to be shaken up. What was it like when Brecht and all those freaks and all those radical surrealist women artists in all those salons of Europe in the ’20s, Gertrude Stein, all those demimondes—we forget that there were all these times when they called time’s up. So it’s just very hard to be in it, to see if it’s making any change. I think we can say, from precedent, that it is.

But you’re not surprised.
No, because it is slow-moving.

“Leave No Trace” is now playing in select theaters.

This interview has been condensed for continuity and clarity.