Chicks behind the flicks

Lynda Obst: A bunch of us have had this conversation many times over the past couple of decades. What's different for young women filmmakers like Kim and Patty than it was when Nora and Laura and Callie and I were first breaking on the scene, say, in the '80s?

Laura Ziskin: Well, there are four more women directors than there were 20 years ago.

Nora Ephron: No, no, no, no. Twenty years ago there were no women directors. Zero. I was a screenwriter then, and I remember the list that my agent used to give us whenever we finished a script, and there were no women's names on it, none. Maybe, maybe Barbra Streisand --

Ziskin: Now there are four.

Ephron: There aren't four. There are way more than that.

Callie Khouri: But I get lists when I turn in movies, and they don't have a lot of women on them.

Ephron: We've now gotten to a point where we're at the bad plateau, but it's still way more women. It just is. So that is a difference.

Khouri: And yet, still, the good news is that whenever the annual meeting at the Directors Guild takes place, there's never a line for the women's bathroom. [Laughter]

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Ziskin: I'm curious about the women here who are directors. I think it's harder for women whose peak career-making years coincide with their peak baby-making years. Directing is a job that requires 100 percent of your time and energy and it's therefore hard to have children. Well, Nora has children and she did it.

Cathy Konrad: You did it.

Ziskin: But I'm not a director. Producing is an all-engaging job, but it's a little bit different. The movie can continue in your absence if you have to go to the school play. [But] I know Elizabeth Daley, who's the dean of the USC film school, says she has trouble recruiting women into the directing program.

Obst: But we all know that it's harder for young women directors trying to get jobs than young men. What do you think, Kim and Patty?

Kimberly Peirce: I think the indie world is actually great for women, and for gay people. Because if you have a story, you're going to be able to [tell it]. That's where a lot of women get their start. But you get into your second, your third movie, and you're building a career, and it's hitting smack up against those years when you want to have a child. I mean, you can't get bonded if you're pregnant.

Margaret Nagle: Really?

Peirce: Yeah. Is that shocking?

Patty Jenkins: My mom was an active feminist and I only had a sister, so I was raised in an all-female household. It never occurred to me that I couldn't do whatever I wanted. I do think there is another generation like that coming up. When it comes to different genres, "Spider-Man" is one of my favorite things of all time. [It has] a much deeper message behind it. When films are action films without that behind it, I'm not at all interested.

Konrad: The material that gets made at studios is a function of the culture: what is branded and what makes money. I'm not saying that women only want to make dramas, but I do think that you'll find a lot more women that want to tell stories about people than cars.

Nagle: I've never wanted to make anything blow up. That was something my brothers did, and I never wanted to watch movies where people blew things up. "Spider-Man" was a revelation to me because I went, "Oh my God! At the core, this kid, his self-esteem, his identity, he's me!"

Peirce: The danger is when you earmark movies for women. You picked up on something to me that was really interesting, that women would go to what's typically a boy movie if the boys are emotive, right? There's something interesting to me about that, because it's like, "Why did they like 'The Bourne'?" It's got all that testosterone, but I imagine it appeals greatly to women, right?

Donna Langley: Yes, they don't drive it right off the bat, but they do go. They're going because of Matt.

Ephron: Yes, because they're hoping that Matt Damon will wake up remembering them. [Laughter]

Nagle: What about "The Devil Wears Prada," where they were so amazed that so many guys went to that movie, because everybody's had a scary boss ... Young boys go to the movies reliably every Friday night in droves, so it's young boys that make the principal audience.

Ziskin: But is that a self-fulfilling prophecy? The movies were made for them because they go in droves?

Khouri: It's a lot easier to get young boys out on a Friday and Saturday night than it is to get working women or housewives out on a Friday and Saturday night.

Ziskin: But the truth of the matter is those teen boys are less reliable because they have way more choices, and in fact the most reliable moviegoing audience -- and also the dirty word in the movie business -- is "women over 35." Because we have the moviegoing habit. I would go to the movies every weekend if there was something for me to see. The studios, if they were smart, would have a geriatric division.

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Obst: Callie, I want to ask you this because you wrote one of the great feminist movies of all time ["Thelma and Louise"], and then we had this fabulous conversation where you told me that you were going to do a NASCAR movie because you were completely bored with the chick flick. Did you have a harder time trying to change genres or was this a career thing?

Khouri: The stuff that comes to me is still way girlier than I would go after on my own. I spent years trying to get a baseball movie made, and that didn't happen. I wanted to make a NASCAR movie. The stuff that comes to me, I'm always like, "I don't want to do this. There's crying in this." That's what sifts down to me, and it is frustrating. I would like to work outside of the female-centric world. But if it's got a woman in it, I'm going to have a better shot at [getting] it.

Ziskin: But there are movies in general, and then there are women's movies. We're still the other -- we're still a secondary audience. When they made "Little Women," my daughter was 11, she went five times in one week. That was because as a young woman, she never got to see herself and her experience on the screen. We know so much about the male experience because it's been fed to us through the literature that the men wrote and the world that the men created; it's a relatively new phenomenon in the modern world that we have power to say what we think and to express ourselves and our sensibility. But we're still considered an alternative class.

Peirce: It's fascinating that you would say that a young girl would find a reflection of herself in "Little Women" because I don't fall for that sort of typical female kind of gender thing. I love blowing things up. I just did "Stop-Loss," a war film, and there was nothing more exciting than when they set those cars on fire. People need the adrenaline. If women identify with that sensibility, if that turns them on, then they're going to make those kinds of movies.

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