10 Female Directors Who Deserve More Attention From Hollywood

So who, among the roughly 6% of directors who are women (the figure put forth in this widely reported 2014 survey), should work more? Short answer is, obviously, all of them. Because if we’re working to redress the ludicrous gender imbalance that exists in the U.S. film industry (and that is a too-obvious-to-even-comment-on goal, right? Right?) we need to see a dramatic uptick in stats like the percentage of women who direct the top 250 movies in any given year (2013’s depressing figure of 6% is actually down 3% from 2012, which is even more depressing). And let’s just repeat once again that, while “diversity” is a buzzword bandied about liberally these days, we’re not talking about a minority here (which is a whole other, though related, issue) we’re talking about women—50% of the population and, crucially, 50% of cinema audiences. (Also, 100% of the writers of this article, so have at it, crazy anti-feminist internet trolls.)

Of course, there are much-needed initiatives, like Fox’s mentoring program for emerging female directorial talent, that are aimed at recruiting the next generation, in the hopes that the industry’s profile in this arena will improve. But what about the women who are already card-carrying DGA members who can’t seem to catch a break? Why do so many women (and by “many,” we’re talking relatively, obviously) make a splash with a film or two only to virtually disappear from the industry landscape thereafter? Why does the model of the indie hit calling card film that gets you a massive, “Jurassic World”-style franchise, only seem to apply to men? (As Manohla Dargis pointed out last year,  “The great irony is that women are accused of making romantic comedies, as if it’s a bad thing, but Marc Webb makes a romantic comedy and he gets ‘Spider-Man.’ Are you kidding me? You cannot win.”) These and other rhetorical questions (ones frequently highlighted on our excellent sister blog “Women in Hollywood” whose interviews we plunder frequently throughout this piece) have led us to today’s feature.

The following list of ten names is of course highly subjective, and was arrived at after not a little internecine wrangling. For example, many of the names that were on top of our mind have been working fairly consistently, but out of our direct line of sight on television. Lisa Cholodenko’s terrific “Olive Kitteridge” miniseries for HBO and Jill Soloway’s “Transparent” for Amazon Prime are just two of the recent premium TV shows that have given talented female filmmakers a welcome presence, but the precedent extends far back to when TV was not the fully rehabilitated equal, or near-equal, of cinema in terms of prestige and/or directorial input. Allison Anders, Nicole Holofcener (both of whom got their TV start on “Sex and the City”), Mary Harron, Darnell Martin and even Martha Coolidge, the first female president of the Directors Guild of America, are all women who made promising early movies but moved towards TV in the late nineties at least as a supplement to at best sporadic big-screen outings.

It’s a path many female directors are taking more recently too, and with the improvement in the quality of TV offerings, it does feel like a more viable choice—there is a difference between getting the odd episode of a “CSI” spin-off to direct and helming the next Steven Soderbergh-produced high-concept TV series, after all. And the latter is happening for Amy Seimetz, for example, whose great feature debut, “Sun Don’t Shine,” we bigged up a lot in 2012.

So all is rosy, because TV is now just as good as movies, and female directors can all get work there, right? We-ell. In fact the stats for episodic TV, while better, are still pretty poor: just 14% of TV directors are women (and only 2% of the 19% non-white directors are women, incidentally).

There are hopeful stories too, of course. Aside from the Holy Trinity of highest-profile female directors (Campion, Bigelow, Coppola) quite a number of women who might have figured on this list a year or two ago have landed gigs in the meantime, and have had films out last year, this year, or have something coming imminently down the pike. There’s Cholodenko, who we mentioned already; “Pariah” helmer Dee Rees is currently filming a Bessie Smith biopic and has several writing and directing projects lined up; Karyn Kusama has “The Invitation” coming in 2015; Lake Bell is following up her brilliant debut “In A World” by being attached to the Noah Baumbach-penned adaptation of Claire Messud’s novel “The Emperor’s Children”; Gina Prince Bythewood will release “Beyond the Lights” soon; Zoe Cassavetes has “Day out of Days,” her first feature since “Broken English,” due in 2015; Kasi “Eve’s Bayou” Lemmons came back to the big screen in 2013 for the first time since 2007’s “Talk To Me” (though it was a shame it had to be with “Black Nativity”); and most high-profile of all, Ava Du Vernay will follow up her strong 2012 title “Middle of Nowhere” with this December’s awards-probable “Selma.”

So that’s as much context as we can really give without writing a dissertation on the subject. For the reasons touched on, we excluded the names mentioned above from our final list of ten, and other than that, we focused mostly on women who haven’t made a narrative feature in the last few years, who’ve directed at least one film that we’re pretty keen on, and who work primarily in English-language cinema. There are many, many more and those names we’ve already mentioned need to be celebrated for their achievements, get nominated for Oscars, land blockbuster gigs and most importantly need to keep getting work, but here are 10 other names that feel overdue, in some cases criminally so, for some big news soon.

Patty Jenkins
Best Known For: “Monster” (2003)
Last Film: “Monster” (2003)
What’s the story? Jenkins hasn’t been sitting on her porch knitting since her excoriating, uncompromising feature debut, which famously won Charlize Theron an Oscar and performed the seemingly impossible task of making the actress look unattractive. In fact she’s worked on and off in TV, most notably gaining an Emmy nomination for directing the pilot for “The Killing.” She went on to direct one further episode of that show, and otherwise has one “Arrested Development,” two “Entourage” entries and two further pilots to her filmography, 2013’s “Betrayal” with Henry Thomas, and the just-completed “Exposed” starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Ben Barnes. Oh and a segment of a breast cancer awareness TV film called “Five.” So yes, that’s eight TV episodes, more or less, in eleven years? Of course more recently, Jenkins was attached to “Thor: The Dark World” before leaving that/being pushed out citing “creative differences” with Marvel (perhaps the same creative differences that caused original director Kenneth Branagh to bail and ultimately left Alan Taylor in charge of such an uninspired sequel). And then there was that brief biscuit of time when “Fifty Shades of Grey” was going to be directed by someone like Joe Wright or Gus van Sant or Bennett Miller or Jenkins, before the dubious honor fell to Sam Taylor-Johnson. This distinct recent upswing in buzz has, fingers crossed, borne fruit—in May it was reported that Jenkins is attached to a female assassin action comedy with definite shades of “Grosse Pointe Blank” called “Sweetheart,” that made the 2013 Black List. But early days there, and nothing set in stone as yet.
In Her Own Words: “[Filmmaking is] very much about pushing on a door that won’t open, but one day the door cracks open, and a moment happens.” [2011 interview]

Lucy Mulloy
Best Known For: “Una Noche” (2012)
Last Film: “Una Noche” (2012)
What’s the story? Student Oscar nominee Mulloy’s deserved success with her excellent, multi-award-winning debut “Una Noche”—which picked up Best New Narrative Director, Best Actor and Best Cinematography at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival and went on to play to great acclaim throughout the rest of the festival year—is the kind of inarguable profile boost that surely should have seen her linked or attached to something else since. But we’ve had no word as yet on her next project, despite her NYU mentorship from Spike Lee and the constant stream of awards and positive notices, our own included, that her film generated. Mulloy is undoubtedly a filmmaker who wants to create her own projects, and we really hope that, as one of the most promising writer/directors to emerge in recent years, we hear about something cooking soon—it is all too easy for hot-new-thing status to dissipate in the years in takes to pull a new film together if you’re starting from scratch. Her keen eye for the authentic rhythms of Cuban life, her ability to get astonishingly strong performances from her non-professional cast and her masterly forming of these element into a thrilling, beautiful (also brilliantly edited) whole belied her inexperience completely. So if it felt like the confident, fresh expression of a filmmaker with four or five films under her belt, we can’t wait to see what her fourth or fifth film will look like. She needs to get cracking on her second.
In Her Own Words: “I think it’s really important that there be female directors from everywhere, every walk of life, every culture. I think that woman in society, in general, going through life, are treated differently. And I think that those experiences obviously do translate to work when you’re directing a movie.” [August 2013 Shadow & Act interview]