(This is an autogenerated transcript and may contain inaccuracies)
JADE HINDMON
Welcome back. You're listening to KPBS Midday Edition. I'm Jade Hindman. March is Women's History Month, so our Midday Movies critics are highlighting women directors, both the trailblazers and the emerging new voices. A new study by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that only 9 women directed the top 100 grossing films of last year. So in total, women represent less than 10% of the biggest filmmakers in Hollywood today, and that's a drop from last last year. There's still been some recognition, though. This year, Chloé Zhao joined an elite filmmaker group as only the second woman nominated twice for the Best Director Oscar. She directed Hamnet, which got a lot of buzz. So while women are making progress in the film industry, there is still a long, long way to go. Once again, I want to welcome our film critics, KPBS Cinema Junkie Beth Accomando and Moviewallas' podcaster, Yazdi Pithavala. Welcome to you both.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Thank you so much.
YAZDI PITHAVALA
Thank you.
JADE HINDMON
Let's begin by highlighting women who were pioneers. We're talking directors who really blazed a trail and opened doors for those who followed. Beth, you wanted to remind us of who some of those trailblazers were.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Yes, as the oldest member here, I'm going to go back in history and give you some names. So Alice Guy-Blanche is a French woman credited as the first woman director. And Dorothy Arzner is the first woman who joined the Directors Guild back in 1936, and her career spanned from from the silent era on into the 1940s. But the person I want to highlight is Ida Lupino. Most people probably know her as an actress. She was famous for her tough noir dames in films like Road House and They Drive By Night. But she had this opportunity in 1949. She had scripted a film called Not Wanted, and it was about abortion, which was a daring subject at that time. And the director had a heart attack on the third day of the shoot. And since she knew the script so well, they decided they would let her, uncredited, direct the film. So she stepped in. And she is someone who, while she was making all her films as an actress, was very observant of the directors she was working with. So she did a good job. The film made a lot of money. And she ended up forming a film production company with her then-husband, Collier Young.
BETH ACCOMANDO
And she directed this great film noir called "The Hitchhiker." And as the title implies, it's a story about two men who who are driving to a camping trip who end up picking up a hitchhiker with some unpleasant results.
CLIP: The Hitch-Hiker
Face front and keep driving. Sure, I'm Emmett Myers. Do what I tell you and don't make no fast moves or a lot of dead heroes back there get nervous.
BETH ACCOMANDO
So this is a gritty, huff-as-they-get noir thriller. There are 3 male leads in this film, no women of note. And I just love how masterfully she handled this film. The tension in this is ratcheted up all the way through. It's a great film. She became a very prolific director. She tackled issues of rape and disability in her independently produced features. And she had a really long career directing television. She did over 100 episodes, all genres— Westerns, sci-fi, detective. But most notable, she was the only woman to direct an episode of the original Twilight Zone series, and that episode was "The Masks." So I just think she is a fantastic trailblazer for us to remember and to seek out her work, both as an actress and as a director.
JADE HINDMON
Yeah, she really opened some doors. And Yazdi, you have another trailblazer to highlight. Who is she?
YAZDI PITHAVALA
So I want to highlight Agnès Varda. Agnès Varda was the only female filmmaker who was part of the French New Wave. She directed her first film in 1955 when she was just 27 years old. And she continued on for another 6 decades, all the way to 2019, when she made a documentary about herself and her films called "Varda on Agnes," before she passed at the ripe old age of 90. She was known primarily for bringing documentary realism even to her fictional stories. And no, she was known for her location shooting and for bringing in a lot of nonprofessional actors. No other than Scorsese has called her one of the gods of cinema. You may know her from very seminal French films such as "Cleo from 5 to 7," which was this lovely story about a woman spending a couple of hours while she's waiting to find out the results from her biopsy to find out if she has cancer or not. It's a lovely film. "Gleaners and I" is another film that she directed. And I really like her for her documentaries, including "Daguerreotypes" and especially "Faces/Places." And to give an idea of the person that she was, here's a clip from an interview with Varda.
AGNES VARDA
And every single film, every single story is a puzzle. You bring the pieces in. Does it make an image at the end that makes sense? Does it end with a face or a landscape? Or a black wall, you know. You know you work, but you don't exactly know what you build, what puzzle you finish. And what I love the most and what I feel the most now being old, that some pieces of the puzzle are missing, and they will be missing all the time. And there is no one documentary that has all the pieces of the puzzle. It's just some pieces, and you have to invent, to understand, to imagine the rest. There is no truth, you know that.
JADE HINDMON
She did a lot of great work. Well, Beth, you wanted to add another foreign filmmaker here.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Yes, I want to slip in a real quick mention of Lina Wertmüller. She's the Italian director of Swept Away and Seven Beauties, and she has a milestone. In 1976, she was the first female director to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director. So I think she needs to be in the record books for that.
JADE HINDMON
Absolutely.
YAZDI PITHAVALA
Amen.
JADE HINDMON
Well, let's turn to some of your personal favorites. Yazdi, I know you love them all, but if you had to pick just one, who would it be?
YAZDI PITHAVALA
There are so many to pick from. I wanted to mention Mira Nair. I wanted to mention Jane Campion. I wanted to mention Kathryn Bigelow. But the one I settled on is Gina Prince-Bythewood. She's made lovely movies, including Love and Basketball, The Secret Lives of Bees, Beyond the Lights, as well as The Woman King, most recently with Viola Davis. She has been quietly making studio-backed films since the early 2000s when she first directed Love and Basketball. And is there a better American romantic film made? Than Love and Basketball. Here's a clip from the movie.
CLIP Love and Basketball
You asked me what was missing. What? From basketball. You woke me up to tell me that? It's not fun for me anymore because you're missing. What I'm trying to say is I've loved you since I was 11. We haven't talked since college. You wait 2 weeks before my wedding to tell me something like I know I probably should have said it 2 weeks ago. You haven't changed. You still think the sun rises and sets on your ass. Well, guess what? It doesn't. Then why are you so upset? Because you don't pull this shit on someone who's about to get married. Better late than never, right? Wrong.
YAZDI PITHAVALA
She's really had a wonderful career, and her early films had predominantly African American characters. But of late, she's kind of diversified. In most recent Recently she made "The Old Guard" with Charlize Theron for Netflix. And I'm really excited for her next venture where she kind of moves into the fantasy arena. And it's the movie "Children of Blood and Bone," which has Viola Davis again, along with Idris Elba. So really looking forward to that.
JADE HINDMON
Yeah, she's made some really good classics. I can't wait to see that one either. Beth, who are your favorites?
BETH ACCOMANDO
It's a tough call to narrow that down as well. I will do a little quick mention of Lynne Ramsay. She did "Ratcatcher," "Morven Caller," and Really impressively, we need to talk about "Kevin," which is an incredibly difficult film about a school shooting. I guess you can call it a shooting even though he used arrows and not a gun, I believe. But she's an amazingly poetic filmmaker. What's interesting, her and my other favorite director I'm going to mention, which is Kathryn Bigelow, they're both very visual storytellers, but visual in very different ways. Lynne Ramsay is much more kind of this quiet poetry, and Kathryn Bigelow is very much into this action, adrenaline-driven kind of filmmaking. I loved Kathryn Bigelow from her first film. She did Loveless and then impressively Near Dark, which combines vampires and action, which I absolutely adore. She also did Zero Dark Thirty, Point Break, which is another great action film. Most recently, she did House of Dynamite. I love the fact that she was a filmmaker that didn't play up being a woman director. She just went out and did these films, took the projects that she loved and that she wanted to do. And, you know, when she was starting out in the late '80s and early '90s, making films like that always meant that she ended up being asked questions like, well, that's a very masculine film. How was it directing it? And, you know, she had to field those questions up until winning for "The Hurt Locker." But here's an early interview after she had done "Near Dark," where she is asked one of those questions about doing an action film.
KATHRYN BIGELOW
I don't know, it's sort of hard for me to stand outside it and to see what changes perhaps that film might be able to make. I certainly hope it opens up the arena for women to enter action. I am interested in high-impact, you know, moviemaking. I mean, certainly RoboCop is a terrific example of that. Just, you know, I like to feel a kind of an adrenalinic response to the screen. You know, whereas previously it's, you know, the association of women with sort of more emotional material and men with the apparatus, hardware, technique, maybe is breaking down. And within a few years' time, it'll no longer be an issue, you know, who directed what. And it'll be, you know, people will be hired based on their strengths and their focus and their inclination. I hope that's the case soon.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Not quite there yet, but definitely making progress. She was briefly married to James Cameron, and I love the fact that she beat him out for Best Director. He was up for Avatar, and she was up and won for The Hurt Locker. So she's someone I've always admired, and I really appreciate the fact that she is a woman director who has refused to be put in a box of what Hollywood and male directors think a woman director should be doing. And she's made no fuss about it at all. She just broke that glass ceiling.
JADE HINDMON
I love that.
YAZDI PITHAVALA
And I like that her latest film, which is on Netflix, A House of Dynamite, I think it deserves more recognition. It's— a lot of people give up on it because of the movie's ending, but it's so wonderfully constructed. I love that film.
JADE HINDMON
That's one I'll have to definitely check out. Well, are there any new female directors you're following?
BETH ACCOMANDO
Yes, so I really love Nia DaCosta. She works in my favorite genre, horror. She is a Black woman who did a fabulous Candyman remake.
CLIP Candyman
The legend is if you say his name 5 times while looking in the mirror, he appears in the reflection and kills you.
NIA DA COSTA
A big thing that we did with this film was expand the lore of Candyman, expand the mythology, and that was really just to make it more specific and to reframe who we were talking about, which was Candyman as a person, as a concept, as a symbol, as a martyr and a monster. And so telling the story from a Black point of view I think helps. Instead of it being an outsider looking in trying to write a thesis about it, it's actually the people experiencing it. I think that's the best way for an audience to understand something as traumatic and with a history as long as what we're talking about in our film.
BETH ACCOMANDO
And then she also did the latest installment of the 28 Years Later franchise, The Bone Temple, which is by far the best of that series since the original. And she did a really interesting new take on Hedda Gabler, which is not overtly horror, but there are definitely some horrific elements in it. So she's really somebody to watch. I can't wait to see what she does next. But I do also want to give a shout out to Coralie Fargeat, who did Revenge and the deliciously gross body horror film The Substance. So one of the things I like about her is just her attitude towards making films. And this kind of bold desire to be provocative and not to be ingratiating in any way. So here she discusses a scene in which Dennis Quaid was eating shrimp with a lot of gusto and disgusting sounds, and this was in The Substance. And here's her response to the request she had to cut that scene out, and this is why I love her work.
CORALIE FARGEAT
The thing that impressed me the most in the editing was how much this shrimp scene made people uncomfortable. It was from all the scenes, if I had expected people to have a strong rejection of something, I would have imagined everything but the shrimps. And it's true, it was all guys telling me, "Oh no, but the shrimps, it's too much. Please tone down the shrimps." And I was like, the power of the shrimps, like to make them feel so unwell. And I learned on my first feature that when there is a scene that makes everyone uncomfortable and that everyone asks you to cut or to do differently, it's most of the time because there is something very powerful in that scene that you have to stick to.
JADE HINDMON
I agree. I would agree with that. Well, Yazdi, who, who of this next generation of women directors do you like?
YAZDI PITHAVALA
Again, there's so many, so many to pick from, but I wanted to shed light on two relatively new Indian film directors, Payal Kapadia, who made "All the Imagineers Light," as well as Shoochi Talati, who made "Girls Will Be Girls." Both are female filmmakers who are fearless and unafraid to take on pretty charged and provocative material. Both filmmakers also have a way of dealing with female desire with so much honesty and frankness, which has frankly been missing from Indian cinema. Kapadia made "All the Imagineers Light" last year, which won the Grand Prix at And it is a lovely, quiet examination of a few female characters from the lowest rungs of the economic ladder in current-day Mumbai. And then Taladi made this lovely film called Girls Will Be Girls right around the same time. And that film is set in a boarding school in India where a girl begins to assert her burgeoning sexual desire under the watchful gaze of her single-parent mom. And here is a scene from the film where she brings in a co-student who she really likes, to meet her mom for the first time.
CLIP Girls Will Be Girls
Hi, Auntie. I'm Shree. Hi, I'm Meera's mom, Anila. I saw these flowers and thought they were really pretty. Oh, thanks. Want to put this in a vase? Come sit. Bring some water also. Okay. I didn't know you have such an amazing garden. Oh, it's my mom's. This house is my mom's only. Meera was saying that you split your time between here and Haridwar. I always come for her exams. But this year is very important, no? So I'll be here until her board exams. My daughter is my priority, whether she realizes it or not. Have. Thank you. That's why I wanted to askdo you miss Haridwar? No, not really. What do your parents do? My father is a diplomat and mother is a dancer. She also teaches Bharatanatyam.
JADE HINDMON
Very nice, very nice. Well, we're focusing this conversation on directors, but we can't forget the women behind the camera. At the most recent Oscars, Autumn de Roald Arkapawd became the first woman to win the award for best cinematography for "Sinners." Are there any women behind the scenes that you want to shout out?
BETH ACCOMANDO
Well, as somebody who loves editing and admires women editors who have been at the forefront of that craft for many years, decades, in part because Hollywood saw editing as sort of an extension of clerical work back in the day, because, you know, there were script girls who kept records and they felt like, oh yeah, editing is just an extension of this clerical job. So I would shout out Thelma Schoonmaker, who's been Martin Scorsese's editor for decades. She does amazing work. And again, you know, she works in films that are often not considered what would be the typical realm for women to be editing—gangster tales, violent stories. She talks a lot about editing violence in the films and how you craft that to build tension or to be shocking. So she's someone who just has has a huge, impressive career of working in the editing room. And I think women editors are just fabulous. Indeed. Yasti, any for you?
YAZDI PITHAVALA
So I'll circle back on the Sinner's Award. You know, for the longest time, cinematography involved carrying heavy cameras. And, you know, it was always thought a job for a man being, you know, involving a lot of physical work. And even in interviews that you see of Autumn Arkapaw, you see that She's so committed to it, and she's such a student of cinema history that I'm so wonderful that Ryan Coogler kind of recognized that early, gave her a chance, and she was able to go all the way to win the Oscar.
JADE HINDMON
That's another movie that I just love. All right, so let's go out with a recommendation for what to look for coming to a cinema. Beth, you've got one that opens today.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Yes, I'm really excited that this is opening today. The film screened at Cannes last year. This is Julia Ducournau's "Alpha," but it's only opening here in the US. Right now. So you can see it in a cinema, which I highly recommend. So both her and Fargeat have this love of body horror, and they have this fearlessness and this eagerness to provoke. And I love that quality in these films. They are not making films that want to be quiet or passive or ingratiating. So here she discusses her first film, Titane, and how she wanted to hold the audience's interest in her main character, Alexia. She knew that this character was not like unlikable, not sympathetic, and was downright violent at times. And so this is her discussion of how she wanted to deal with both the violence and her character in the opening.
JULIA DOCOURNAU
At this level, I think the first thing that I started understanding in her is her anger, her rage, and hence her violence. Because Alexia is a very, like, direct response to the idea that a woman is a designated victim. And I thought it's funny because a guy who is gonna assault someone, or even heckle or whatever, It's never going to occur to that person that that woman could retaliate in a way that could hurt him, actually. And this infuriates me to a point that I actually wanted to bring all that anger in someone who would be, like, able to retaliate just because she is a psychopath. And it means that she doesn't feel fear.
BETH ACCOMANDO
So I love her attitude about women characters. I'm not interested in these I don't want these role model kinds of women. I want complex, sometimes unlikable, unsympathetic women, but I want them to have depth and dimensionality. And her characters have that. And I also love the way she depicts violence in her films. I think it's very visceral and impactful, which is how it should be. So her new film, Alpha, is about sort of the unexpected consequences of a 13-year-old girl getting a tattoo. It's sort of an allegory about AIDS, but also about generational trauma. And yes, body horror does come into play. Hmm, very interesting.
JADE HINDMON
Well, Yazdi, what's your pick?
YAZDI PITHAVALA
So I'm really excited for two movies which are going to be coming out this year. One is the latest from director Olivia Wilde. It's called The Invite. But the one I'm even more interested to watch is the film Josephine, which is directed by Beth de Arujo. And this film was the winner of the audience and the grand jury prize at Sundance this year. It's going to be released later this year, and it has been clearing up prizes at all the film festivals. And the movie stars Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan as parents of an 8-year-old little girl who is dealing with the trauma of having witnessed a brutal crime. And by all means, I've heard this movie is wonderfully directed, and also a joy visually to look at. So I'm really looking forward to that. And here is actually a clip from Channing Tatum and the director being interviewed during Sundance. This is my 20-year—
CHANNING TATUM
20 years since I've been back. I had Guide to Recognizing Your Saints here, and it was one of the first, like, I think, quote-unquote, real movies, real characters I ever did. And to be able to have this movie specifically back here is like, I don't know, it's really nice wrap-up.
BETH DE ARAUJO
I was just I was just really excited that he met me with such earnestness. He's a huge star, so you never know sort of what the vibe's gonna be when you meet someone. And he came with a pad of paper and pen, had read the script inside out, and just really connected with the character in a way that I really appreciated. And it just kind of went from there for me.
CHANNING TATUM
How's it feel for you, man?
BETH DE ARAUJO
It feels like a homecoming for this project. So yeah, it feels really nice.
YAZDI PITHAVALA
So you can see, obviously, there's a lot of excitement around this film. And Channing Tatum is one of the underrated actors. And yeah, I'm really looking forward to this one.
JADE HINDMON
Wow. Well, there were so many trailblazers and up-and-coming talent talked about here today. I love everyone's work and can't wait to see more of it. I've been speaking with KPBS arts reporter Beth Akomando and Movie Wallace's podcaster, Yazdi Puttavala. For more on their picks, check out KPBS.org. Beth Yazdi, as always, thank you. Thank you so much.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Thank you.
