In her gorgeous new book, Cinema Her Way, writer and film critic Marya E. Gates interviews 19 female filmmakers about their work, their experiences in the film industry, and the films that inspired them to make their own. These interviews with directors — including Karyn Kusama, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Allison Anders, and Cheryl Dunye — give us a thoroughly detailed insider’s view of the creativity, determination, and community-building that has come to define their careers. Aside from getting the directors’ stories in their own words, what comes through clearly when you read it is Gates’ appreciation for the women she included in the book, her love of film, and her belief in the power of art.
Through her work in Cinema Her Way and her work for other publications, Gates has proven that she is one of the most vital film writers and critics we have working today. She very graciously agreed to speak with me about the book, the experiences that made it possible, and why this book is so necessary.
Stef: I’ve been following your work for a little while now. I love the Female Filmmakers in Focus interviews. So, I was super excited to see the book and when I got the book, I recognized what a massive undertaking it must have been. I was hoping you could just share the process you used to figure out who would be included in the book, how you narrowed your options down, and how you decided on what to include in the final version.
Marya: The original concept even before I had the lit agent was that I wanted to do 365 profiles. I was working on a book proposal, not really knowing what I was doing in 2017. I was going to do 365 profiles or 52 depending on who was interested because it was either one a day or one a week. When my agent found me on Twitter, she asked, ‘Do you have a book idea?’ So, I sent it to her and she said, ‘I think there’s good bones here.’ We worked on it and she was the one who was like, ‘I think we should aim for 52 because we can sell that, and we can do the one a week kind of thing.’ When [my publisher] Rizzoli came on board, they were also big fans of the Female Filmmakers in Focus, and they asked me to do interviews so we can get a little more buy-in from the filmmakers that way. I knew I couldn’t do 52, so the goal became 20 to 25. It ended up being 19 because my final filmmaker was unreachable for months and my deadline passed.
I had my original 365 lists and then I whittled it to 100. And then from there, the publisher wanted a few [big] names, and obviously, Jane Campion was the number one, and then I wanted to get Gina Prince-Bythewood. I also wanted Karyn Kusama because she sort of straddled every genre and television. Those were the three names I thought were relatively well known. Your average at least film person knows those names.
For everyone else, I really just was like, well, whose work do I think is interesting? And in particular, whose work do I think is not necessarily talked about as in depth as I think they’ve earned? It kind of went from there. And by the time I was done, I realized that I didn’t really notice any overarching similarities, but after editing the whole text, I realized that everyone on here is either a bit of a punk or a bit of a ‘cool girl’ or, in some way, queer.
I did make a concerted effort to make sure that I had women from a lot of different socioeconomic backgrounds, a lot of different sexual backgrounds, a lot of different regional backgrounds, and a lot of different modes of filmmaking because what I know for a fact is that there is no such thing as a ‘woman’s film.’ Women just make every kind of film, and I wanted the book to really reflect as much of that as I possibly could.
Stef: Some of the people that ended up in the book, particularly Gillian Armstrong, had a very unique impact on your life. And I also noticed in every interview you kind of start and end with the same two questions about the moment the director wanted to make films and then about which films by female directors people should pay close attention to right now. Can you tell me about the process of preparing for these interviews and figuring out what you wanted to ask and discuss?
Marya: Once the filmmaker said yes, I either rewatched the films and television programs that I’d already seen or tracked down work I hadn’t seen yet. As with all of my interviews, I try to track down every interview that filmmaker did about each of their films. But for this case, obviously, I was trying to talk about their entire career. I was, in some cases, tracking down 15 or 20 interviews. I found with the filmmakers who started working earlier in the 70s and 80s, it was a lot harder, and even in the 90s, it was a lot harder to find interviews where they talk about their process because I find I want to know as much as I can beforehand so I can try to get them to move past their canned answers. But that’s a lot harder to do if they haven’t even gotten to give canned answers.
In the book, there are more filmmakers from earlier eras than there are from right now because in the last 10 years, I think more journalists are willing to ask female directors just about the filmmaking art, as they should always have been doing. But a lot of the women who started were ‘pioneers’ in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. The bulk of their interviews are like, ‘What’s it like to be a woman?’ And then I think, okay, but I want to know…does she storyboard? These are the questions I’m interested in. That research project was about what I could find. Also, I went on a lot of YouTube rabbit holes of filmmaker introductions, festival introductions, and sometimes podcasts. There’s just a lot of informational intake.
Stef: Which, out of the interview questions that you have, were the ones that were most exciting for you to ask and listen to and why?
Marya: It’s not the same question, but I always loved it when I managed to ask a question and then the filmmaker said, ‘Wow, I never thought about my work that way before,’ or ‘I always wanted someone to ask me this.’
For example, when I was talking to Miranda July about one of her shorts, there’s this really weird prefabricated sound, but it’s mirrored with this picture of a baby, and it was really disturbing. I wanted to vomit afterwards. It was so good. I asked her about that and she said, ‘Let me tell you about my love of sound.’ And then she went all nerdy on the way she doesn’t feel like her films are done until she’s playing with the sound. I would never have thought that about her movies because she’s such a visual filmmaker. But then it made me want to rewatch all her movies just to listen to the soundscapes. So, I always find that sort of rewarding. That kind of stuff is always really fun, where you kind of help a filmmaker understand their own work a little bit.
Stef: I’m kind of a perpetual homework assigner to myself also just in terms of works that I haven’t experienced yet. And I really liked reading about your Year With Women personal project that you kind of undertook and that led to the idea for this book. I was just hoping you can describe that a little bit more in detail: how it began, how you managed it, and how you kept track of your viewings and your opinions on those viewings.
Marya: In 2013, I saw two documentaries: one was called The Girls in the Band about female jazz musicians and the other was called The Punk Singer, and it’s about Kathleen Hanna. Both those movies are about challenging canons and challenging the history that we’re taught and the fact that often the achievements of women, people of color, and basically non-white cis men are always sort of on the margins of history. Even though I’ve always been kind of a little baby feminist, I hadn’t really thought that deeply about what I was taught. And those movies made me wonder why I didn’t challenge any of what I’d been taught or learned up to that point.
I started thinking about films, and I’ve always really loved films by women. Growing up in the 90s, I took it for granted that there were a lot of women because there were so many women working in the studio system. Not just Gillian Armstrong, but Nora Ephron, Nancy Meyers, Penelope Spheeris, Penny Marshall, and Kathryn Bigelow. I just didn’t even think about it. But then I started looking at the movies I saw in college, and I realized there were less women making those big movies. I started thinking deeper about how there are women making movies, but they’re mostly the ones that aren’t talked about. They aren’t the ones that win awards (except for Kathryn Bigelow at one point).
In 2014, I started doing this thing I called Female Filmmaker Friday where I would just write about a female director’s film or body of work on my old blog. Right around that same time, there were a lot of lists coming out of women you should know, but it was always the same 10 names. That’s when I decided I wanted to see if I could do a whole year. I started by looking at the streaming services, and this is 2014, so it was very limited, but even with the limited availability, there were over 100 films directed by women on streaming. Between that and what I could see in theaters living in LA and what I imagined would fall into the streaming services and become rentable in that year, I was pretty sure I could get to 365. It felt doable.
I wasn’t on Letterboxd at the time, but I used Tumblr and I made YouTube videos. For each movie I watched, there’s a YouTube video. By the end of it, I felt really rejuvenated. I realized that the things that were boring about movies were, not to sound like a misandrist or anything, boring because the perspectives of men can get really repetitive. There are some women who make films the same way, but there’s such a variety of female filmmakers to discover that I felt like I was finding so many new avenues instead of these really boring roads. New ways to make horror movies and new ways to think about even male-led dramas. Women can sometimes bring out different aspects out of actors, too, they can push them to different places because every different director is going to bring a different perspective. I don’t know how to describe it other than saying it is emotionally different. And it’s hard to describe because good cinema is kind of hard to describe.
Stef: You mentioned Girls in the Band and The Punk Singer, and in those documentaries, they talk a lot about the female experience in music. Girls in the Band specifically mentions how many producers there are, but so little of them are female, and there’s all these overlapping experiences that female musicians and female directors have. What were some of the experiences that came up the most as you were speaking to the directors that you chose for the project? And what were some of the biggest obstacles or challenges you heard over and over again? Not just personal ones, but experiences that they shared.
Marya: I think one of the main issues most of these women brought up at one point or another is just the fact that there’s so much money involved in filmmaking and often women are not trusted with business. Even for example, Gillian Armstrong, she made My Brilliant Career and it did so well, and then she made Starstruck, this small little movie because she wanted to make a musical. Her third film was a big studio film. She was doing just fine, but she was maybe a day over or something and the studio started interfering and acting as if they needed to take her off the project. Basically, Diane Keaton had to be like, ‘No, she’s doing a great job. Trust her.’ A male director will often go over and get a grace period of going over before the studio comes in to take more control. With Gillian, it was half a day over and suddenly there’s questions of her capabilities, even though she’s already made two features.
I think the problem still lands on who is making the money, who is making these deals, and there are certain women producers that will help protect you. Little Women (1994), for example, is so good because it was almost all female creatives, and so they were able to really hold back the men in suits. But I don’t think everyone’s able to really do that, at least not at the Hollywood level. At the independent level, I think you’re able to do a little bit more, but then you have to do more with less budget. The overarching connection is that these women all have very strong visions of what they want their films to be, and they’re unwavering. And so, sometimes the films don’t get made.
Stef: Relatedly, what’s your favorite success story from the directors who you interviewed or one that you’re still thinking about?
Marya: I know that it was a misfire, but I’m really glad that Marielle Heller got to make Nightbitch how she wanted to make it. And I’m glad that she has gotten to make four films at, for the most part at least, at an almost major level. Because I think she has a really distinct vision of how she’s going through the world. I hope she gets to make a fifth film. It’s a success story to me, but the movie didn’t do as well as I think people hoped. It’s kind of bittersweet. She is a success in terms of getting to make four films and working with amazing actors like Tom Hanks and Amy Adams. I guess it’ll be more of a success if she got to have sort of a misfire and still gets to make her fifth film.
And on the other hand, when Jane Campion finally won Best Director for The Power of the Dog. I think she earned that with The Piano as far as I’m concerned and should have been nominated for Bright Star.
Stef: What I liked about the book is that as you were talking to some of the directors, they mentioned or you mentioned them being involved in practicing other art forms. For instance, Mary Lambert is also a painter, which I didn’t know before actually reading the interview in the book. Was it surprising for you to hear that some of these women had their hands in different artistic practices or was that kind of clarifying in terms of what you’ve noticed in their films as you’ve watched them over the years?
Marya: I do think that most filmmakers, regardless of gender, class, anything, the most interesting filmmakers are artists at heart. And most artists at heart work in multiple mediums. I feel like the filmmakers that I tend to gravitate to are those kinds of people who have the need to express themselves and they’re always finding different ways to do it. But what I loved about getting to talk to all these women about their other practices is them really talking about that process and how the painting influences the filmmaking or the filmmaking influences the painting or fashion design or any of those other arts. I think those are the richer filmmakers, and they’re the ones that tend to go through life with real experiences. I think some of the filmmakers who make really beautiful, “Well-made films,” but are so deeply only referential of cinema tend to be the filmmakers that I like the least. Because I’ve seen all the same films as they have, but what else have they done? Have you gone out and done anything in your life? What do you have to say about the human experience that isn’t related to Alfred Hitchcock?
Even in the millennial generation that I would’ve thought, I feel like we should all have more life experience than many contemporary filmmakers are showing. But one of the issues I think that’s happening, at least at the studio level, is that you have to be rich in order to make it there, and so, there are certain filmmakers who have been rich kids their whole life. Their entire world experience is watching movies and maybe doing deep research on certain things that they’re obsessed with, but they haven’t actually lived. And I find that boring.
I think the kids coming out of high school and college post the quarantine experienced adolescence in a really cramped, weird way. And I’m hoping that will lead to a lot of really weird idiosyncratic personal cinema, but we’ll see.
Stef: What was the biggest takeaway that you got from speaking to these women and hearing about their experiences on the job and outside of it? What do you think they can teach us beyond the kind of simplistic perseverance and resilience narratives that female artists are usually assigned?
Marya: I think some of the women, especially those who started working in the more pioneering era, have a lot of residual anger. There’s a lot of anger in this book. And it’s earned anger. Some of these women persevered and made films the whole time, but someone like Julie Dash had to pivot into television and has never made a second ‘Feature Film.’ Everything else she’s done is television. She’s had to persevere for 30 years in order to make another personal film. Is the takeaway that it took her 30 years and she persevered, or is it the takeaway that we’re so fucked up that it took 30 years for someone like Julie Dash to have the money to make a new movie? I think every ‘perseverance narrative’ is there because they have to go through it, they have to persevere in order to keep making work, but I think there’s a lot of anger. I think the flat way to talk about this book is that it’s about perseverance. And I’m glad that you asked it the way you did. The real thing is there’s a lot of anger in this book because I don’t think any of these women, except maybe Jane Campion, has been celebrated as well as their talent deserves and sometimes they’re even dismissed. I think all of these women have similar stories of perseverance despite, as opposed to perseverance because.
Stef: You also mentioned earlier female filmmakers and artists having each other’s backs. Part of what comes up in these interviews a lot is that they kind of know that they’re going to get screwed or that people are going to try to screw them, so they kind of stick together and defend each other.
Marya: The early pioneers really showed that having your group, whether it’s your actual crew or your peers, supporting each other is so important. And I think younger generations have really created avenues for that in a way that I think is really helpful and hopeful, at least on the independent side of filmmaking.
Stef: I noticed this very iconic image from Karyn Kusama’s film Girlfight on the cover immediately. How did you come to the decision to use this image for the cover and why did you ultimately decide to use it for the final version?
Marya: We had a few images that we thought sort of spoke to the gist of the book. We gave them to the designer, and she mocked up a couple of covers and we gave our feedback and pretty much all of us — me, the designer, my editor, and the main publisher — landed on this one as the one that really showed everything we wanted to say because it’s powerful, it’s a little feminine, and it’s really defiant. The movie does a really good job of looking at the complexities of navigating the world as someone who doesn’t quite fit either side of femininity or masculinity and it plays with what strength does and can look like. That’s why the film is so timeless. There’s always going to be people sort of in the middle who don’t fit perfectly anywhere and the movie is saying it doesn’t matter where you fit, you fit in you. The movie is saying, ‘Do you believe in yourself? Do you have the strength in yourself?’ So, I feel like that image really tells the story of all these women. Once we landed on that, we chose Valley Girl for the back image of the book. And the reason we did that is because Valley Girl is the movie Karyn Kusama saw that helped her realize she could be a filmmaker. It shows the conversation the filmmakers were having with each other without even realizing it.
Stef: Last question, and this is kind of a personal question…can you give me three to five films from your Year in Women that you think everyone must see today?
Marya: I didn’t discover them that year, but everyone should see Little Women (1994) and Bright Star. From the ones that I discovered, I got to find this list. I have it on Letterboxd. Aw, shit. There’s so many good ones. I would have to say Me and You and Everyone We Know for sure. I’m kind of ashamed to say I didn’t watch them until a Year with Women, but both Girlfight and The Watermelon Woman. Mansfield Park, also. Last year, I interviewed Patricia Rozema for Autostraddle, actually. The last one I want to mention, because I love this filmmaker and it is the only film that she’s gotten to direct and it’s not fair because this movie’s so good. It’s a movie called Last Night by Massy Tadjedin. It’s got Keira Knightley in it. I love this movie so much. It makes me cry so hard every time. Also, I watched a really bad print of Wanda that year and now there’s a beautiful print of Wanda in the Criterion Collection. That is a great one. It was a good year.
Stef: That’s a nice eclectic mix that you just gave, actually. Thank you.
Cinema Her Way is now available.
