Women Behind the Camera at Tribeca

On Thu., April 26, the second day of the sixth annual Tribeca Film Festival, The New York Times published an article in its Arts section ("Hollywood's Shortage of Female Power") noting a decrease in the number of female executives in Hollywood, as well as a decrease in the overall number of films dealing with women's issues.

But despite the grim forecast and the statistics illustrating the declining number of women directors, writers, producers, and editors in this "male-driven world," as one male industry exec put it, along comes a film festival that brings a glimmer of hope for the distaff side.

No, the Tribeca Film Festival, which ended May 6, does not negate the facts so carefully pointed out by the article. But it has enabled a number of women to showcase their talents both in front of and behind the lens. It has also provided an opportunity for women (and some men) to tell stories from a woman's perspective.

Among 144 feature films and five short-film programs, 62 films told stories about women, according to my own count based on their titles. Though the number of women directors (between 6 and 7 percent) and women executive producers (an even smaller percentage) was relatively low, the festival has given many of these first-timers a chance to get their feet wet. I can state with confidence that those low numbers will soon change.

Women in the industry was the subject of a panel discussion on Fri., April 27, as part of the Tribeca Talks series, which took place at the Borough of Manhattan Community College's Tribeca Performing Arts Center. "Bringing Home the Bacon" featured five women actors, all of whom were represented by films in the festival that they wrote, directed, edited, produced, and/or acted in: Rosario Dawson (Rent, Sin City), who produced and stars in Descent; award-winning and Oscar-nominated Julie Delpy, who wrote, directed, edited, produced, and stars in 2 Days in Paris, with co-star Adam Goldberg; Mary Stuart Masterson (Fried Green Tomatoes, Nine on Broadway), who stepped behind the lens to direct and produce The Cake Eaters; Eva Mendes (Training Day, Hitch), who stars in and produced Live!; and Julia Stiles (10 Things I Hate About You), who wrote and directed her first film, Raving. Jacob Weisberg, editor of the Internet magazine Slate and former editor and writer at The New Republic, moderated.

In response to Weisberg's first question, about how each actor chose to become a multitasker, Stiles noted that she learned a great deal from the process: "I learned a lot about acting -- what reads on screen and what doesn't, and when an actor is not focused. I learned about editing and postproduction that I didn't have a clue about before. I learned that I have to monitor everything."

Weisberg asked Delpy how she ended up wearing so many hats. She blamed it on her obsessive-compulsive behavior. "It's either that you have the kind of budget where you can hire people in which you have 100 percent trust, or you take over everything," she said. "If you leave [the crew] alone without any monitoring, you will end up with something that you don't know what it is. You have to be on top of everything all the time. Direction is all about details."

Dawson met colleague Talia Lugacy when they were both in their teens and studying at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute. They knew they wanted to work together, with Lugacy writing and directing and Dawson acting and producing. Dawson even helped Lugacy fund her thesis at NYU with the money she earned acting in The Adventures of Pluto Nash. They shot five short films together; Descent is their first feature. "It's a raw exploration of violence and abuse, both on the male side and female side," Dawson explained. "It explores sexism, racism, and just what people can do to each other when they're pushed.

"Most of the movies I've worked on could happen with or without me. This is something we birthed ourselves," she stated emphatically. It took Dawson and Lugacy 12 years to make the film. And because they raised the money themselves, they were able to have complete creative control over it.

Mendes read the script for Live! a year and a half ago. She fell in love with both the character and the subject matter. When she found out through her agent that the film was being shelved, she did everything she could to make it happen. She got financing, found a director, and shot it in a month's time. "You can go out and seek those projects that speak out to you for whatever reason and make them happen," she asserted. "This is a real labor of love for me. I never produced anything before. I now have a production company. My goal is to tell these stories that otherwise wouldn't get told. I produced the film in order to make it happen. It speaks to my soul."

When Masterson was first handed the script for The Cake Eaters by her agent, she thought she was being considered for an onscreen role. "It turned out that they were interested in my directing it," she said. "My agent knew that for the past 20 years I've been writing projects, or developing other people's writing, getting the financing together. And then if the projects fell apart, I would take an acting job. He knew that I would be interested in doing an already-financed picture. I thought the script had a beautiful heart, a sweetness about it and an innocence that I don't see very often." Masterson worked with writer Jayce Bartok for about eight months and then shot the film on location in upstate New York.

When asked if she was tired of acting, Masterson responded that she loved acting as well as producing, writing, and directing, "but what I like about producing, writing, and directing is the opportunity to express myself in the breadth of all my capacities."

Weisberg commented on the dearth of acting roles for women and the even greater scarcity of women directors. "There's still this traditional assumption of male authority," he emphasized. In fact, during the question-and-answer session, one member of the audience made light of the fact that the American Film Institute recently sent its members a nomination list for the 100 best films. Of the 400 titles on the list, only 4.5 were directed by women. (The 0.5, the audience member explained, was a woman who co-directed.)

Stiles agreed with Weisberg about a director's job being stereotyped as "authoritative" and "masculine." "Women can be stereotyped as nurturing," she said. "We're uniquely qualified to organize things, make sure everyone's okay, make it feel safe to do good work, feel included -- these are totally feminine qualities. The best producers I've worked with have been women. But you do need to be comfortable with being the final arbiter of every decision. A democratic process does not work on a film set."

Delpy remarked, "It doesn't necessarily come out that women are tough or strong enough to handle a movie. When people say they're looking for a female director, what does that mean? That they need someone to breastfeed?" Delpy noted that in her next film, "people are getting killed left and right. I also want to do a Japanese war movie and a comedy about the media.

"Women have to be better than men at everything," she continued. "We're not equal yet. Much work has to be done at that level. If a woman director has one failure, it's over for her. It will take her 10 years to make that up." Delpy quoted European director Agnieszka Holland, with whom she has previously worked: "We'll know when women are equal to men when a mediocre woman has an important job." 

-- Sherry Eaker, Editor at Large