LIKE MOST big-time movie directors, Kasi Lemmons had a studio driver to take her to and from the set of her new film, "Talk to Me." So driver and passenger did some chatting, and one of the their conversations stuck in her mind. "And I was the first woman director he'd driven.
" The number crunching of a lone limo driver is hardly scientific. But when it comes to women directors, Hollywood is full of depressing statistics that support the chauffeur's observations. Of the 8,500 directors represented in the Directors Guild of America, about 13 percent are women.
That figure includes women who work in television, which has long been considered a more welcoming environment. According to Martha Lauzen, the number of women directors working in film is only 7 percent. Lauzen, a San Diego State University professor who has been tracking the industry for 10 years, publishes an annual study she calls "The Celluloid Ceiling," which tracks gender for the casts and crews of the top 250 films released in North America every year.
For a more personal example of the statistical imbalance, consider the case of Sofia Coppola. When she was nominated for best director for her 2003 film "Lost in Translation," she became the very first American woman to receive that honor in the Academy's history. Factor in the foreigners who've been nominated, and Coppola was still only the third woman.
And to date, the last. When Lemmons was interviewing her director of photography on "Talk to Me," a biographical picture about Petey Greene, the dynamic ex-felon who put talk radio on the map in 1960s Washington, D.C.
, she asked him if he had experience working for a woman at the helm. The cinematographer, Stephane Fontaine, said she'd be his sixth. Pleasantly surprised, Lemmons asked, "How is that possible?
" Fontaine had worked mostly in Europe, where he told her about a third of the directors are women. "It was an incredible moment for me to realize, hmm, we're having a Hollywood problem," Lemmons said. "And you wonder, what's wrong with Hollywood?
" This is a song that has been sung before. At a round-table discussion about the dearth of women directors convened by the DGA last summer, "Clueless" director Amy Heckerling, who has been in the business for more than 25 years, said: "It's getting so boring. Wade.
' We're fighting for that again?" But every time new statistics are released, reflecting minimal, if any progress, the conversation starts up again. The Alliance of Women Film Journalists (of which this reporter is a member) was so disheartened by the lack of women filmmakers on the American Film Institute's recent 10th annual 100 Greatest Films List -- of 400 films nominated, only 4.
5 were directed by women -- that the group decided to create its own list of great films. Released late at the end of June, AWFJ's list includes Heckerling (twice) as well as films made by Mira Nair, Jane Campion, Gillian Armstrong and Coppola. All of the female directors interviewed for this article spoke passionately about the disparity in the numbers in the industry.
But being labeled as "women directors" made them uncomfortable. "I'm just a director who happens to be a woman," said Zoe Cassavetes, whose first feature, "Broken English," a romantic comedy starring Parker Posey as a neurotic Manhattanite who has nearly given up on finding love, opened in Bay Area theaters this weekend. "If you are in command of what you are doing, all that stuff falls away.
But then half of me is like, 'There should be more women directors! Why do you think there aren't many women directors?'" On the list There are powerful women directors in Hollywood, people such as Nancy Meyers ("The Holiday") and Nora Ephron ("You've Got Mail") who are practically brands in and of themselves.
But looking at a Web site called the Numbers (http://the-numbers.com), which tracks directors by how much their films have grossed, it's hard not to notice how sparse the feminine names are on the list. If you pull out the women and rank them by their grosses, Lemmons is 21st.
She's made three films -- "Caveman's Valentine," "Eve's Bayou" and "Dr. Hugo" -- which is about average for the list. For whatever reason, even the top women directors don't make that many films.
9 on the list and the first woman ever to serve as president of the DGA, has made the most: 11 films. Then come Penny Marshall and Amy Heckerling, with seven films each. That seems like a lot, until you consider that Steven Spielberg is hard at work directing his 46th film.
Generalizations are always risky, but female directors do tend to make what are often referred to as "women's movies," smaller stories about relationships -- such as "Broken English" -- or social issues. These movies are perceived to have limited audience appeal. A classic example is "Stephanie Daley," an intense film about a teenager (Amber Tamblyn) who hides a pregnancy, gives birth in a bathroom and then faces murder charges.
While it opened last month to very strong reviews -- the Wall Street Journal's Joe Morgenstern called it "spellbinding" -- it was booked into just one theater in the Bay Area, for a one-week engagement. The same thing happened earlier this year to Karen Moncrieff's "The Dead Girl," a much lauded film about a murdered prostitute. Laurie Collyer's "Sherrybaby," which featured a Golden Globe-nominated performance by Maggie Gyllenhaal as a convict trying to reclaim her child after a stint in prison, had only a limited theatrical run last fall before going to DVD.
These are films that are considered "hard sells." They all feature strong female leads. "My fundamental line is that what we make true becomes true," said "Stephanie Daley" writer/director Hilary Brougher.
"Since the belief is that 'Stephanie Daley' is a hard sell, it becomes a hard sell. If we believe that women will see men's movies but men won't see women's movies, then that becomes true." "I can get a million good reviews," sighed Brougher, who won the top screenwriting award at Sundance in 2006.
"But unless there are marketing dollars to bolster that, it doesn't mean anything." "Personally," she said, "I don't really even know what the term 'woman's movie' really means. I do know the term gives me a vague stomachache.
" 'Safe' for financiers Actress Julie Delpy has wanted to be a director since she was 17, when she wrote her first script. In 1992, having acted for great filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Krzysztof Kieslowski, she went to the NYU film school. She did well and graduated eager to get behind the camera.
Years later, all she had to show for it was a short film and a indie feature that never saw theatrical release in the United States. She also had a drawer full of scripts that reflected her love of science fiction and other nongirlie topics. She couldn't get any of them produced.
"I was kind of losing hope," she said. Then a friend suggested she write a script that bore some similarity to "Before Sunset," the successful 2004 film Delpy had starred in and co-written. She had shared an Oscar nomination for the screenplay, and her friend's supposition was that financiers would feel "safe" with a project that seemed like "Before Sunset.
" Delpy wrote 40 pages of a relationship farce set in Paris, which she then shopped around. She found financing for it in Germany. The result is "2 Days in Paris," a witty, Woody Allen-esque comedy about a Frenchwoman (Delpy) who brings her American boyfriend (Adam Goldberg) home to Paris.
It's slated for a late-summer release. "This is why my first film is a romantic comedy," said Delpy, now 37, with evident exasperation. "It is only because it is the first time people will give me money to make a film.
People will trust a woman to do something with a relationship more than they will to do something with a war story or science fiction." "I would sell out to direct a big action movie if I had the opportunity," she said. "I love to take risks, and I think I would do a great job.
My dream is to do a science fiction movie, like 'Close Encounters of a Third Kind,' like 'Blade Runner.' But you need money to make 'Blade Runner.'" She'd also need a studio willing to trust a woman with guns and explosions -- and that's a rarity.
Mimi Leder is a notable exception, having directed "Deep Impact" and "The Peacemaker." In a sense, so is Lemmons. The two leads in "Talk to Me" are men: Don Cheadle as Petey Greene; and Chiwetel Ejiofor, who plays Dewey Hughes, the guy who gives him his first big break on the radio and becomes his close friend and manager.
Lemmons fell in love with "Talk to Me" (which opens Friday) as soon as she read it, but she knew that as a woman she'd have to work harder to prove to the producers that she was the right director for such a masculine story. "I knew that I was going to have to go in with a hard sell, that I was going to have to convince them that I knew men better than they knew themselves," she said. Like Delpy and Sarah Polley, whose directorial debut, "Away From Her," opened to glowing reviews this spring, Lemmons began her movie career as an actress.
She puts the lessons she learned in front of the camera to good use behind it. "I knew the approach I wanted to take," Lemmons said. "For instance, I will whisper direction, because I knew I didn't like being screamed at from across the set.
"It's very personal, directing, you know," she said. "It's like they say about sex: You never know how the other guy does it. As an actor, you have had the unique experience of working with other directors.
" But Lemmons' best on-the-job-training came from her "Eve's Bayou" and "Caveman's Valentine" star, Samuel L. "I always say I went to the Samuel L. Jackson school of directing," Lemmons said.
LIKE MOST big-time movie directors, Kasi Lemmons had a studio driver to take her to and from the set of her new film, "Talk to Me." So driver and passenger did some chatting, and one of the their conversations stuck in her mind.
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