FEATURE:
Aspect: Ratio
IN THIS PHOTO: Celine Song’s debut film, Past Lives, is one of the most praised and accomplished of this year/PHOTO CREDIT: JJ Geiger
Celebrating the Great and Pioneering Female Writers and Directors of Film in 2023
_________
WE will get to a day…
IN THIS PHOTO: Margot Robbie during a Vogue (May 2023) interview in promotion of Barbie/PHOTO CREDIT: Ethan James Green
when there we do not have to highlight female film writers and directors when they do something extraordinary. Of course, their work deserves that. What I mean is that there is this culture where half the films made are by women. That all their extraordinary work is taken as red. Never will we have to tackle award ceremonies for not including enough women (or any at all) in categories that normally are dominated by men. That more women are on front of film magazine covers. Articles written about how they are role models. I think things are slowly changing in that respect – though it is clear there is still some way to go before there is parity and they are getting their full dues. The same is true in many industries. Music, for example, is a classic one. Progress is often quite slow because so many of the highest positions that yield the most influence and power are occupied by men. That mentality that they don’t see things as broken, so why change them?! Again, things are starting to move in the right direction. You only need to look at the cinema this year to see that some of the most mesmeric and important films have been made by women. Not to ignore incredible actresses like Margot Robbie – whose starring role as Barbie, in my mind, is award-worthy and career-best; so captivating and nuanced was her performance -; I wanted to spotlight some amazing films and truly awe-inspiring female directors and writers.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kelly Fremon Craig directed and wrote the screenplay for the adaptation of the Judy Blum middle-grade novel, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret/PHOTO CREDIT: Dana Hawley/Lionsgate
I think that the sheer richness and variety of films helmed or written by women have been spectacular. I am going to pay special attention to women who, to my mind, have directed the two best films of the year. Special mention needs to go to Kelly Fremon Craig and her phenomenal adaptation of the 1970 Judy Blume novel, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. It has won praise across the board. From the legendary Mark Kermode’s take, to a five-star rave from Empire, the phenomenal Kelly Fremon Craig, whose impressive C.V. also features around terrific coming-of-age entry, 2016’s The Edge of Seventeen, is someone we need to watch closely. She is a singular and astonishing talent with a distinct and captivating voice and style. There have been quite a few wonderful comedies helmed by women. Joy Ride, directed by Adele Lim, with a screenplay by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao is a rare case of a comedy being able to match adult humour, raunch and X-rated fun with heart, real wit and laugh-out-loud moments aplenty! Again, these are talents you will be hearing a lot more from. It is a film that comes highly recommended. Upcoming films like the Emerald Fennell-helmed Saltburn (out in November) is one to watch closely. Already out is You Hurt My Feelings. Written and directed by Nicole Holofcener, is another remarkable film that has won widespread praise. A new film that I knew would get applause and attention is Bottoms. Written by Emma Seligman (who is its director) and Rachel Sennott (who co-stars), it seems that female talent is responsible for some of the best and most interesting comedy of this year.
IN THIS PHOTO: Rye Lane director, Raine Allen-Milller/PHOTO CREDIT: Julia Kennedy @ A&R Agency
It is not just high school comedies, those with a crazier spirit and a general fast-paced and strange tone. More grounded comedies with plenty of heart are also coming from incredible women. British film Rye Lane is directed by Raine Allen-Miller. Undoubtably one of this year’s best films, Allen-Miller is such an accomplished and interesting director who is adept at weaving comedy and heart seamlessly. A.V. Rockwell’s - A Thousand and One - which she wrote and directed – is astonishing! This is what Empire wrote for their review:
“Before you see a single frame in A Thousand And One, you hear the sounds of the New York City neighbourhood the film takes place in. It’s a smartly deployed recurring gambit that helps establish a sense of time and place in A.V. Rockwell’s layered and affecting feature debut, and it proves to be an effective backdrop for a rich story of Black motherhood, sacrifice, and community.
The inciting kidnapping might have you thinking this is a duo-on-the-lam story, but Rockwell’s smarter, more unconventional approach yields impressive results. Patient storytelling allows her to take in the rapidly gentrifying Harlem neighbourhood that the bulk of the film takes place in, and how it impacts people of colour in the community. The socio-political context is at first deftly woven in – audio of former NYC Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg’s controversial policies is heard at one point – and then explicitly slammed in our faces in a standout scene with Inez’s landlord trying to force them out of their apartment. Both approaches are effective, all aided by Gary Gunn’s ethereal, '90s R&B influenced score, and Eric Yue's lush cinematography.
At almost every turn, Teyona Taylor unveils new capabilities.
It’s a perfect foundation for a Moonlight-esque triptych of impressive performances from Aaron Kingsley Adetola, Aven Courtney, and Josiah Cross, as Terry goes from kidulthood to adulthood. Each actor is so emotionally in sync with the character that the time jumps are never jarring. Although the backbone of the film is on his perfectly imperfect dynamic with Inez and father figure Lucky (Will Catlett, in a nicely nuanced turn), each version of Terry is allowed ample time to showcase his complexities. A teenage Terry’s courtship of a young girl and the misogynoir Inez calls him on is especially playful and enlightening, if not fully mined”.
Other films, such as Nida Manzoor’s Polite Society has also been received with applause and acclaim. There are two films, very different to one another, that are helmed by amazingly inspirational women. My top two films of the year, one has broken box office record, whilst the other has created a quieter and less pink storm! Before spotlighting them – reviews and interviews with their directors -, a special mention goes to another terrific comedy, Theatre Camp, co-directed and co-written (and co-starring) by Molly Gordon. British director Charlotte Regan’s Scrapper (which she also wrote) is one of this year’s most rewarding and memorable films.
IN THIS PHOTO: Nida Manzoor on the set of Polite Society/PHOTO CREDIT: Entertainment Pictures/Alamy
There are two particular films that have resounded and resonated with critics and audiences. Perhaps for different reasons. I am going to start with the best film – in my view – of the year. Greta Gerwig co-wrote (with Noah Baumbach) and directed Barbie. I have written a few features about the film. From this one here, to that one there, to that one, over to this one, I had nothing but love for this blockbuster. I will get to an interview with her. Kudos to the entire cast. Ryan Gosling as Ken is hilarious and phenomenal. I think Margot Robbie is the standout. Her turn as Barbie (or ‘Stereotypical Barbie’ to be precise) is full of humour and emotion. She can be vacuous and aimlessly cheery. Living in Barbie Land, everything is perfect and as it should be. When entering the horrors of the Real World, she sheds tears and experiences emotions she has not experienced before. Such a commanding and standout performance, I especially adore her interactions with Rhea Perlman. Playing Barbie’s creator, Ruth Handler, there is this touching and tear-inducing moment where Barbie voices her fears and doubts. Struggling with the realities of the real world she has been in and the fantasy one she is used to, there is such depth and nuance ion Robbie’s performance. We all know that Barbie broke box office records. Greta Gerwig became the first female director to direct a film that has surpassed a billion dollars at the box office. From her more Indie background, she helmed brilliant Oscar-nominated films Lady Bird (2018) and Little Women (2019; both U.K. release years). Even though the films had budgets of up to and around $40 million, they made massive profits at the box office! Barbie’s budget is around $128–145 million, and it has since gone on to make $1.419 billion. It is a huge leap in budget and scope. The Guardian were especially obsessed with Barbie. Giving it some muted applause, they seemed determined to undermine it and its director. One feature asked if the film has killed the Indie director. Another bemoaned the fact that a slew of toy films and Barbie offshoots and imitators that will come about. One, bafflingly, talked about rampant product placement in a film where one was not exactly distracted by the names of cars, sunglasses brands and commercialism away from the fact that, as it is about Barbie, Mattel and the toy is going to be pretty evident and exposed.
IN THIS PHOTO: Greta Gerwig in 2017/PHOTO CREDIT: Victor Demarchelier for Interview Magazine
They also felt that the film was muddled in its feminist take. There were other pieces about Barbie’s feminism, and how it is perhaps quite complex and hard in a film where Barbie’s legacy is quite difficult. I think that Barbie, its success and Greta Gerwig’s incredible film is feminist and has inspired great debate and discussion. She will doubtless inspire many female filmmakers and has broken records for women. Despite some sniffy and needlessly critical reviews, most critics gave it a hugely warm reaction. I think it is a perfect film! I will move on the second 2023-best film soon. Before that, I wanted to drop in W Magazine’s interview that was published on the day Barbie was released in cinemas (21st July).
“Barbies are cool again, thanks to Greta Gerwig’s soulful and sneakily emotional Barbie, one of this summer’s biggest cinematic events alongside the atomic bomb movie; though the only one of its kind dressed in happy heaps of magenta.
Or cool again is the wrong phrasing perhaps. Relatable for the first time feels closer to an accurate reading of this brilliant Barbie, starring an enchanting Margot Robbie as the stereotypical blonde (her fellow Barbies are portrayed by the likes of Issa Rae, Sharon Rooney, Kate McKinnon, Alexandra Shipp and Hari Nef, among others) and a hilarious Ryan Gosling, as Barbie’s generically beachy boy-toy Ken. After all, this is the first time in popular film when a wise writer gave the emptily pretty and unrealistically proportioned doll, once deemed antifeminist for making young girls feel bad about themselves, a grounded coming-of-age in the real world where women have flat feet and cellulite. And it certainly feels like the first time in a long time we’ve been made to reconsider all the ways that the Barbie doll, maybe—just maybe—wasn’t all that anti-woman.
Joining W over Zoom a few days before the theatrical opening of her latest film—which opened to the biggest box office of the year, Barbie director and co-writer Gerwig reflects on the emotions these toys stir: “I find that there's just such beautiful absurdity in the making of dolls, of inanimate objects. We're so scientifically advanced, we're talking to each other on machines. We're very knowledgeable about the world and the universe. And at the same time, we still make dolls and we still feel things about them, which feels truer [to who we are], but less advanced than we consider ourselves to be.”
Below, Gerwig discusses her personal attachment to Barbies, her directing style, making personal films in any budget and how her love of Shakespeare guided Barbie.
What are your earliest memories of playing with Barbie dolls?
Barbie was somewhat a forbidden fruit for me when I was a girl, because my mom did not like Barbie for all the reasons that someone wouldn't like Barbie. But I got a lot of Barbies as hand-me-downs from girls who lived in my neighborhood, with the haircuts and the missing shoes and mismatched outfits.
I loved Barbies when I was young, but I distinctly recall a phase of rejecting them because I wanted to be “cool” and “likable.” Same goes for the color pink. Was reclaiming these “girly” elements one of your starting points?
One thing we really did think deeply about with the set and costume design was exactly that: not diminishing a little girl that just loves the brightness and the sparkles and the too-muchness. Barbie-ism is maximalist. When eight-year-old girls play dress up, they put on everything. When I was a little girl, I loved Lisa Frank. I thought her art was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. Then as you get older, you say, "No, I have adult taste, and I don't need sparkle dolphins." But there is still someone in you that loves a sparkle dolphin. You just have to let them out and play a little bit.
That maximalism comes out tastefully in your movie. How did you marry that with the more emotional and intimate things you wanted to touch on?
In no way am I comparing myself to this person—so please don't think that I'm doing that, that would be mortifying—but I always think about the architecture of what we have in this film and the ontology of Barbie [in relation to] what I love so much about Shakespeare's comedies. Stay with me. I'm not saying I'm Shakespeare. But I do think Shakespeare was a maximalist. There wasn't anything that was too far or too crazy that couldn't be worked through, and then there’d be something in the middle that felt quite human. I was thinking about it in those terms: a heightened theatricality that allows you to deal with big ideas in the midst of anarchic play.
IN THIS PHOTO: Margot Robbie, Ana Cruz Kayne, Greta Gerwig and Hari Nef on the set of Barbie/PHOTO CREDIT: Jaap Buitendijk/Warner Bros.
During Barbie, I found myself thinking about a moment in Little Women when Jo has an emotional outburst: “Women: they have souls, and they have ambition, as well as beauty.” Did you think of these two films in close proximity?
Yes, definitely. In some ways, all the movies I've co-written, written and directed are all talking to each other. It is almost a mystery to me when I'm in the middle of it. And then when I step back, I think, "Oh, you continue to be interested in women. This is something you're fascinated by." That ache of contradictions, of never being able to totally bridge that gap between adulthood and childhood, is present in this movie, too. It's this overflowing sense of joy, and then it's also, "I can never get back there."
Well, I cried during that scene in Little Women. And I cried during America Ferrera’s monologue about womanhood in Barbie. The latter took me by surprise. I noticed that my face was wet all of a sudden.
Oh, that's so beautiful. In Little Women, [it just comes] from everything inside you, and from the book. But Barbie is a bit of a sneak attack.
I found myself feeling protective of the toy that I once loved. In an interview we did for 20th Century Women, you said when you read a character and feel protective of her, that’s when you know you want to play her. Does the same apply to writing and directing?
I think you're spot on. I have realized I don't really write villains. Everybody in my films exists somewhere in the messy middle, and I feel empathy for them in what they are. Once the actors take it on, it adds another layer. I want to give them some sort of grace I feel we all deserve, but can't give ourselves.
Do you feel having a major acting career and speaking “actor” fluently make you a better actor's director?
I think there's an advantage to being an actor who’s directing. I know how vulnerable and how scary it feels. Margot said, “Just so you know, the week before we start shooting, I'm going to doubt that I can ever do this,” And I was like, “I totally know that feeling. You go ahead and have that feeling.” And she was like, “Once we're going, I'll feel more like, ‘Okay, now I'm in it. I know how to do it.’” I deeply empathize with that and try to figure out how to make them feel safe.
IN THIS PHOTO: Ryan Gosling, Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig on the set of Barbie/PHOTO CREDIT: Jaap Buitendijk/Warner Bros.
In another interview we did, this time for Lady Bird, you talked about why it took you so long to direct solo. “Courage doesn’t grow overnight” is something you’ve mentioned. In going from a career in the indies to a big studio scale, have you felt a similar reluctance?
Prior to doing it, I thought, “Well, once I've done it, then I'll feel like, ‘Yes, I'm a director.’” And then I didn't really have that feeling. I had all of the same terrors going into the second one. And I thought, “Well, but after the second one, then I'll surely feel I’m a director.” And then that feeling never came, and I realized, I don't think it's coming. You feel like a beginner to whatever project you're on. My experience on the first movie was, I'm going to have to do it before I feel like I can, because if I wait to feel like I can, I'm never going to do it.
I sometimes wonder if that ‘any day now’ feeling is a feminine one, or if men feel like that too.
I know a lot of male filmmakers, and I think they have it too. You would think that at a certain point they don't have that feeling. But every time, you have a sense of vertigo.
Mattel is now developing different toy and IP-driven projects. On the one hand, it’s not your responsibility to think or worry about that. On the other, do you think about whether Barbie might have unleashed something Disney-like into the world?
I don't really know how to answer that in a larger sense. The thing that felt so peculiar and wonderful about this movie was that it felt like I got to make something deeply personal, attached to this thing that is completely impersonal. It was an opportunity to do these things that nod to my favorite soundstage musical; these days, nobody's really like, “Oh, could you hire a bunch of miniature artists and scenic painters and just go to town?” You have to find the right thing to realize that. So I got to live out a personal fantasy of something.
I went to a Catholic high school. There was creativity, but there were also extremely clear boundaries of what we were meant to do. You could choreograph a dance in liturgy, or you could write a sketch comedy for the pep rallies. It wasn't necessarily sanctioned, but you could sneak it in. It made you feel like you were getting away with something, which was also fun. That has always made me feel like there's not such a strong demarcation about, "Here's real art over here and here's not real art over here." It’s wherever you make it, wherever they'll let you go, wherever there's any kind of space or time. I think art can come up in the most unlikely places.
In terms of my own future, I definitely want the skill set to be able to tell stories of different sizes. I want to be able to make tiny movies, big movies, and everything in between. It just takes so long to make any given one. That’s the only thing I feel limited by. You only get to make so many”.
With film references to everything from Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb to The Wizard of Oz to The Matrix to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, there is so much detail, variation and layers in the phenomenal Barbie. I think a book will be written about it. The concept and coming together. The build-up and the fact it was pitched against Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. The success and reaction. Maybe a documentary. The fact it is a feminist film and so many people missed so much of it. Not really paying full attention! I agree there are complexities and not everything will be loved by all, yet I think it is a phenomenon. One that is sensationally and miraculously brought to life in such a vivid and flawless way by Greta Gerwig. At just forty, she is a director who is going to go on to make even more history and inspire generations of women! Stepping from playwriting to filmmaking, the extraordinary Celine Song brought us Past Lives in June (that is the U.S. release month). I don’t think there will be a more celebrated and truly moving film released all year. I will finish with an interview from Celine Song. First, among the five-star reviews, this is what The Guardian said in theirs:
“This heart-meltingly romantic and sad movie from Korean-Canadian dramatist and film-maker Celine Song left me wrung out and empty and weirdly euphoric, as if I’d lived through an 18-month affair in the course of an hour and three-quarters. How extraordinary to think that this is Song’s feature debut. It’s delicate, sophisticated and yet also somehow simple, direct, even verging on the cheesy. Past Lives has been compared to the movies of Richard Linklater, Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig; all true, but I also found myself remembering the wrenching final moments of Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, with Tony Leung murmuring his pain into a stone hollow in Angkor Wat and – yes – the gooey genius of Dean Friedman’s plaintive 1978 chart hit Lucky Stars.
This is a story of lost love and childhood crush,the painful and dangerous access to the past given by digital media; the roads not taken, the lives not led, the futile luxury of regret. And it’s a movie that speaks to the migrant experience and the way this creates lifelong alternative realities in the mind: the self that could have stayed behind in the old country, versus the one that went abroad for a new future. In this it is similar to the frantic, Oscar-winning multiverse comedy Everything Everywhere All at Once, though I think better and truer.
We start with a static shot of three adults, drinking uncomfortably in a New York bar: two are Korean, one is white American. A narrative voice, perhaps representing that of the audience or the film-maker, teasingly speculates as to who these people are. Flashbacks supply the answer: the first takes us to sometime in the late 1990s or early 2000s in Seoul, where a 12-year-old girl, Na-young (Seung Ah-moon), is walking home after school with a 12-year-old boy, Hae-sung (Seung Min-yim). They are sweethearts, though the relationship is clouded by competition, and the question of which of them will come first in the class. Na-young’s mother actually sets up a kind of romantic “play date” between the two, which fatally gives poor Hae-sung the impression that they are meant to be together, and his heart is broken when Na-young casually announces in class (not even directly to him) that her family is emigrating to North America.
The next section shows the two in their 20s: Na-young (played by Greta Lee) has anglicised her name to Nora and is now a budding literary star in New York. Poor, humble Hae-sung (Teo Yoo) is trudging through his military service back in Seoul and studying engineering. The two connect via Facebook and then Skype, and the beaming excitement of their conversations will have you on the edge of your seat. The movie screen is flooded with their happiness and a single unasked question: should they be together? Or is that illusory? Are they both romanticising the purity of their childhood friendship? A later section in New York has Na-young fully established in her prestigious career. Hae-sung, after a dismally failed relationship, finally comes to New York and meets Na-young and her husband, Arthur, (John Magaro), a promising novelist.
Lee’s brilliant code-switching between her Korean identity with Hae-sung and her American identity with Arthur is gripping, as is Magaro’s wary, pained questioning, as Arthur suspects (justifiably) that she is deeply in love with their Korean visitor. And as writers, Arthur and Na-young can see how Hae-sung, though a provincial country mouse compared to them, is actually incomparably more compelling and magnificent: a handsome, dignified, modest, heartbroken romantic hero who has sacrificed everything in his life for this distant real love.
Na-young/Nora talks about the Korean concept of “in-yun”, the karmic bringing together of people who were lovers in past lives. This wonderful film suggests a secular, 21st-century version: the past lives of Na-young and Hae-sung are their childhoods, preserved and exalted in their memory and by modern communications. Past Lives is a glorious date movie, and a movie for every occasion, too. As ever with films like this, there is an auxiliary pleasure in wondering how much of her own past life Song has used. It’s a must-see”.
I want to come to a great interview that was published by The Hollywood Reporter in July. They spoke with Celine Song about Past Lives, and how she fell in love with filmmaking. It seems that her former life in theatre is not one she is in a hurry to return to:
"Judging from the strong audience reactions here in Karlovy Vary and at other festivals, Past Lives is one of those personal stories with universal appeal. Did you set out with that goal in mind?
My professor once said that if you make something that you yourself are so excited and enthusiastic about or something that you love yourself so much, that you believe in and you think is true, because you’re a person and not an alien, there are going to be other people who also connect to it as fellow humans. And I think that’s ultimately the thing that guides me through everything that I make. At the end of the day, I know that my standard for what is bullshit and what is true is going to be higher when it comes to the things that I make. There’s no critic who could be better at knowing when I’m bullshitting. So, in that sense, the only thing that I’m pursuing is something that I can be interested in or I can think is honest. Once you do that, you just hope that other people also see that and see that it’s not just a story of one person, but it’s also a story that can exist in their own lives, too. That’s what I can do as an artist.
How much of the story is based on your own real experience or the experiences of others?
There’s a bar in the East Village that I ended up in because I was living around there. And I was sitting there with my childhood sweetheart who flew in from Korea, now he is a friend, who only really speaks Korean, and my American husband who only really speaks English. And I was sitting there trying to translate these two guys trying to communicate, and I felt like something really special was going on. I was sort of becoming a bridge or a portal between these two men and also, in some ways, these two worlds of language and culture. Something about that moment really sparked something, and then it made me really feel like maybe this could be a movie. So it started from a pretty real thing that happened to me. But then, of course, in making the movie, it comes from a subjective experience that sparks this whole story into an object, which is a script, and then from there, the movie.
Since I used to live in New York, I must ask you which bar in the East Village you went to?
Please Don’t Tell. (The writer says: “I know it!”) You know about it!? With the phone booth. But the scene is actually shot at the Holiday Cocktail Lounge on 8th Street. You may have just walked by it, it looks like nothing from the outside.
The opening scene in that bar shows the three main characters sitting in the bar and someone is wondering about their relationship to each other, which is the kind of conversation I have had with friends before. How do you craft dialogue that feels so natural and authentic?
I think that comes from theater. I worked in theater for a long time. It’s really the only thing in theater you can rely on. Because in theater, you don’t really have the set design, there’s nothing to really help you. All you have is dialogue and actors. So to me, I came in as a veteran, I knew how to do that.
There are scenes where you can really feel the awkwardness, for example, in the scene when the two men meet for the first time. How did you achieve that as a director?
I’m not going to do any fireworks or do some VFX or something to improve what’s going on in the actors’ faces. What that means is the whole movie has to live in the actors’ faces. So there are a couple of things that I did.
I kept the two male actors apart in the preparation of the movie until we shot that scene where the two of them see each other for the first time. That required a little bit of logistics, but the two guys were apart. And also, I asked Greta, who plays Nora, in her rehearsals with each guy to tell the guy that she was having a rehearsal with the other guy. So they were both forming ideas of who the other guy is and created expectations for what that is. And then of course, when they meet for the first time, we were rolling. Because we wanted to be rolling when they met for the first time — the actors as well as the characters. And when that happened, that shot is in the movie, the first shot of them looking at each other is in the movie. And it was amazing because they could just feel all their expectations collapse, right? But also, they had to take each other in and try to understand. Because it’s also so much about what’s our idea of another person. I’m sure you’ve seen photos of me before. And, of course, meeting me in person is a completely different thing in a way.
This also matters in the movie because it is a movie about extraordinary hellos and extraordinary goodbyes. I don’t think every movie needs to play games like that. But I think this movie did because it was just going to be helpful for the actors to craft the really special hellos and really special goodbyes.
The other thing I did is I actually didn’t let Teo (Yoo) and Greta (Lee), Hae Sung and Greta, touch each other until they meet each other for the first time in the film. They were rehearsing, so they knew each other, but when they actually hug, the actual heat, the physical and everything, it’s just made tangible, it’s made something that you can touch. So I think that is something that you’re trying to craft partly because I don’t have fireworks going off. All you can do is get to see what’s happening in their faces and sometimes that’s going to be enough.
After watching the film, I thought a lot about identity and who we are and can become and what influences and changes us. For example, I grew up in Austria with a Hungarian father and then moved to New York and now live in the U.K. Nora moved from South Korea to Canada and then New York. Could you talk a bit about that theme?
What’s so funny is that when we talk about identity, a part of our talking about identity is a flattening of our human experience into words. If you’d talk about your identity, you’d say: Well, I’m an Austrian with a Hungarian dad, who is a journalist, which isn’t the whole of what’s going on with you. And then once a New Yorker. So everything is about a flattening of your experience. The time that you spent in New York, I don’t think that could be boiled down to [just] a New Yorker, because every day you lived there, you gave that city time and space, right? And every day was being alive in that time. You can’t really talk about that as a flat word. What you can talk about is an experience, or you can think about that as existence. So I think that it is also about existence that is fluid and that also flows through time and space.
It used to be that to move to another town, you’d get on a horse. It used to be a lot harder to be mobile. But now we have become more mobile. And of course, we all have professional pursuits and a lot of our professional pursuits require traveling, or moving to a new place, or changing — changing career or changing company, or whatever it may be. We move from place to place. And that is so much what the movie is about. Absolutely, it is about identity. But I think it is about the way that identity is not flat, but that identity is both spherical and in constant motion. Because right now, I don’t think that you can take New York out of me because I lived in New York for 10 years.
Is Nora the professional working writer person in New York? Yes. Is she also the little girl that she left behind in Korea, only speaks Korean and has all these ambitions and all these issues? Absolutely. I think that we can say that about all of us. I know that you and I sitting here we know that there’s a 12-year-old kid version of us that existed and is kind of in us still. And depending on who you’re talking to you feel that way. I’m sure you’ve heard this before. People sometimes talk about how when they’re spending time with their parents, they’re suddenly back to their teenage days, they feel like a teenager and will then be like: “Mom! Dad!” I think that person exists. So it is really about the many selves that we are. And it’s about both accepting that and reconciling that and letting go of the idea that you’re just one thing.
Have you come up with an idea for a follow-up film yet or do you know if you want to go into a different direction in terms of subject matter?
As an artist, the thing that you want the most for your work is for it to be alive. Every new thing you do has to feel completely alive to you. And what works for me always is that there has to be some part of it that is brand new to me, more or less something that I haven’t done before ever. Something that scares me or something that makes me feel like it is going to teach me something. Something that I think is smarter than me. Those are the things that I really hope for in every single project that I do. So whatever it may be the projects that I want to do are always the things that are going to make me feel alive doing them, because I don’t want to beat a dead horse”.
Even though I have spent a lot of time with Celina Song and Greta Gerwig, and I have also highlighted particular films directed and or written by women, there are so many more this year that are worth exploring! Rather than use this feature to illustrate that progress needs to be made and there is still not enough exposure of films by women, it is more a celebration and acknowledgement of the phenomenal work they have brought us. From outrageous and hugely fun comedies to tender and stirring pieces that linger in the heart, there are so many different aspects and voices being projected onto the big screen. Although the ratio of male to female directed is still skewed and only seven women have ever been nominated as Best Director at the Oscars – three have won: Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker (2010), Chloé Zhao, Nomadland (2021) and Jane Campion, Power of the Dog (2022) -, I think this will change. You can feel and sense that things are moving forward now and there is not quite the discrepancies and gulfs that there were. I think, apart from Christopher Nolan, Celine Song and Greta Gerwig must be favourites to win that Best Director award next year. Female screenwriters and directors do not get quite as many opportunities as their male peers. Plus, as we saw when Barbie was successful, there are far too many waiting to attack and display misogyny and sexism – even if they defend themselves by saying it is fair criticism. However, as women directors outnumbered men at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, there is this new shift towards equality and acknowledgement of incredible female directors. As you can see from the films listed above, amazing women behind the camera and writing these stunning scenes are adding so much beauty, wonder, history, genius and unforgettable moments…
TO cinema in 2023.