So many of my favorite stories, in any medium, are about friendship. Those relationships are so often just as emotional and complex as any romantic or family dynamics, and yet there's a dearth of resonant, grounded films about platonic bonds in American films.
Susanna Fogel
As a consumer, I love action movies and have a lot of opinions about how action comedies don't really do justice to what I find exciting about an action movie, which is the genuine thrill of watching something that feels really high-stakes. A lot of times, it's played for laughs and action, which waters down the sense of danger.
I was constantly reading books about how to direct, and asking directors, 'How do you do it?' And when I finally actually started doing the work, it seemed like you have to be decisive and have an opinion. But also you have to be a good collaborator and hire the right people to shore up whatever your skill set is.
I have felt that there's a lot of receptiveness to female stories now. I think some of it has a little bit - a lot of it is economically driven and driven by, just, kind of studios wanting to check that box because now they know they have a woman problem that they need to solve.
I have to say, my family's always been incredibly open and encouraging of any way I might want to express myself. At a very young age, they accepted that my outlet would be writing, and comedic writing, and they were pretty accepting of that.
It's become my lifetime passion as a writer to try to show female friendships in the way that I see them, which is as emotional and connected and deep.
Culturally, as women, we're raised to be very concerned with others' approval in a way that men aren't, but an inevitable part of directing and being visionary is that you have to be a boss, and as such, not everyone is going to like you all the time or agree with your choices.
My way of dealing with not really fitting in at my very crappy New England high school and junior high was to write sketch comedy and satirical takedowns of the social hierarchies. At the same time, I was developing a love for movies at the height of the '90s New York indie movie explosion: everything from 'Rushmore' to Nicole Holofcener movies.
Micro humor is a joke that's contained in the writing: it's a punch line, it's a turn of phrase, it's something that you can see on the page, and no matter who's saying it, it is, in and of itself, a funny line.
Anything that feels like good characters, I am excited to do whether I write it or not. But if I don't find it in the world, I will write it myself.
It's been increasingly hard to make small stories about female friendship, and, definitely, those stories don't have any shot of getting a theatrical release.
I hope that women know that they can and should try everything they're interested in - with the confidence that men have had.
Our friendships are really the epicenter of our social world and emotional lives.
Macro humor is just a person being themselves in a situation, saying whatever they're going to say, and it's funny because of the situation and who they are, or they say something, and it's just so them.
I feel like most movies about female friends derive their conflict from an extension of the high school movie rivalries, or there's some petty grievance: a competition over a guy or a wedding date or something. And I don't relate to any of that.
I still feel, when I meet actresses, no matter how high-profile they are, that they are starved for good roles.
We're so used to seeing women in movies about a romance where they don't seem to have any inner fortitude. They're completely defined by their relationships, and it's hard to engage with those characters and relate to them.
I think it's good that we're talking about it, but I think there's still a gendered nature to the way that people see female directors' skill sets. And I think we need to keep examining that. I don't know if people know how complicated the issue really is.
I'm a writer-director originally from Rhode Island, now living in Los Angeles. I've spent the past eleven years working with a writing partner, Joni Lefkowitz, and am now making the transition into feature directing thanks to this script we wrote together and our incredible producer Jordana Mollick.
I love watching action films, and especially the little moments of wit and humor in the choreography in a lot of them. The editing of an action sequence often has great moments of comic timing.
Economics drive the creative, and for a long time, movies about men were just considered 'movies,' whereas movies about women were considered niche and only appealing to women. This is to an extent still true, and what it does is represent movies about women as less profitable.
In Providence, we didn't have a first-run movie theater. But we did have an indie movie theatre on the Brown campus. That was the theater we'd go to. I think, as highbrow as it sounds, that I grew up on the films.
I want to be someone who takes risks but also stays engaged by trying new things.
Have confidence in your own voice, be entrepreneurial, and take big risks with the knowledge that, by default of being a woman, people are going to advise you to be conservative, play it safe, make sure everyone likes you, and constantly question whether or not you're ready to be in charge.
My writing partner, Joni Lefkowitz, and I love studying girl friendships in particular because they seem defined by a combination of codependent intimacy and subtle, constant passive-aggressiveness.
You can have a lot of destruction, but in a realistic female movie, the women are going to be aware of that destruction and apologizing for it.
Sometimes my friends and I are sill,y and sometimes we're serious, and sometimes we're emotional, and sometimes we're not.
When the mumblecore 'Tiny Furniture' thing happened, it reminded me of the thing we were trying to do in my little 1995 way.
Men starting out have so many options of filmmakers to connect with artistically and be shepherded by and collaborate with. I just didn't have an older, more experienced me to help me. So I hope all the women making movies now are aware we have the opportunity to be that to new filmmakers.
I didn't have a lot of men to ask questions of when I was starting out. There were two female directors people suggested I talk to when I was starting out, and they were Nancy Meyers and Kathryn Bigelow.
I have these wonderful friends, and they're supportive and loving, and you can really be yourself around them in a way some people even can't with their partners.
If you're a filmmaker who grew up wanting to make a movie for people to have that female experience of sitting in the theater together, it's hard to do unless you can compete with the bigger spectacles that are being offered to them.
As women, I think we're used to looking around to see what people think about this, who's approving of us, who's criticizing us, and whether we have to internalize their thoughts on us.
After my first film, I was having trouble finding a second film. I had a lot of attempts that failed.
On 'The Spy Who Dumped Me,' it wasn't fear as much as it was feeling overwhelmed because there were so many moving parts. But I felt that I knew what I was doing. And on a movie like this, there's so much preparation that goes into it that by the time you were there, you had done months of planning.
I was a heathen Jewess with no bat mitzvah. Only the neurosis, the brown hair, and the self-deprecating humor. But being one of the only Jewish kids in my WASPy hometown definitely informed my perspective on the humor of being an outsider.
Any place where the Jewish district is the hipster district is a very surreal and awesome place.
The process of working with the second unit director and basically sharing your workload with another director is such an interesting, delicate thing - and entrusting that person with your vision and making sure that you are not adding a completely different aesthetic to the mix that you don't have to contend with in editing.
Friendships have been such an important part of my life both emotionally and logistically.
I started really idolizing people like Nicole Holofcener and Whit Stillman.
I love action movies, and I love comedy, and I love writing comedy, but the genre of action-comedy - or, at least, as it currently usually is - is just not something that I feel that compelled by, generally, because I find the action to be silly, or it's too slapstick, or the stakes feel low because people are joking in the middle of it.
When you're watching a Bond movie, if there's a violent death, there's something about cleverly chosen twists, or what props are used, or some way that he's doing something that feels like an ironic twist, that feels like it gives the audience permission to enjoy watching it and to enjoy watching something that's otherwise just brutality.
The older I got, the less pretentious I got in my art tastes and work.
When I was in high school, I was writing a lot. I dealt with my high school angst by writing short plays and short films. I was obsessed with reading 'Entertainment Weekly' and 'Premiere' and 'Movieline' and all those magazines.
I try to write from a place of writing what I know, and what I know is interesting and appropriate women with edgy senses of humor. They're not soft people, so why are all the movies about women soft? My friends are all blazing their own paths. Some are married with kids, but a lot of them aren't. Some of them don't want that life.
I studied English in college and approached filmmaking from a writing background while trying to learn as much as I could about the technical side of things by making shorts and a webseries.
I love Nicole Holofcener's films for their constant duality of humor and emotion and their focus on very real, if flawed, dynamics between funny people.
