Spark of Access: Marya E. Gates on Her New Book, “Cinema Her Way”

It’s wonderful to meet someone like Marya E. Gates whose mission is so closely aligned with that of Cinema Femme. She has spent well over a decade using her platforms, including at RogerEbert.com, to champion the vital work of female filmmakers. Now she has released her first book, Cinema Her Way: Visionary Female Directors in Their Own Words, which features her in-depth interviews with 19 great directors, two of which we’ve spoken with at our site, Isabel Sandoval and Lizzie Borden.

Marya is currently on tour with her book, moderating Q&As with filmmakers at various cinema palaces around the country. Prior to her appearance tomorrow in her hometown of Chicago, I had the pleasure of speaking with her for Cinema Femme about how to create real change in an industry still marred by inequity.

I thought we could start with you talking about your gateway into the female director world. I know “Little Women” was a very special movie for you. Mine was “A League of Their Own,” and then I didn’t really dive in deep until Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation.” 

I think we’re both similar ages, and the 80s and 90s, at least for Hollywood, was the time when most women were making films in the system. So I think we grew up sort of lucky that we didn’t really have to seek those films out, right? In addition to “Little Women” and “A League of their Own,” I also saw Penelope Spheeris’ “Wayne’s World” and “The Little Rascals” as a kid. And then there was Agnieszka Holland’s “The Secret Garden,” Caroline Thompson’s “Black Beauty,” and Amy Heckerling’s “Look Who’s Talking” and “Clueless.” I was still a kid when I decided to seek out every movie Penny Marshall had made, like “Renaissance Man,” because I love Danny DeVito. We just took it for granted because half the movies that were coming into my hometown theater, which could only show one a week, were directed by women.

But when “The Piano” was released in 1993, I wasn’t at all aware that Campion was the first director to get nominated for Best Director since Lina Wertmüller. It all changed once I became aware that Sofia Coppola was only the third woman to be nominated for “Lost in Translation” in 2004, and only the second woman to have a Best Director and Best Picture nomination together since Jane Campion with “The Piano.” I was like ‘Wait, what?’ It didn’t make sense to me because I grew up with all these women directors and their films. That is what awakened me to the inequality.

By the 2000s, Hollywood studios were hiring women less and less. There was a big dip in Hollywood produced films directed by women. But a third of independent films were directed by women because digital made filmmaking so much more accessible. I tried to seek those films out, or at least tried to become aware of them. The accessibility of those films depended on where I lived. When streaming came along, it was a lot easier for myself and other people to find them. That’s a long-winded way of saying my passion for female directed films has always been there.

Around 2013, when my professional life jump started in the media, I became aware of the canons of films and the best of lists, and there was always just one film directed by a woman on the list. I felt this was bullshit and not right. A few websites were doing counter lists showcasing films by women that they felt you should know. But then, it was always the same ten women, like Jane Campion, Kathryn Bigelow, Ava DuVernay and Sofia Coppola.

They were just hanging their hats on the same women. It is bullshit.

I wouldn’t see Penny Marshall on the list, or even Nancy Meyers and Nora Ephron, who were also huge in the 90s. It’s better to have some women on the list rather than none, but it doesn’t do any good to just repeat the same ten women over and over again. Because you then continue to perpetuate the idea that only ten women have ever made or are the only ones currently making films. Anyone who watches international or independent film knows that this is absolutely not true, and has never been true. Just look at the history of Sundance Film Festival. There have always been so many films programmed that were directed by women. That festival has always done a great job of being a launching point for women, and a lot of the other festivals have finally caught up. Fifty percent of the films TIFF programs are always directed by women, which I think is fantastic.

In 2014, I discovered Susan Seidelman’s films and was like, ‘Why has she not been on those lists with her incredible features, her pilot for ‘Sex and the City’ and her Oscar nominated short film?’ She has one of the greatest runs that any filmmaker has ever had. I don’t know why she’s not talked about like that. I just felt like that was dumb. And in the meantime, Hollywood films were getting really boring. So I created A Year with Women where the goal was to watch fifty-two films a year directed by women as both a challenge for myself to actually just put my money where my mouth was and just support women filmmakers all year, and fill in some gaps by spotlighting films from the past that I hadn’t seen. What other filmmakers like Susan Seidelman were out there for me to discover? Turns out lots. For several of the women who are featured in the book, I had never seen their work prior to doing A Year with Women.

It was also a sort of social protest in that I was pretty sure I could do this, and I figured I was probably going to have a better viewing year than most people. I was being really careful about what I watched, and I purposely watched some films that were not good, because I don’t think equality is just women making good films. Equality looks like women getting to make a bad film and then making another film. Because men get to do that all of the time.

Right around the same time, while my professional career in marketing took off, I ended up moving across the country to Atlanta and then returning to LA to work at Netflix. Trying to turn A Year with Women into a book became a back burner thing, so I kept up the challenge of watching at least 52 films a year directed by women. But watching 52 is pretty easy. If you look at letterboxd, people have joined me in the challenge. Some people are like, “Shoot, I didn’t make it this year.” But with 52 films, you only have to watch one a week.

So on one hand, this book was a culmination of thirty years of watching female directed films, starting with “Little Women,” and then on the other hand, ten years of specifically highlighting women directors. I love to enhance my own knowledge, but more so, to take that knowledge and apply it in ways that I think are actually helpful. It’s important to have the data for highest grossing films and hiring practices, but I do think it’s a little flawed. They still don’t look at streaming. The streaming platforms are the ones that hire women, so I think it’s flawed data to not talk about all of the women making streaming films. It doesn’t help build awareness for those filmmakers, and really, the main reason I did a Year with Women was to create awareness. The newsletter that I do is about awareness. The more names people know, the more careers people know in depth. As consumers and critics, we can create change by supporting female filmmakers.

I can’t tell Warner Brothers to hire a woman, but I can support a hundred female filmmakers a year by sharing more about their films. If you’re somebody who, for example, watches twenty films in theaters a year, make it a goal to see ten of them directed by women. Now you are, in your own consumer habits, creating equality with your money. That’s something that is really not talked about as much. People see these lists and say only twelve percent of the films are directed by women. And that sucks, but you can go out and see films directed by women, and make it fifty percent of your viewing. When you look at the actual data, the difference between the film that’s the hundredth highest grossing film and the ninety-ninth is usually like $20,000. It’s not a lot. Most of the films that are at the bottom of the hundred top grossing films only make like a million dollars. We as a voting block, voting meaning with your dollars, really can push more women directors over the hump.

Those films that are in the bubble of being in the top hundred tend to be the Neons, the A24s, and the ones that have decent distribution. The only way to be a highest grossing film is to have the support of the audience, right? Obviously, the first step is getting hired, but those films are there. If we put our money there and critics review those films, outlets interview those women, et cetera, that’s a whole huge amount of people who can make one or even ten films that are among the highest grossing. Because the highest grossing is literally us. We’re the ones who are dictating the highest grossing films once the films are made.

What’s disappointing about this though is that I’ve been literally saying this for the past ten years. The reason the numbers haven’t gotten better is not just because of the hiring, it’s because the films by women are not covered. Fifty percent of the films at TIFF may be directed by women, but fifty percent of the reviews coming out of TIFF are not reflective of this. If you look at Rotten Tomatoes, the outlets aren’t assigning it, and the critics aren’t making it a priority. The independent films by women are the ones that struggle to sometimes even get ten percent of the reviews so that they get a score. We can’t change the hiring practices, but we can change our viewing habits, our writing habits and our reviewing habits. I’m not surprised that Hollywood hasn’t changed as much. I am really kind of surprised that the critical reviewing habits haven’t changed, because there are more films. You know this because of your outlet. I know this because of my newsletter. I cover three to four films a week that are new films directed by women. What are people doing?

How did you go about selecting the women you interviewed for your book?

When I did the original version of this book, coming out of a Year with Women, I wanted to do 365 profiles with 365 different women. So you’d learn about a different female filmmaker every day of the year. That proved to be too gargantuan to sell. When my agent, Nicki Richesin, reached out to me after seeing my work on the internet, she asked me if I had a book idea. She helped me retool it into something she thought she could sell, and we whittled it down to 52 films directed by women. When Rizzoli came on board, they really liked my Female Filmmaker in Focus column and said, “Why don’t we do interviews instead?” And I was like, ‘Okay, I’m not going to do 52 interviews.’ So we whittled it down again to twenty, and it ended up being nineteen because Lynne Ramsay went up into the Scottish Highlands to work on a script and never came back down before my deadline. But that was fine because I’d rather have a new Ramsay movie than talk to her. It ended up being nineteen filmmakers and the publisher was okay with that.

How were you able to whittle the list down? What was your process?

I picked five filmmakers that I absolutely needed to have, which were names people would really recognize. So I wanted Jane Campion and Gillian Armstrong. I also wanted Marielle Heller because she’s just one of my favorites. And I really wanted Gina Prince-Bythewood. I just love Gina and I’ve worked on one of her films. Then obviously, there were people I had really good relationships with who were high on my list like Isabel Sandoval, Allison Anders and Susan Seidelman. I’ve known all of them for quite a long time, so I really wanted them involved. For everyone else, it was just a matter of, ‘Whose films do I think would be both really fun for me to talk about, but also exciting for readers to learn more about?’ In the case of Sally Potter, a lot of people know “Orlando,” but do they know the rest of her filmography? She has a really robust filmography, same with Julie Dash. I think there’s a misconception that Julie Dash hasn’t made anything apart from “Daughters of the Dust.” But she’s made a ton of films, mostly for television, that are really interesting. Then I began emailing people to see if they would say yes, and some of these women just had contact forms on their websites. For others, I had to go through agents, but I was really surprised when people who I thought were so cool said yes. I was like, ‘Okay, this is good.’

What was it like talking to Miranda July?

She was so fun to talk with. We talked about some things that I hadn’t even thought about in her career. I asked a very specific question about a sound moment that really freaked me out in one of her shorts, and she just went off about the way she loved sound editing and how it lets her know when the film is locked. I would never have thought that, but now, looking back at her films, I’m like, ”Oh yeah, she really is one of those filmmakers who loves sound. It’s fun for me to ask really specific, idiosyncratic questions about things that I enjoy, and then realize that I unlocked a whole box, a whole section of their process that I wouldn’t necessarily have thought to ask about in the grander scheme of things. I found that really rewarding.

I love how you mentioned in your intro that film history hasn’t properly recognized early directors like Alice Guy-Blaché. As with the TCM series Women Make Film, you’re shining a light on that history by exploring these filmmakers who are alive. Can you talk about the importance of bringing attention to the filmmakers who came before those who are interviewed in the book, like Agnes Varda?

Like I said in the introduction, what is widely accepted to be the first narrative film was directed by a woman. The whole grammar of cinema has its roots in Alice Guy, what she thought was interesting and what she saw as the potential of filmmaking. In American cinema, Lois Weber was as innovative, if not more so, than D.W. Griffith, who usually gets the credit. But she was doing certain things before he did, while also thinking beyond narrative to using cinema as a tool to shape social change. Some of her ideas are very outdated and creaky, but the way that she saw the potential in film as a medium speaks to a lot of the kind of filmmakers I interviewed, who are deeply feminist and are using cinema to create a world in which they want to exist.

You could make an argument that every single one of these filmmakers is feminist. Not that they would call themselves that necessarily, but it’s definitely a recurring theme throughout their films. That’s not to say a filmmaker who’s a woman has to be feminist, but I think the thematic contributions of women to film as an art is undervalued. I think we’re just starting to see the ways that Varda was not just visually innovative, but thematically innovative in the kinds of films and stories she was telling. Same with Chantal Akerman. Obviously, “Jeanne Dielman” arriving at the top of the Sight and Sound list was not just, as some male filmmakers said, “a knee jerk reaction.” It’s because she did something so deeply innovative with that film, and people had access to it. If you look at the Sight and Sound list from 2012, that film was on there, and it was just after it became available more widely on DVD. So you add another 10 years and streaming to that, of course it’s going to go higher on the list because more people have access to it.

Part of the point of the book, by looking at all these women as well as those who inspired them, is to create that spark of access. I hope that the people who read this will then go look at the filmmakers who inspired the ones I interviewed. The goal would be that in future Sight and Sound lists and other best of lists, there is less of a debate regarding whether these women are worthy. 

Marya E. Gates will be in conversation with Kat Sachs following the 11am screening of Jane Campion’s “Bright Star” in 35mm tomorrow, March 29th, at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre. For tickets, click here. Marya’s book, “Cinema Her Way,” is now available for purchase.