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She’s The Boss
The rise of the actress-director
Jada Pinkett Smith had written her script, raised a budget of a few million dollars and assembled a strong cast, so when she arrived for her first day of shooting on The Human Contract, she was as confident as she’d been at any point in her career.
“I felt really empowered,” she says. “When I got on the set my first day, I was ready. That’s my world, I know what that is.”
Pinkett Smith’s self-assurance is derived from spending half her life as an actress. But this differed from her previous movie work. This time, in addition to starring alongside Paz Vega, Idris Elba and Ted Danson, she would also be the director—a job she’s thought about for a while now.
“This is my passion,” Pinkett Smith says. “This is the first time I’ve been so engaged in years. I love acting, but unfortunately there aren’t a lot of challenging roles out there for women. You get complacent and when I get complacent, I get bored. This is a great challenge for me. It’s something that I feel like I can do well, and something I’m willing to learn.”
Pinkett Smith, who has had starring roles in The Matrix films, Collateral and opposite her husband, Will Smith, in Ali, is among a growing number of well-known actresses who’ve found their way into the male-dominated world of feature film directing.
Two of last year’s more critically acclaimed films—Sarah Polley’s Away from Her and Julie Delpy’s 2 Days in Paris—were directed by women who first gained renown for their on-screen performances. Now, a pair of films scheduled to arrive in theaters this spring also happen to be made by actress-turned-directors.
Like Pinkett Smith, whose first big break came on the sitcom “A Different World,” Helen Hunt began making her name on TV, most notably as the co-star of the long-running NBC series “Mad About You.” Each has since carved out a career in a series of high-profile Hollywood films and each makes her big-screen directorial debut in 2008.
Pinkett Smith’s The Human Contract focuses on a successful but troubled captain of industry who, as she says, has to “create his own rules and have an understanding of what he needs to be in order to be happy.” Then She Found Me, which Hunt directs and appears in alongside Matthew Broderick, Colin Firth and Bette Midler, deals with a woman reunited with the mother who gave her up for adoption.
That Hunt and Pinkett Smith have decided to direct is notable for a couple of reasons. For one, both women have the intellect and vision that lead to a fruitful directing career. They’ll make good movies—and for anyone who cares about quality cinema, that’s a good thing. Just as important, the fact that Pinkett Smith and Hunt are behind the camera means that the ranks of female directors are growing, if ever so slowly.
Still, the statistics on the male/female breakdown of the directing profession are astounding. In a story published in 2002, Salon.com posed the question: “Why are 96 percent of films directed by men?” Two years later CNN noted that Sofia Coppola’s Oscar candidacy for Lost in Translation was “only the third time a woman has been nominated for Best Director.”
The fact that female directors are far outnumbered by their male peers would seem to be a regrettable relic from an era when women were rarely, if at all, in charge of studios and production companies. Women have since begun to wield greater power within the industry—but men are still doing most of the directing.
Hunt, who worked on and off for years on her upcoming movie, says she’s not sure why the disparity lingers.
“I will never know—I’m lucky enough to never know,” she says, noting that it wasn’t so long ago that American women were denied more basic privileges, like the right to vote. “I’m lucky enough to say that I don’t know why, and I just have to hope that we are all moving toward a gender-blind, colorblind world.”
Pinkett Smith suggests that tradition plays a part in the shortage of women working behind the camera. “It’s a man’s game,” she says. “The DPs are usually men, your ADs are usually men. It’s just men all over the place.
“I feel we have to work 10 times as hard because of the whole gender bias thing. But I definitely learned how to get over some big humps. I had a fantastic crew, I really did, and we just made it happen. I just made sure that I kept my woman game up!” she adds with a laugh.
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by Jon Raymond on 4/28/08 at 5:20 pm
I love watching films by women writers and directors. They have a perspective and voice we have seen too little of. As a man, I am at a loss watching some of these films. Juno is a great example written by a woman. I wouldn’t have a clue about what a teenage pregnancy is like, let alone the growing pains of being a teenage girl.
Two days in Paris was awesome. You get the female perspective which usually, unlike the male perspectuve, has very little to do with sex.
Of of the classic greats of all time in Kissing Jessica Stein. That film is so groundbreaking and insightful to a woman’s perspectve. I really feel unworthy. How could i ever come up with something as original. Women have a lot of new frontier to explore at their feet.
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This story was published in the Spring 2008 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
She's The Boss
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