When I was little, the world was my stage. My parents took me to see every musical, ballet, concert, and child-friendly play that came through town. I wanted to be Judy Garland. I wanted to be Cathy Rigby. I wanted to be in Cats. I took ballet lessons, sang in a choir, played piano, figure-skated, went through drama workshops and performing arts camps. I made home videos of myself and called it the Avery TV Show, made videos with my Playmobil characters and used different voices for the characters, wrote my own scripts on the computer (using MS paint because I didn't know MS word was a thing) and recorded my performances. I'd go through old clothes, do photo shoots, choreograph my own figure-skating routines. Everything I did was a chance to perform. Every day was a new act of a show.
Around the time I started middle school, I began to seriously study performances by professional actors and actresses. My parents introduced me to Johnny Depp, who was at the time one of their favorites, and eventually decided I was old enough, at twelve, to see my first horror movie: Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow. Initially I was watching for the performances. It was the first time I'd seen Christina Ricci and I immediately decided I loved her. But as the film progressed I began to notice other things. The smoky atmosphere of the town. The twisted, otherworldly trees. The color palette, all grays and whites and blacks with the occasional pop of bright blood-red. The cast as a whole and the way they interacted with each other, the greats like Michael Gambon and Richard Griffiths playing off the relative newbies like Ricci. I noticed the costumes. The effects. I wondered how they made the horseman look headless. I wondered how they'd decided on having Johnny Depp play Ichabod Crane instead of someone like Tom Cruise.
I wondered who was responsible for the whole thing, because whoever they were, I wanted to be that person.
That was the spark. That was the moment that I realized I didn't want to be the actor. I didn't want to be the person who came in after the story was already written. I wanted to write the story. I didn't want to just be in the show, I wanted to create the show.
I started reading everything I could get my hands on about Tim Burton. I searched his name on the internet. I demanded to see his other movies. My favorite was Edward Scissorhands, for reasons that I could not, at the time, fully articulate. I looked at colleges--yes, when I was twelve--and decided I had to go to Columbia College in Chicago for their film program. Throughout all of this no one told me that prominent female directors were hard to come by, that filmmaking was a male-dominated field. No one told me that I would be outnumbered by men on just about every film set I would ever work on. Even after I read Girl Director, a book I recommend for all amateur female filmmakers, I still wasn't fully aware of the feminist aspect of my chosen career, and even after I got the "girl director talk" from another girl at Interlochen, I still didn't really care.
And even now, when I'm aware of all of the little things, the obstacles I'll face, the wage gaps and internalized misogyny and slut-shaming and institutional sexism, you know what? I still don't give a damn.
Because here's the thing. What's between my legs--or, for the more politically correct of you out there, the way I choose to express my gender identity--in the end, that doesn't matter. I once wrote a rant on my high-school blog about how unfair it was that women-oriented film festivals would not take my film because, while it was written, directed, and edited by a woman, it featured a male protagonist. At the time I thought that was the most ridiculous thing. Now, well, I honestly don't care. That film wasn't the best work I've ever done anyway, and really, the reason I got into filmmaking wasn't because I wanted national acclaim. I got into it because I saw a movie that spoke to me emotionally, and I became drawn into the idea of someday touching someone else the same way.
It's very unfeminist, the way I got into filmmaking. I should have fallen in love with the work of Kathryn Bigelow, Amy Heckerling, Nora Ephron, Sophia Coppola--all women whose work I love now, but who I didn't know much about when I first entered the world of filmmaking. I should have found my identity in a movie about women, made by a woman. Should have, but didn't.
For what it's worth, it was the girls in Tim Burton's movies that I loved above all. Catwoman's courage in Batman Returns, Kim and Peg's tenderness in Edward Scissorhands, Lydia's unfailing individuality in Beetle Juice, Sally's quiet rebellion in Nightmare Before Christmas, Katrina's unwavering loyalty in Sleepy Hollow, I saw something of myself in each of these women, something that I didn't see in movies aimed at girls my age. But it wasn't just the characters. It was the beauty of the films themselves. The innocent pastel houses contrasted with Edward's dark, lonely mansion. The monochromatic colors punctuated with the bright red blood of the Horseman's victims. The dark landscape of Gotham City. The contrast between bright, candy-colored Christmastown and the corpse-inhabited gothic landscape of Halloweentown. It was this intoxicating combination that drew me in, and it wasn't until years later that someone pointed out, "You know, your idol for filmmaking really should be a female director, haven't you ever heard of Sophia Coppola?" that I realized people actually believed things like that.
Years ago I was on the set of a student film, directed by a female classmate who was generally liked and considered popular among the rest of the student filmmakers. Said young lady had chosen mostly male classmates to crew for her film. I happened to have worked with that particular group of students before and, while they are all fine young men and exceptionally talented filmmakers, they all had the tendency to get "in the zone" while working and ignore the opinions and input of others. Moreover, three of these guys were close friends who frequently worked together inside and outside of class and had an intimate rapport with one another that few could break into with any degree of ease. So it came as no surprise to me that they essentially drew together and shut out the rest of the crew--a common mistake that friends can make when working together.
Having worked with these guys before, I knew that protesting and saying, "hey, listen, LISTEN!" wouldn't do much good. But this girl, the director of the film? She didn't know that. She complained, loudly, about being left out. She grew increasingly frustrated. I felt her pain, but kept my mouth shut. She didn't want my advice; I was there as a stand-in, not as a mentor. But that didn't stop her from turning around at one point and hissing in my ear, "I forgot how hard it is to be a girl in this department."
Wait, what?
Let me back up here and explain that the very same year this young lady complained to me, the highest award the filmmaking department had to offer was snagged by a girl whom everyone agreed was an exceptionally gifted cinematographer. I feel like I should also add here that while I had many problems in high school, my gender was not one of them. I felt left out by my peers, but the fact that I was a girl had nothing to do with that. At Interlochen, girl filmmakers were not shunted to the side, or confined to gender-stereotyped roles like makeup artists or costume designers. We were directors, editors, and screenwriters. Up until that moment, when that girl whispered in my ear that it was so hard to be a female filmmaker, I hadn't even realized there was any kind of issue linked between gender and my "role" in our department.
I bought into this idea of femininity as a detriment for a few months in college. I too complained that being a girl was just too hard. I blamed my inability to get into a film festival on the fact that I was a girl who made a movie about a boy, and complained endlessly about the unfairness of it all. I told my friends I was going to be a trailblazer. I wrote an awful screenplay, dripping with misandry, about how awful it was to be a female artist in a male-driven world, only thinly veiling that the story was about myself by changing the lead character from a filmmaker to a photographer. It was stupid. It was petty.
It was a mistake I vowed to never make again.
I'm aware that feminism is important. I'm aware that there is a wage gap, I'm aware that there are so many female directors who deserve acclaim and so few who get it. But I'm also aware of the fact that my all-time favorite director--yes, he happens to be a man--has also not gotten a well-deserved Oscar, and the day he gets it I'll be just as happy as I was when Kathryn Bigelow broke ground by becoming the first woman to win Best Director. I'm aware that Hollywood treats women in particular like dirt. I'm aware that it will take a lot to change that. I'm sick of hearing the same-old, same-old about the women in the celebrity inner circle. "Kristen Stewart is a talentless slut with a bad attitude." "Taylor Swift is boy-crazy and stuck-up." "Lady Gaga has a screw loose." "Miley should be ashamed of herself for getting naked." "Katy Perry needs to grow up." I'm sick of that. I'm sick of hearing how stupid we are, how naive we are, how we need men to take care of us.
But I'm also sick of politicizing something I love. And maybe for some women it has to be that way--maybe the way they cope with media insanity is by writing movies like Thelma and Louise, or buying into the ideal of "strong female characters" who don't need no men--but for me, this is the truth: the more I make being a girl into a big deal, the bigger deal it becomes. The more I let being a girl in a male-dominated field get to me, the more power I give others to use it against me. I'm not going to hand anyone an excuse to hurt me. They already have enough of those; I don't need to give them any more.
In a few months I'll graduate with a degree in Cinema Studies. Someday I plan to get my master's in screenwriting. Ultimately, I want to write for TV, and someday I hope to create my own TV show. I want to cross between film and TV, and to anyone who says I can't, well, I guess it's up to me to prove you wrong. I don't know what I'll do immediately after I graduate. I really don't. I know where I want to be and I know I'll do what I have to do to get there.
But I will never ever feel sorry for myself because of who I am, or let someone tell me "You can't do that because you're a girl."
And to anyone who actually believes that? The time machine is over there, buddy. Go back to the 1900s.
(But, hey. Just so you know? There were female filmmakers back then too.)
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