I recently rewatch Jane Campion’s 1993 masterpiece The Piano – which broke records at the time for being one of very few female-directed films to make an overwhelmingly positive impact upon film awards bodies. This film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes (a first for a female director), and Jane Campion became only the second woman nominated for Best Director at the Academy Awards (she ultimately got beaten by Steven Spielberg for Schindler’s List). This is a film which, when I first watched it, I rated 5*s – I thought it was a simply phenomenal piece of art, which was fully deserving of the accolades it had. As such it made my top 100 films of all time. However, upon rewatching it, I decided it was fully deserving of a place on my top 5 films of all time. It goes without saying, I am constantly changing these lists, the exact position of my favourite films fluctuates greatly, but I generally keep a consistent top 10 (recently expanded to 12). The Piano is the only film in my top 100 which was directed by a woman, and although I’m personally disappointed that this is the case, I am unfortunately not particularly surprised, given the sparsity of female directors in the film industry (more so historically, but also in the present). While I acknowledge I could do better in this respect, I do believe I am genuinely honest with my rankings and there is very little, if any, unconscious bias against female directors. For example, out of the films I watched that were released last year, about 30% of films were directed by women and 3 out of 5 of my picks had I been voting for the Academy Award for Best Director would have been women. I only use this as an example, not an excuse, to bridge into the larger point of this article: is enough being done for female directors in the industry? My experiences will echo that of many film fans, and while awards bodies like the Oscars face widespread condemnation for a lack of representation, this is the main issue. Female directed films are very rarely getting through to the average non-film fan. For an average film fan, I expect the ratio is similarly slanted heavily in favour of men. So, I will be analysing what exactly in the industry has historically led to this lack of diversity, what changes are being implemented at this moment and what changes need to be made in order to improve this serious issue at the heart of the film industry.
The first reason I am going to give lies way before anyone enters this industry, and rather predictably this is a societal issue. There’s nothing I can really say about this that hasn’t been said already: we cannot expect female film-makers if there’s a snobbish attitude about young girls being passionate about film-making. This is improving, through out-reach programmes and the like, but obviously these issues are so deep-rooted in society that it will take generations to weed out this mentality. It starts with role models, however – famous names who young girls can look up to, and this is already being brought into fruition through current directors such as Chloe Zhao, Kathryn Bigelow, Greta Gerwig, Jane Campion, Patty Jenkins and Ava DuVernay. So, progress is being made on this front, and will continue to be made as the other issues in the industry are addressed. This, combined with lack of funding, ultimately leads to less female-directed films being made. The ‘Hollywood Diversity Report’ from 2021, a study by Darnell Hunt and Ana=Christina Ramon for the UCLA, has tracked the percentage of theatrically released films in the past 10 years directed by women. In 2011 this was 4.1%, but last year has increased to 20.5%. However, in truth, only in the past two years have we seen any type of increase (prior to this from 2011 it was only single digit percentages of female-directed films, with the exception of 2017). The clear increase from 2018 (7.1%) to 2020 (20.5%) shows the effort which is now being put in to create a more level playing field, and hopefully in the coming years, we will continue to see a substantial increase in female directors so that complete parity can be reached.
The second reason is lack of funding. In my eyes, this is the primary issue as to why there are less female-directed films; more specifically, less female-directed blockbusters. This is again shown by the UCLA ‘Hollywood Diversity Report’ which shows that 45.7% of female-directed films have a budget under $10 million, whereas 28.0% of male-directed films have a budget in the same range. As such, lack of funding creates a two-fold problem. Firstly, a director might not make the film due to them lacking funds. This comes down largely to film studios: when a director walks through their doors for a meeting, it is up to them to decide whether it will earn the studio money. One common viewpoint among studios in the past has been that no-one will turn up to watch a film directed by a woman or, to express the same misogynist sentiment in a more subtle way, audiences do not tend to enjoy films shot from a feminine viewpoint. There are obvious problems with this argument, it is simply not true on many levels. This is still used today though, perhaps not as widely, but simply a studio head can point to the lack of box office hits among films directed by women, or simply state it is a bigger risk (men have a track record, women don’t), but here we realise there’s a bigger issue. Without the increased funding (and by this I mean, regular increased funding, not just a one-off), women can’t be expected to create box-office hits. So, the catch-22 is that studio heads want evidence of box-office success before green-lighting female-directed blockbusters and giving such films a worthwhile investment, but without firstly having sustained investment, there is very little chance of a woman directing a major box-office hit. The second part of this issue is that when women do get films green-lit by major studios, they might not always get all the funding needed. This is not just an issue for female directors: some of the biggest names have complained about a lack of funding from studios and not enough respect being given to the directors’ artistic vision including Martin Scorsese and Guillermo del Toro. However, this is obviously a much bigger issue for female directors, and the careers of Jane Campion or Claire Denis, for instance, show this. It must be noted that studios such as Netflix are not running on the same box-office centric financial model, and this has allowed directors to get what they want more. Gina Prince-Bythewood’s The Old Guard is a recent work which proves this: a big-budget comic book film directed by a woman. The budget for this was reportedly $70 million, which compared to say Extraction (a male directed action film made by Netflix on a budget of $65 million), shows the money that Netflix are willing to invest in female directors. Further to this, awards bodies such as the Oscars are starting to recognise smaller films to a greater extent, so this allows for greater awareness amongst ordinary people and so a greater box office return.
The final reason for this is the lack of big film stars who are willing to work with female directors. This is not really an issue anymore, but in the past this was a big issue. The biggest actors, who would be the driving force behind people going to see a film, would go their whole careers without working for female directors (perhaps a mentality thing, about taking orders from a women). As I said, this is really not as much of an issue at the moment: many of today’s biggest movie stars seem more than willing to work for women: take Christian Bale, Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks for example, who were all ahead of their time working with female directors in the latter part of the last century. However, a 2014 study by Cosmopolitan showed that 20 of the top 100 highest-grossing actors have never worked with a female director, with a further 21 only working with a female director once. So, while this is not as big a problem as it was in the last century, it is still clearly an issue which needs addressing. That being said, I firmly think that at the moment this is less of a mentality problem, especially amongst younger actors. This is heavily linked with the previous issue of funding: female directors cannot get blockbuster stars to act in their films without enough money to pay them. Take Dwayne Johnson, who is probably the epitome of male blockbuster action star, who has zero female-directed films to his name. You’d hardly expect him to act in a lower-budget picture. Hopefully, in the next few years, with the growing acceptance that a female director can direct blockbusters, this will be less of an issue.
All of these issues will undoubtedly play a part in increasing awareness of female directed films, and hopefully lead to more female-directed films amongst the pantheon of universally loved films. Only three of the IMDB top 250 are directed by women (The Matrix, Capernaum and A Silent Voice), and while I do not view this by any means as a way of measuring the best films, I think it is quite an accurate tool for measuring which films are the most popular to some extent. For me, the primary issue is studio funding, and while I do not have any substantial evidence to support my claim, I feel that many well-respected female directors would have had an even greater career if not for the hardships they had to put up with just to bring their ideas to audiences (Jane Campion possibly being the best example of this). Critics play a big part in this too, as the male-dominated world of film criticism, means that female directors struggle to have their films considered ‘successful’.
For anyone interested in watching more female-directed films, I would heartily recommend all of Jane Campion’s films as a great starting point, but also such directors as Lone Scherfig, Greta Gerwig, Debra Granik, Jennifer Kent and Kathryn Bigelow. All of these directors have created multiple great films which I truly believe to be slightly more accessible to modern audiences. I would also encourage anyone to actively seek out well-told female stories: diversity in art is much more than diversity for the sake of it – it leads to a more rounded experience of art as a whole and multiple perspectives through which to view the world.
Top read Stephon 👏