Gloria Steinem in conversation with Niki Caro, director of North Country

Not since Erin Brockovich has the real life heroism of a working class woman made it to the Hollywood screen -- and this one cares about safe women not just safe water. In North Country, Charlize Theron plays a single mother trying to make a living as a miner in Minnesota’s Iron Range. Like Lois Jensen, the woman whose life inspired this movie, she files the first-ever class action suit for sexual harassment, and ends up winning a victory for all women workers.

Niki Caro directed this, her first U.S.film, with the same realism and simplicity she brought to Whale Rider, a Maori story of her native New Zealand. On her way to Minnesota for the premier that she says matters most – a screening for the community where the story was lived and filmed – she stopped to talk to Gloria Steinem and the Women’s Media Center.
(North Country opens nationally October 21st.)

GS: I’m sure you’ve had a lot of strong and favorable responses to this film because it shows the depths of what women experience in the workplace. That hasn’t been shown in this way before.

NC: No - it’s so shocking.

GS: The only comfort I can offer is that I am enough older so that I remember when it was worse -- when it didn’t have a name.

NC: Am I right that it wasn’t until the Anita Hill phenomenon [1991 hearings that North Country characters see on TV] that the word sexual harassment actually came about?

GS: Actually, in the early 70s at Cornell University, there was a summer employment program. Two women professors were trying to describe what the students said happened to them in the workplace, and they coined the term sexual harassment. [In 1979], Catherine McKinnon wrote a textbook on sexual harassment as sex discrimination. There came to be a body of law about it.

NC: The film was set in 1989-1991. So many people talked to me about the phenomenon [Anita Hill] - it’s still everywhere.

GS: Yes, and it existed not just for years but centuries before there was a name for it. It happened to domestic workers in the home, and certainly to women slaves -- but it’s been trivialized and that’s what’s so important about your movie…it makes it clear that it is not a trivial experience.

NC: No it’s not. And it’s still confusing for women to know where that line is. I worked hard at understanding where the harassment comes from. It comes from boredom, it comes from humor, and sometimes it comes form malice and hate. But it’s not just one thing and it’s hard for the women who experience it to know where that line is. Is somebody speaking to you inappropriately, or are you being touched casually? And certainly, I know from the women in the mines it was hard to distinguish things but they knew it was wrong.

GS: But the fact that IT'S hard to distinguish is carefully nurtured in our culture. If it was reversed, we’d know in a minute.

NC: Of course, you’re quite right. Those women didn’t have a choice. Many women who suffer sexual harassment don’t have a choice to get another job. I can also understand knowing these women as I do why they took it for so long. Honestly, I would have done the same thing – I would have found a way to give it back and to protect myself -- because they were feeding their children.

GS: I have no children, and I’ve put up with a lot of sexual harassment as a writer because I thought it was my job to get the assignment and not diminish the guy’s ego. An editor I worked with at the NewYork Times Magazine gave me a choice: Either I could go to his hotel room with him or I could mail his letters. It’s about power.

NC: -It’s about an abuse of power.

GS: Just like rape is [about power] not about sex. Sexual harassment is, as somebody said, “the executive answer to rape.”

NC: I heard an astonishing story yesterday from a woman who worked at the stock exchange. She was known as the cunt among her male colleagues, and one comment she remembers is a guy saying, “Get your fucking cunt out of my way or I will nail your tits to the floor.”

GS: How did this film come to you?

NC: When Whale Rider was released in the U.S .and began to do very well, I had a baby -- so I was in New Zealand not participating in the movie phenomenon at all, and I got sent a lot of scripts and I was obliged to read about 3 a week…The only time I had to read them was when I was breastfeeding. I can’t remember a single script that I read but this one. I couldn’t put it down, and even though I didn’t want to make a movie so quickly after having my first child, I couldn’t give it up it was so important and perversely timely even though this is 2005. I was pretty shocked coming from a pretty progressive country. I am terribly fortunate to be a New Zealander.

GS: Your country is definitely more progressive than we are.

NC: So much. I shouldn’t come to a country like America and feel how backward it is. And that’s what I feel.

GS: Did it hook into what you had personally experienced?

NC: No. I personally have done all manner of jobs and have been in environments where there have been a lot of guys. People said things about me and other women in general that I found made me uncomfortable. So I understand the phenomenon.

GS: It’s about [maintaining] a power structure.

NC: That’s an important point too. I’ve talked with so many men who after seeing the movie are terribly moved and terribly angry and recognize the truth there and are ashamed of it and don’t know what to do. This is not just a film for women. I don’t choose films because of their female empowerment stories.

GS: I read the production notes, and there were six or seven places where people said it’s not “just for women.” I’ve read the production notes for a lot of World War II movies, and not one single person has ever apologized and said, “This is not just for men.”

NC: It’s not right, but we do whatever gets it out there….I want to be clear too as the filmmaker, it is human nature that I am interested in. I am as interested in the male characters, what they are doing as much as the female characters and I don’t want to limit the audience for the film because I want men to see the film…

In the moviemaking world next Friday night, a bunch of people are going to make a decision about what movie they are going to see, and more women decide what movie to see. You don’t want [men] to say, “Jesus I don’t want to see that.”

GS: What is it like to be a woman in Hollywood?

NC: I can only describe what it is like to be me in Hollywood. As a director, you never ever see another director work, so I don’t know what it’s like on other people’s sets and my sets are highly specific. I only hire people who are temperamentally suited to the way I work. I get a lot of satisfaction out of telling real stories and doing so respectfully and with integrity and collaboratively, so I can’t have the average filmmaker asshole on my crew because that would upset the very careful atmosphere that I try to create. It is also an atmosphere that is conducive to great performances. I don’t have lights on the floor, so actors can move wherever they want. I don’t have marks. We have an incredible cinematographer who worked with a handheld which creates a great deal of freedom. I found Warner Brothers to be incredibly respectful of my creative choices in the beginning, but the test was always going to be the first week of shooting…if the dailies weren’t good they would be all over it.

I had a closed set every single day. No monitors on set. No visitors, nobody’s agents, nobody’s children, nobody’s boyfriends. We shot some astonishing stuff the first week. We shot the flashbacks, the rape, the school, and the Union Hall scene with the 300 real miners. We shot the beginning of the film, the first time you see Josey in her home after she’s been beaten, and we shot Woody Harrelson on ice. I think the studio just went: Ok, just let her do it the way that she’s doing it.

GS: 12 weeks -- that’s all?

NC: We weren’t in preproduction this time last year. It was so fast. That’s because it was run by girls and we completely knew it. I got one call about half way through and it was the head of the studio and he said: “I don’t know what you’re doing but for god’s sake keep doing it. We love it just call me if you need anything.”

The things that were completely non-negotiable for me was that I wanted to take all the footage back to New Zealand and cut the film there by myself with my editor, David Coulson -- and then I would bring it back when I was satisfied. They fought that but agreed to it. They gave me final cut after they saw it, which is amazing.

GS: I think that in upfront negotiations, that almost doesn’t exist anymore.

NC: You have to prove yourself before you get that. The other thing that I needed was my first assistant director, Liz Tan to come. She and I made Whale Rider. She’s smaller than I am, she’s fierce but very fair and loving and she helps me create the environment that I need to work and that allows me to be soft-spoken. It’s her voice you hear on the set; you never hear mine. When we got here, it freaked us out actually. As pre-production moved towards production, it gets more and more stressful and more people come on. And you have to do location scouting which is traditionally the worst part of filmmaking. Thirty people are staring over your shoulder saying, “So what do you want? Where are we going to put the crew? Where are the lights going?“

It’s stressful when you meet for the first time a lot of the people you are going to be making the film with and they’re predominantly guys. As carefully as they have been chosen, they’re guys who have a expectation that a director and a first AD are men -- and often, from what I understand, kind of grumpy. So there’s me and Liz and here we are, we’re short and we’ve got long hair and occasionally we wear lipstick and I could see them kind of looking at each other going; “ So these two are in charge? Give me a break!”

The first week was very interesting because Liz and I, we’re good at our jobs and we work very effectively together. It was the Union Hall day where the two of us handled 300 very volatile miners and their real feelings. After those days -- it was completely unspoken of course -- I saw respect in their eyes….As a filmmaker, you’re constantly proving yourself and that’s your job, to handle situations like that, and its your responsibility to make something great from it.

GS: When did you two find each other?

NC: On Whale Rider. I’d only made one film before that, and I worked with a different female first AD. Liz is quite unusual, she’s a big part of my filmmaking -- as is my editor David -- and between the two of them, I feel very safe because she looks after me on the set and it goes off to David and he puts together. I have implicit trust in him with materials that I am very sensitive about. It’s nice three short New Zealanders who don’t raise our voices in Hollywood quietly gaining the respect of everybody.

I heard something really disturbing from an actress while we were shooting who had read something in The NY Times about how women directors in Hollywood felt they had to become really hard, really tough to do the work. And I take the absolute polar opposite opinion -- that my gentleness and sensitivity and care are my edge. That makes me different from everyone else and that doesn’t mean that the work isn’t going to be tough. Its tough material we’re talking about but it’s made in a gentle way.

GS: It must be a double standard because, say, Trauffaut was very gentle.

NC: Journalists often ask whether I think that only a female director could have told his story and I don’t. I think that directing has to be beyond gender. It has to be about the personality of the filmmaker. Many of the great directors had that quality.

But then I spoke to the women who fought this case. We had them out in LA for the premiere and they were very close to me when we made the film and one of them said to me: “I thought about it I don’t think I could have been involved if the director wasn’t a female.” And she still drives truck up there. She’s actually in the film -- one of the women who stands up in the back of the courtroom. That is testament to how much damage has been done to those women.

GS: One of the functions [the WMC] should serve is not only to encourage women who are working in the media, but to allow you to say what other people have not asked.

NC: I am really concerned by how prevalent [sexual harassment] could be out there. From what I’ve heard its very alive and I’m very concerned about that.I want to know what would happen if they all stood up. It would be revolutionary and god, I don’t know if we are really ready for that much anger and hurt to be spoken about.

GS: Part of the problem now is that when they settle sexual harassment suits, the agreement is that they not talk about. There’s a gag order.

NC: This is what I’m saying, and it starts in that community up in the Iron Range. Because those are predominantly good people, and there are guys up there and I’ve met them. I’ve worked with some whose attitudes towards women I can only describe as prehistoric, but there are many many more men who value and cherish their women, and there are some who cherish their women, but still believe they should not be working in the mines. They are not proud of these events in their recent past. Those men are ashamed. Part of the reason is they have never had that conversation. I hope that this film is a healthy and positive way for them to discuss what happened. If it starts there, wouldn’t it be great if it could extend to everyone who has experienced it.

There is an on-line forum for people to discuss what has happened to them so this just doesn’t become just entertainment. Standup

We’ve got to get people to go on Friday night. I know if we get people to see it they’re going to talk about it.