New Films Portraying Fictional Women Directors: A Tentative, Flawed Step Forward

Chalk it up to coincidence or a growing desire to flip the occupational script for female characters. At least three films released this summer feature women as fictional film directors. The films vary from The Fall Guy, a full-fledged studio actioner with an estimated budget of $125 million and bona fide movie stars, to a small indie feature, MaXXXine, from A24 with an estimated budget of $2 million. A Family Affair is an indie film distributed by Netflix showcasing the considerable star power of Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron, as well as up-and-comer Joey King. All of the films are directed by men and only one, A Family Affair, has a woman writer, Carrie Solomon.

The fictional directors in these films offer updated archetypes of females, including the modern damsel in distress and brittle female boss. While their place on a movie set is never questioned, one of the directors needs saving, another can’t communicate with a male star, and yet another repeatedly reveals her insecurities regarding the future of her career.

In The Fall Guy, Emily Blunt plays Jody Moreno, a first-time film director, helming a big-budget studio feature. When the star of the film goes missing, Jody’s stuntman and ex-boyfriend, Colt Seavers, played by an ever-game Ryan Gosling, steps in to rescue Jody and her movie.

She is simultaneously the most prominent of the three fictional female directors and exists in the most unreal situation. As a directing newbie, Jody would never be considered for this gig. In the real world, while it’s possible to locate examples of studios betting unholy sums of money on features made by relatively unproven male directors, the same cannot be said for women. Moreover, the number of women who have directed action films with budgets of $100 million or more can be counted on one hand. The notion that a first-time film director, who happens to be a woman, would be hired to helm an action film with huge stars is unlikely, verging on absurd, in a business that continues to worship all things masculine, hard, and violent.

I also can’t recall a single film featuring a fictional male director whose movie needs to be saved by a love interest. Instead, these films detail the director’s perseverance, vision, and triumph over personal demons and adversity (Pain and Glory, dir. Pedro Almodovar), the human cost that an outsized ego and narcissism can exact on a film and its crew (White Hunter, Black Heart, dir. Clint Eastwood), and the ups and downs of living in the public eye when success becomes more elusive (Stardust Memories, dir. Woody Allen).

On the set, Jody uses her position as a director to punish her stuntman and ex-boyfriend by setting him on fire over and over. She is competent but motivated, at least in part, to exact some measure of revenge on Colt for a relationship gone wrong.

In the Netflix film, A Family Affair, Zac Efron plays a movie star, Chris Cole, who falls in love with the mother of his personal assistant. In a minor plotline, he is making a film in which he needs to take direction from a nameless woman director who only speaks French. He has a difficult time understanding her instructions and asks his assistant Zara, played by Joey King, to translate for him. She does, but infuses the direction with heaping amounts of her own hostility toward Chris. It’s a comic bit that suggests male actors and women directors literally speak different languages.

Finally, Ti West’s MaXXXine features Elizabeth Debicki as Elizabeth Bender, a director with a hard edge intent on making sure that her lead actress, Maxine, doesn’t cause problems on her film and thwart her career. Bender is more nuanced than the typical lady boss or bitch characters, but underlying her tense demeanor is an insecurity regarding her directing career. Early on, a production assistant warns Maxine that Bender is tough, and the director admits to being ruthless. When Bender cautions Maxine she is now in the “belly of the beast,” and future opportunities may not come her way if she doesn’t raise her game, the director is clearly projecting her own insecurities on the actress. However, the film allows Debicki’s character to be as exacting as any male director. Repeatedly, she is dissatisfied with the choices crew or cast members make, and she instructs Maxine to clean up anything going on in her life that might interfere with the film.

The fact that multiple films feature women working as film directors this summer comes as a surprise and perhaps even a revelation. Seeing female characters command sets and express their desires to mold narratives in this role feels new. It’s a tentative step forward in the evolution of women being accepted in this powerful storytelling role. But the fact that romance would need to play a part in these portrayals or that the women would have to play brittle characters reveals a reluctance to let go of old tropes. These films feature women who display incremental movement — baby steps — to more confident and independent portrayals. Even so, they help to normalize the reality of women working as film directors, altering the pictures inside our heads.