Oscar-Nominated Female Filmmakers in Their Own Words
When it comes to women getting Oscar nominations in non-acting categories, making a movie that does things that are original or unexpected — along with having the creative freedom to do so — is often crucial to getting nomination recognition from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization whose members vote for the Oscars. Being bold and taking risks are what many of these nominees in major Oscar categories talked about on the campaign trail at various Q&As during this awards season. (The 96th annual Academy Awards will take place March 10, 2024, at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.)
Despite efforts to diversify the Academy, women are still a minority in getting Oscar nominations. The report Women’s Media Center Investigation 2024: Gender and Non-Acting Oscar Nominations revealed that women are 32% of the non-acting nominees this year. The percentage of female Oscar nominees in 2024 increased only slightly compared to 2023. Here is what some female filmmakers had to say about their Oscar-nominated work for the major categories in the 2024 Academy Awards. Their Oscar-nominated movies are listed in alphabetical order.
This riveting French drama (which takes place largely in a courtroom) tells the story of a famous novelist named Sandra Voyter (played by Sandra Hüller), a German immigrant who is on trial in France for the murder of her French husband, who was a university professor. Anatomy of a Fall (distributed in the U.S. by Neon) won the Palme d’Or (the top prize) at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, making director Justine Triet the third woman director in the festival’s history to win this award. Anatomy of a Fall is also nominated for Best Picture, with the nomination shared by producers Marie-Ange Luciani and David Thion.
Triet is the only woman this year who has an Oscar nomination for Best Director. Triet and her partner Arthur Harari, who co-wrote Anatomy of a Fall, received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Anatomy of a Fall also garnered Oscar nominations for Hüller (Best Actress in a Leading Role) and Laurent Sénéchal (Best Film Editing).
During an October 2023 public Q&A at the New York Film Festival, Triet said that she and Harari started writing the screenplay during the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020. “In the beginning, it’s just discussions without writing anything about the main thing we really wanted,” Triet commented on the writing process. “After we are in separate rooms, we just send email of the scenes.”
Triet said that Hüller was the only actress she had in mind as the star of Anatomy of Fall when she was writing the screenplay. (Hüller co-starred in Triet’s 2019 movie Sybil.) “We tried to not imitate the U.S. legal drama,” Triet said. “In the beginning, we made many mistakes. The French lawyer who helped us a lot [as a consultant] — Vincent Courcelle-Labrousse — told us, ‘You are not in the U.S. It’s not the same game in France. We have to play the French card.’ I like legal dramas. We saw a lot of movies in the writing process — all the classics, many series, and documentaries.
As for directing Anatomy of a Fall, Triet commented on taking the unusual step of crafting sound design of an audio recording depicting a spousal physical fight that is pivotal evidence in the trial. It is deliberately unclear in the audio recording who instigated the altercation. “Seeing all the cinematic representations of the legal system,” Triet said, “we were surprised to find the tropes of the mise-en-scène, especially the lighting from above, as kind of a divine judgment. We wanted to do something that was very different from that — especially since I had spent a lot of time in courtrooms myself. … I didn’t go to cinema school. I did art school in Paris and learned [about filmmaking] from classic movies and documentaries. …The older I get, the more I’ve let go of the idea of [being] over-controlling.”
With worldwide ticket sales of $1.4 billion, Barbie is the highest-grossing film of 2023 and the highest-grossing film in the history of Warner Bros. Pictures. It’s the first live-action, major-studio movie based on Mattel’s popular Barbie toy doll brand. Barbie director Greta Gerwig is the first woman to be a solo director for a billion-dollar movie and the highest-grossing movie of the year. The story in Barbie is about life-sized dolls Barbie (played by Margot Robbie) and Ken (played by Ryan Gosling) navigating the differences between life in Barbie Land and “the real world.”
The movie features behind-the-scenes work from two power couples: Gerwig and husband Noah Baumbach co-wrote Barbie, which is nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. Barbie star Robbie and husband Tom Ackerley are two of the Oscar-nominated producers of Barbie (along with producers Robbie Brenner and David Heyman), which is nominated for Best Picture.
Other women who received Oscar nominations for Barbie are America Ferrera (Best Actress in a Supporting Role); “What Was I Made For” co-songwriter Billie Eilish (Best Original Song); Jacqueline Durran (Best Costume Design); and Sarah Greenwood and Katie Spencer (Best Production Design). Gosling (Oscar-nominated for Best Actor in a Supporting Role) performs “I’m Just Ken” in the movie, which garnered an Oscar nod for Best Original Song for co-songwriters Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt.
Gerwig and Robbie shared their process of making Barbie during a virtual press conference with the Critics Choice Association in January 2024.
Gerwig said of crafting the Barbie screenplay: “When Noah and I wrote the script, it was fun and funny. And at one point, we were making each other laugh hysterically. At one point, we were making each other tear up. It was this feeling that we were creating this thing that felt so wild and anarchic and hilarious and heartbreaking. We were excited by it.”
Gerwig added, “I was amazed that we were allowed to make it and that we made it in the form that it is. I think the feeling that we had translated to everyone on set. I felt like all the actors, all the designers, the DP [director of photography] came with this enthusiasm and delight in the whole process. And they continued it. It was like that first feeling of when we got back from audiences who were watching it. It was amazing. It was part of why we wanted to make the movie.”
The screenplay came from wanting to take big risks, no matter what the consequences, Gerwig said: “We were writing it in the midst of [the COVID-19 pandemic] lockdown, when no one was going to movies. We thought, ‘Well, if we made one last movie, what would it be? Let’s make something wild.’
“That kind of got brought back to us,” Gerwig commented on audiences’ enthusiastic reactions to Barbie. “It was amazing. It was like, ‘Oh, the joy we felt wasn’t misplaced. It was shared.’ I think it’s incredible to feel that. I think what’s incredible to me is how globally it has connected and resonated. That’s been amazing. I love the script. When we were done writing it, I really thought that no one would ever let me make it.”
As a producer, Robbie is one of the people who was in charge of securing the rights to make the Barbie movie and deciding that Gerwig would be the director. Robbie commented: “The fun thing about Barbie [as a brand] is that there is no set narrative. She’s a doll. It’s not like there’s a template of what needs to happen, in order for it to be a Barbie story. It was unpaved territory in that regard. I knew it would be exciting to a lot of people.”
Robbie said that Gerwig was her first and only choice to direct Barbie: “Why Greta? Other than the fact that I’ve been obsessed with Greta for so, so long and have wanted to work with her for so long. Something I recognized in her work was the ability to have a giant, beating heart — even when things are very funny, things are very clever. … There’s something about Greta’s work that always invites you in, even when it’s extremely clever. It’s always real and personal.”
Robbie also remarked on why she thinks Barbie became such a massive hit: “For such a big movie, it’s also really a personal film. And we put of a lot of us in it, right down to the montage at the end. That’s video footage that we provided of our loved ones. Various cast and crew members sent in footage. It’s so strange to put so much of yourselves in a big summer blockbuster film. And I think that was somehow felt. People felt like, ‘We’re having an intimate dialogue. This movie is for me.’ And I think people really responded to that.”
Netflix’s biopic on composer/orchestra conductor Leonard Bernstein has gotten praise and criticism for focusing more on his love life than his musical accomplishments. Amy Durning and Kristie Macosko Krieger — two of the Maestro producers who received an Oscar nomination for Best Picture — say that the movie was always intended to be this way. Bradley Cooper is the star, director, co-writer, and one of the producers of Maestro, which tells Bernstein’s story from young adulthood to his senior years. Steven Spielberg and Fred Berner are the other two producers who share a Best Picture nomination for Maestro.
Maestro doesn’t shy away from depicting Bernstein’s turbulent marriage to actress Felicia Montealegre (played by Carey Mulligan), including her knowledge before and during their marriage that Bernstein was having affairs with men. In addition to Best Picture, Maestro’s nominations are for Best Actor in a Leading Role, Best Actress in a Leading Role, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Sound, and Best Makeup and Hairstyling. Kay Georgiou, Lori McCoy-Bell, and Kazu Hiro share the nomination in the latter category.
At a November 2023 Q&A after a Maestro screening at Sag Harbor Cinema in New York state, Durning said the quality of Maestro was greatly influenced by getting the approval of the three surviving children of Bernstein and Montealegre: “I don’t think we would’ve gotten the movie that has manifested without their enthusiasm and honesty. They were everything, from opening up their homes, to their parents’ closets, to all the huge archive that is left behind that speaks to who they are and who their family was.”
Macosko Krieger added: “I also worked with the Bernstein kids on [director Steven Spielberg’s 2021 remake of] West Side Story, so I think they were predisposed to give us some grace. They knew that [Maestro] would be in good hands with all of us. Bradley [Cooper] said, ‘Let’s turn this into a love story. Let’s talk about Lenny and Felicia. Let’s just not have it be about Leonard Bernstein.’ When the [Bernstein] family heard that, they said, ‘This is incredible. You’re going to make a story about our mother as well as our father?’ And I think that’s where we thought, ‘This is the movie that needs to be made.’”
As for how Maestro handled depicting antisemitism and homophobia, Durning commented. “We always knew it was part of his story. In the beginning, you’re figuring out what the balance is. There are so many facets to Lenny, which is part of the huge job of figuring out how to do it. In the writing of the script, it always came back to being a story of the marriage, but giving them those moments where they can touch on that material and touch on the conflicts he had.”
When asked how the Maestro filmmakers handled the movie’s headline-making makeup (and the controversy over Cooper’s prosthetic nose in the movie), Macosko Krieger replied: “Working as hard as you can for authenticity. Bradley was at [makeup artist] Kazu [Hiro]’s house, and they worked on honing the makeup and the right balance for his face at every stage.”
Macosko Krieger added: “They [Cooper and Hiro] worked for three and a half years … and they just refined the makeup. I think the gratifying piece was when they would FaceTime the Bernstein kids. The Bernstein kids would look at Bradley and go, ‘Oh my God. That’s our father.’ You sort of knew you were going to the right place.”
Oscar-nominated May December screenwriter Samy Burch has joined a rare club of women who have gotten an Oscar nod for their first feature-film screenplay. It is the only Oscar nomination for Netflix’s May December, a comedy/drama that is inspired by the real-life scandalous tale of convicted sex offender Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau, the controversial couple who made headlines after Letourneau began a sexual relationship with Fualaau in 1996, when he was 12, and she was his 34-year-old married teacher and the mother of four children. Letourneau was in prison for this crime from 1998 to 2004. In 1997 and 1998, respectively, she had two daughters fathered by Fualaau, who married Letourneau in 2005.
Directed by Todd Haynes, May December (which takes place in 2015) was written before Haynes got involved in the project. In the movie, the character based on Letourneau is named Gracie Atherton-Yoo (played by Julianne Moore), and the Fualaau-based character is Joe Yoo (played by Charles Melton), who are married parents living in suburban Georgia. The spouses’ lives become disrupted by a visit from a 36-year-old famous actress named Elizabeth Berry (played by Natalie Portman), who is starring as Gracie in a made-for-TV movie and who spends time with the couple for research.
At a May December press conference held in September 2023 at the New York Film Festival, Burch said of writing the screenplay: “I felt the original spark was this character of Joe. … This man in a situation of being 36 and about to be an empty nester, a person who hadn’t really had time to process what had happened to him and the media blitz that followed and the heartbreak of that.”
Burch commented on adding dark comedy to the story: “I like the tonal mix of humor and real genuine sadness and heartbreak. I feel like some of the humor is so uncomfortable, it breaks the tension. It’s needed. Some of [the humor] is more acerbic, dealing with this actress coming to town and the Hollywood machine of it and the satire of that. That’s what I’m interested in as a viewer.”
When asked how much of the real-life scandal influenced the screenplay, Burch said: “I started writing it in 2019. I really wanted a fictional story that dealt with this tabloid culture of the ‘90s that has sort of bled into this true crime biopic world that we’re in right now. And question that transition and why we want to keep creating these stories. That was the real jumping-off point for me. I think these stories that are in the ether are embedded in everybody’s cultural history.”
The filmmakers of Universal Pictures’ Oppenheimer — a biopic of atomic bomb inventor J. Robert Oppenheimer, starring Cillian Murphy in the title role — knew they were taking a risk when they made it a three-hour movie. A movie that is least three hours long that goes on to become a box-office megahit is usually an epic with a lot of action scenes, such as 2019’s Avengers: Endgame or 1997’s Titanic. Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer is an unlikely blockbuster because it is a talkative drama about a scientist dealing with political and emotional consequences of inventing a weapon of mass destruction. However, Oppenheimer became a blockbuster and has grossed $958 million in worldwide ticket sales. Oppenheimer is based on the 2005 nonfiction book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, written by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin.
Oppenheimer is nominated for 13 Oscars, including Best Picture, making it the leading Oscar contender in a year where Oppenheimer has been dominating Best Picture categories at every major awards show that has movie categories. Emma Thomas, who is Nolan’s wife and producing partner, is nominated with Nolan and Charles Roven in the Best Picture category. Ruth De Jong and Claire Kaufman share Oppenheimer’s Oscar nomination for Best Production Design. Ellen Mirojnick is nominated for Best Costume Design. Murphy is nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role; Emily Blunt is nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting Role; and Robert Downey Jr. is nominated Best Actor in a Supporting Role. The other Oscar nods for Oppenheimerare Best Director, Best Film Editing, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, and Best Sound.
Thomas talked about making Oppenheimer at a November 2023 Q&A at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. “The main job of a producer is to hire well and to work with people who make you look good,” Thomas said. “You spend many months making plans for what could go wrong. The crew we work with, they are wonderful. They can do anything. If ever things go down in the world, I want to be with the film crew, because they can work miracles.”
Thomas commented on how the box-office success of a three-hour movie like Oppenheimer is proof that movie audiences are willing to go to theaters to see this type of movie. “There’s been a great deal of chasing of streaming on the part of studios,” Thomas said. “We’ve been hearing for years now that streaming is the way of the future, people want to watch movies in their homes, theaters are dead, kids don’t have the attention spans to watch a movie beyond three hours. Imagine that! As a result, the studios have been leaving money on the table. I think the strikes have been part of a correction of sorts.”
Thomas added, “Chris has often said that the studios have not been reckoning with the actual cost of making films. They haven’t been paying people properly. They’ve been losing money because they’ve been looking at their actual share prices rather than the money that’s actually coming in. I think the success of [Oppenheimer] and some of the other films [of 2023] is that there is a desire for people to leave their houses, to have a collective experience, to be transported to a different world — whatever that may be — to be engaged in somebody else’s story beyond their own, and to be inspired. For that reason, I feel very positive about the way forward. Hollywood is nothing if not a business that copies what’s succeeded. They’re very good and looking at what’s worked and slavishly following that. Hopefully, that means many more big movies in theaters.”
Thomas revealed she initially had doubts about the time length of Oppenheimer: “I was not thrilled about a three-hour film. You’re thinking about how many screenings you can fit in, in a day. … In theory, three hours seemed too much for me. I am the sort of person who falls asleep at 9 o’clock at night. I look at a movie’s running length. When we then made [Oppenheimer], we go through a process in post[production] where we watch the film every Friday for many months to get the right version of the film.”
Thomas added, “I had to admit, once I saw the three-hour version, it was the right length for this film. Out of all of the films that we made, I never once objected to watching the film again. And every time I saw it, I was seeing new details, new elements of performance that I hadn’t seen before. You can watch a movie that’s 90 minutes long that feels too long. You can see a three-hour film that feels too short. This was the right amount of time for this particular story.”
Celine Song, who has a background as a playwright, took inspiration from her real-life experiences to make her feature-film debut as the writer/director of A24’s emotional drama Past Lives. The movie, which takes place from 1990 to 2014, shows what happens when South Korean best friends/childhood sweethearts Moon Na “Nora” Young (played as an adult by Greta Lee) and Jung Hae Sung (played as an adult by Teo Yoo) don’t see each other in person for 24 years, after Nora and her family moved to North America, but they keep in touch through online videoconferencing and social media. The heart of the story is their in-person reunion in 2014, when Hae Sung goes to New York City to visit playwright Nora, who is now married to an American author named Arthur Zaturansky (played by John Magaro), who is curious and a little uncomfortable about the arrival of Hae Sung.
Past Lives has two Oscar nominations: Best Picture (with the nomination shared by producers Christine Vachon, Pamela Koffler, and David Hinojosa) and Best Original Screenplay, which is a nomination for Song. At a November 2023 public Q&A the Directors Guild of America Theater in Los Angeles, Song said of making Past Lives: “It was my very first film. Something that I was asking [Greta Lee and Teo Yoo] was to have a tremendous amount of faith in me, who has no reputation, no films to show them. So much about it had to be about earning their trust. And, of course, every day telling the story that we wanted to tell. In a relationship … it needs great communication. That’s the best way I could help them.”
Song described her approach in writing the Past Lives screenplay: “The thing that has to work in any dramatic storytelling is that the audience has to feel alive in it. Having spent over 10 years in theater, that was something I was coming to face-to-face with every day. Part of making work that’s alive, and asking the audience to stay alive throughout it, it has to have some form of real-life stakes. … The thing I’m asking the audience to be a part of is the mystery [of the relationships in the movie]. It’s a bit of casting the audience to be a detective. … From there, the audience can have direction on how to encounter [the main characters’] story.
Song elaborated that the Past Lives screenplay is also her way of not doing a typical movie about a love triangle: “It would be much easier if the villain was a person. But the truth is that the villain of the story is the 24 years [apart] and the Pacific Ocean. I think it was always important from the beginning that we were not going to treat this movie like a traditional love triangle, where they start fighting or being upset.”
Song continued, “The truth is these two men hold the key to the woman they care about that the other guy doesn’t have. Hae Sung knows something about Nora that Arthur doesn’t know, and Arthur knows something about Nora that Hae Sung doesn’t know. You could either fight each other for the keys, or you could resent each other for the keys that they don’t have. What they’re going to say instead is to be grateful to each other and the fact that this woman can be fully understood only with the both of them there. Masculinity is something I was thinking of at the time. Masculinity is often thought of as chest-thumping. The masculinity that I love … in the men that I love … is when they’re able to set themselves aside for the person that they care about.”
Emma Stone is a producer and a star of Searchlight Pictures’ quirky comedy/drama Poor Things, in which she portrays the character of Bella Baxter, a British woman who becomes an unwilling scientific experiment and evolves from having the mind of a child to the mind of an adult. Bella also fights to have her own identity and independence when several men in her life try to control her. Poor Things is based on Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel of the same name.
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and written by Tony McNamara, Poor Things has 11 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. Stone, Lanthimos, Ed Guiney, and Andrew Lowe are the producers who share the Best Picture nomination. Holly Waddington is nominated for Best Costume Design. Nadia Stacey, Mark Coulier and Josh Weston share the nomination for Best Makeup and Hairstyling. The other Oscar nominations for Poor Things include Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, and Best Original Score. Stone is nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role, and Mark Ruffalo is nominated for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.
At a December 2023 virtual press conference for Poor Things, Stone talked about reteaming with Lanthimos, who previously collaborated with her on the Oscar-winning 2018 comedy/drama The Favourite. But this time around, with Poor Things, Stone was a producer of the movie. “Yorgos asked me to be a producer on [Poor Things],” Stone said. “We’d been talking about this movie for about three years at that point. I don’t know if it changed anything about what our dynamic was, but it definitely feels great to [have] that extra piece, when it comes to Bella and this story.”
Stone added, “I like to try things. About working with Yorgos, I feel completely comfortable with him. I admire him and respect him so much as a filmmaker and as a person. It just feels like an amazing environment. I also love the material that he’s drawn to and the way he tells stories. It’s a great combination of things. The things he makes I tend to absolutely love and really speak to me. And we have a great relationship. It’s just wonderful to work with him.”
As for the much-talked about character of Bella Baxter, Stone commented: “She’s my favorite character of all time. And it was with Yorgos? It was not a hard decision. I felt so lucky.”
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