The iconic Ruth Bader Ginsburg

When their movie, RBG, screened at Sundance last January, Betsy West and Julie Cohen were sneaking glances at its subject, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — who was seeing it for the first time — to gauge her reaction.

“It was nerve-racking watching her watch the film, but it looked like she was enjoying it, and she was very positive afterward,” West said. “We were extremely relieved.”

About three years ago, West and Cohen, veteran producers and directors, decided the justice was having her moment — a pop culture icon, the subject of many memes, sometimes with a little Basquiat crown on her head or with her face superimposed on a superhero’s body, and a nickname, “Notorious RBG,” inspired by the platinum-selling rapper, Notorious B.I.G., who was murdered 20 years ago. They wanted to document the octogenarian’s extraordinary life. 

Ginsburg has been on the Supreme Court since Bill Clinton appointed her in 1993. So after decades on the bench, what made her become a cult figure to millennials? West thinks it has to do with Ginsburg’s responses to some decisions the court made — when, for example, in 2013 they struck down a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, arguing it was no longer needed to prevent discrimination against African American voters. In her dissent, Ginsburg wrote that it was “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” Then, in 2014, when Hobby Lobby was allowed to decline to provide insurance coverage for contraception for religious reasons, Ginsburg wrote, “The Court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield.”

“Justice Ginsburg issued dissents that caught people’s eye,” West said. “The language was so clear and strong, and people found them inspiring.”

For West, Ginsburg had made history before she became the second women to sit on the Supreme Court, when she argued cases before that court in the 1970s that changed the world for American women. 

“Before Ruth Bader Ginsburg, women were literally second-class citizens,” West said. “They couldn’t get credit without a signature from their husband, their husbands could rape them with virtual impunity. Then she took on the law, and her idea was, ‘Hey, the United States Constitution should apply equally to men and women.’”

The movie details how when Ginsburg went to Harvard Law School, one of nine women in a class of more than 500 men, the dean asked the women what they were doing taking a seat that a man could occupy. Although she graduated from Columbia Law School at the top of her class, firms in New York didn’t want to hire a woman. Ginsburg went on to become a law professor at Rutgers and Columbia Law, helped launch the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union and served as the organization’s general counsel, and became a judge on the United States Court of Appeals.

Along with her career, the movie follows her life now, going to the opera, talking with her granddaughter, a 2017 graduate of Harvard Law School, and showing a clip of her with her legal opposite and good friend Antonin Scalia. Some of the people Cohen and West talked with include Ginsburg’s former clients, her daughter and son, childhood friends, NPR correspondent Nina Totenberg (who covers the Supreme Court), and Bill Clinton, who says he knew he wanted to appoint Ginsburg to the court 15 minutes into their interview. Writer and activist Gloria Steinem, who calls Ginsburg “the closest thing to a superhero I know,” is also interviewed, which Cohen says they thought was important to the film.

“In a way, she and Gloria Steinem were parallel to each other in the ’70s,” Cohen said. “Gloria was the public face of women’s rights before the cameras, and behind the scenes Ruth Bader Ginsburg was doing work that was just as important if not more. One way to help bring that to light was have Gloria in the film.” 

Cohen said they knew from the beginning they wanted to weave together Ginsburg’s life with her significant legal cases. Then, while filming the movie, some things came up that they wanted to include, such as Kate McKinnon’s impression of the justice on Saturday Night Live (“I like my men like I like my decisions — 5-4!”). And then there was Ginsburg’s workout, detailed in a 2017 article by a Politico reporter, titled, “I Did Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Workout. It Nearly Broke Me,” complete with drawings of the justice doing side planks in her judicial robes.

The two women asked Ginsburg if they could record her doing her push-ups and lifting weights.

“We went in to talk to her in person without cameras, and we asked with great trepidation if we could go to the gym to film her workout, and there was a pause, and then she said, ‘Yes, I think that would be possible,’” West said. “We were shocked, but as soon as we got into the room and saw the vigor with which she approaches it, we understood why she’s proud.”

This legal thriller includes a romance. Ginsburg’s husband, Martin, whom she married in 1954 and who died in 2010, recognized his wife’s talents, supported her career, and campaigned for her to be considered for the Supreme Court. He did all the cooking, since, as her children cheerfully agree, she was such a horrible cook they banned her from the kitchen. When she testified before the Senate confirmation committee (which Joe Biden chaired), Ginsburg called it the “great good fortune” of her life to meet her husband, “the first boy I ever knew who cared I had a brain.”

West and Cohen also interviewed some childhood friends of Ginsburg’s, who joke when talking about her pushups, “We can’t get off the floor!” “We can’t even get down to the floor!”

They discovered some interesting things about the justice when they talked to these friends, as well as ones from later in her life, Cohen says.

“A thing that came through was how consistent she’s been,” Cohen said. “She always had that extreme level of determination, and she would pause for a long time before responding because she was really thinking about what you were saying. The things true of her today were true of her in high school and even kindergarten.”

That steadfastness and calm has stayed with Ginsburg, from being a legal pioneer in women’s rights to her role now as an 85-year-old millennial icon, sought after for selfies and mobbed by law students everywhere.

RBG opens in theaters on May 4.