PARK CITY, Utah - Tamara Jenkins doesn't want to point to gender bias as a factor in her long wait between movies.
But the decorated filmmaker - who has come to Sundance with "Private Life," her first new movie in more than a decade - doesn't want to not point to it either.
"As much as I know I kind of work slow, and, yes, I had a baby, and I feel a little ashamed it's been that long," Jenkins told The Washington Post Saturday at the festival, "at the same time I'm like 'wait a minute it's not just me.'"
Jenkins began running down names of acclaimed modern female directors, calculating the time they had to wait between features - Patty Jenkins, with 14 years between "Monster" and 2017's "Wonder Woman;" Alison Maclean, with 17 years between "Jesus' Son" and 2016's "The Rehearsal;" Debra Granik, with eight years between Oscar best-picture nominee "Winter's Bone" and her 2018 Sundance movie "Leave No Trace."
"It's her, and her, and her," said the writer-director, whose last film, "The Savages," took Sundance by storm in 2007 on its way to Oscar nominations for star Laura Linney and screenwriter Jenkins. The film, a drama about a struggling adult brother and sister, is also regarded as one of Philip Seymour Hoffman's best performances. "I'm not going to say what it is but we know what it is."
She paused. "It's systemic. It's gotta be systemic. There is something in the water."
Jenkins wants to make sure she at least arrives with a splash. The long periods between movies has given the writer-director an almost mythic aura in the film business, at the same time that the wait says plenty about an industry's reluctance to trust even Oscar-approved female filmmakers.
At a moment when the question of equal opportunities for female directors has taken center stage in Hollywood - "all-male nominees," as Natalie Portman pointedly remarked at the Golden Globes - Jenkins is demonstrating that sometimes even deeply ingrained bias can crumble in the face of highly original work.
"Private Life" centers on a 40-something couple, played by Paul Giamatti and Kathryn Hahn, that has undertaken a string of IVF and other fertility methods after being unable to conceive. The return of the couple's niece to their lives then complicates their equation. The dramedy has the kind of naturalist pace and humanist tone in which both the drama and comedy stem from small moments, helping the film draw some of the strongest reviews yet at Sundance.
Jenkins based the movie on the experience that she and her husband, the filmmaker Jim Taylor, had in trying to have a baby. (The New York-based couple now has an 8-year-old daughter.)
Netflix will release "Private Life" in the fall. Given the festival notices, the streamer may well have its first serious multiple-category contender, building on the more modest buzz "Mudbound" has generated this year.
But it was the person behind the camera that forms the greatest industry subplot to "Private Life." Jenkins says a desire to pour a lot of ideas into scripts - "all my early drafts are 200 pages" - and whittle down later can make for a longer development process. At least part of the mystery about her long periods of disappearance, she said, can be explained by this.
But she doesn't think the 11 years since "The Savages" is all about her meticulous work habits - a skepticism among studios and financiers to give a proper budget to a female director played into it, too, she suggests. "Private Life" had some false starts before landing at Netflix, including with one entity she declined to name that wouldn't earmark a high enough budget, she said.
At least Jenkins didn't have to bring on Taylor and his collaborator, the director Alexander Payne, as executive producers to get the movie financed. That may have happened with "The Savages," which failed to get a green light at Universal's Focus Features before ending up at Fox Searchlight. It was Taylor and Payne's willingness to sign on as executive producers, Jenkins said, that she believed helped to get it over the top.
"No one said it but the search for financing got a lot easier with them," said the filmmaker, who also had nine years go by between her debut feature, the semi-autobiographical "The Slums of Beverly Hills" and "The Savages." (Jenkins and Taylor, incidentally, did passes on the script of another 2018 Sundance movie, the Nick Hornby adaptation "Juliet, Naked".)
Jenkins said she was still adjusting to modern media realities.
"When you make a movie every 10 years you're like a gopher looking up and being surprised by what you see," she said. "There was no Twitter when 'The Savages' came out. Now when a movie plays a festival you have to pay attention to that. And I don't understand how you distinguish between the opinions that matter and the lunatics we should be ignoring."
She said it wasn't the only change that had immediately caught her eye. The past months have, of course, brought the Me Too and Time's Up movements and their goal of ridding the business of harassment and all forms of gender inequity. Jenkins said she was heartened by what she saw, but was still reserving judgment on its potential long-term effectiveness.
"I hope it's not a fad," Jenkins said.
"But I don't know if I can evaluate it," she added. "I just got here again."
- The Washington Post.
