Kiwi screen’s hidden women
We aren’t the home of Harvey Weinstein, but the New Zealand screen industry has its own problems with gender, writes Jack van Beynen.
When director Gaylene Preston started working on New Zealand film sets in
1977, her colleagues gave her the nickname ‘‘Bruce’’.
‘‘It was a term of endearment, it was a way of saying, ‘You are one of us, you are in the gang, you’re Bruce,’’’ she says.
Preston, then an art director, was the only only woman on the production team at Pacific Pictures. Her male colleagues may have meant well by it, but the nickname indicated that she had to become one of the boys to fit in.
Forty years later, it would be a rare production company that only employed one woman. Women account for 44 per cent of workers in the screen industry, according to Statistics NZ data from 2015.
Nonetheless, New Zealand’s film and television industries have a gender problem. Women working in the screen industry say there’s an unconscious bias against them. Women are being passed over for top creative and technical jobs like directing and cinematography.
This isn’t exactly a secret. Funding bodies New Zealand on Air and The New Zealand Film Commission have started to monitor the roles women have in productions they’re funding. By
2020, the Film Commission aims to have half the movies it funds for early development each year directed by women. Last year, just
26 per cent of the films it funded were directed by women.
New Zealand On Air’s 2017 Diversity Report found women accounted for 34 per cent of directors on television projects it funded. Women were wellrepresented as directors of special interest programming, but made up only 10 per cent of the directors of TV dramas.
Writer, director and actress Fiona Samuel has been fighting for women in the screen industry since the 1980s. In 1984 she presented to a television industry conference about glaring disparity in the quantity and quality of acting roles offered to male and female actors.
She’s gone on to write and direct her own projects, including Katherine Mansfield biography
Bliss which won her the 2012 NZ Television Award for Best Director of a Drama or Comedy. But getting funding to translate her ideas onto screen hasn’t always been easy.
‘‘I have had projects that have been knocked back, and you receive letters that are quite coded, often, and you’re trying to read between the lines and go, ‘Why did this thing not succeed?’,’’ she says.
‘‘You don’t want to put yourself in a position where you’ve got a chip on your shoulder and you think your own work has been discriminated against, you’re really wary of that kind of thinking, you want to have a robust attitude towards it. But nonetheless if a pattern does seem to emerge and you’re looking at projects that are supported and you’re going, ‘I don’t see that artistically that’s better. I don’t see that it has a larger audience. I don’t see that the craft level is higher. I genuinely don’t see why that one got through and mine didn’t.’
‘‘After a while in that situation you start to think, ‘Is it the woman situation?’ And no one will ever tell you, you’ll never be in a situation where someone will say to you that, ‘Well, we decided not to support your thing because you’re a woman and it’s got a female protagonist, and we just don’t think that women are as interesting or as capable so that’s a no.’ Nobody would ever say that.’’
People might not say it - even to themselves - but nonetheless Samuel thinks there is an unconscious belief in the screen industry that women just aren’t as good at making films and TV. But an unconscious bias is difficult to recognise, which is why Samuel is glad organisations like NZ On Air and the Film Commission are reporting their diversity numbers.
‘‘Five years ago, women were having these conversations amongst themselves, but they were very wary about putting it out into the public arena in case it looked like it was, ‘Poor me.’ Nobody wants to draw attention to the fact that they got rejected or were unsuccessful or - you know, it’s such a confidence game, you want to tell your best story, and not look like you’re asking for sympathy or special favours.
‘‘But when the data comes in and it’s so clear, that means everybody can go, ‘Oh, okay, we don’t have to make this personal, but here is a picture that shows very clearly that women are not getting these gigs. So let’s look at why.’’’
Ginny Loane, a cinematographer best known for her work on Mahana, agrees that there is an unconscious bias against women in the screen industry - and in wider society. She says the issue is one of representation.
‘‘You think of a cinematographer, and you don’t think of a woman, or you don’t think of a Pacific Island woman with six kids. You think of all the pictures of the white guys with their viewfinders, and it’s become a real default, so basically when people are pooling for talent, they have this innate bias to pool for talent for people that look like them.’’
Loane says the issue extends to which young film-makers are taken under the wings of more experienced members on set. Because most of the people in senior roles are white men, they’ll pick other young white men to train up.
‘‘There will be the loveliest guys on set training up, really lovely young guys, who reminded them of how they were when they first started. They’re training up who’s familiar to them,’’ she says.
One reason, Loane sometimes hears, for the lack of women in senior creative roles, is that there just aren’t enough women out there. She thinks that’s untrue, but says women might lack the confidence of their male counterparts when applying for senior roles.
‘‘I’ve heard all the arguments in the book. ‘Women aren’t there, I can’t find them.’ Well, actually they’re just behind that group of white men who are all putting their hands up, they’re just in behind, and they’re sitting and working at a desk, probably,’’ Loane says.
‘‘They probably need to be approached and asked, and yes you will need to put a little bit more energy into finding them, but they are there, and they do want to work, and they do want to be directors and cinematographers and all sorts of senior positions in the film industry, and they don’t want to just stay in that lowerlevel, mid-level job for the rest of their lives. Their ambitions are just as high as everyone else’s. They just need people to believe in them.’’
Loane’s observations are supported by UK study Cut Out of
the Picture, which looks at female directors in British film.
The 2016 study found that not only did female directors make fewer films than their male counterparts, they also were given smaller budgets.
It also found the gap between numbers of male and female directors widened the further into their careers they got. Men who made one film were more likely to make a second one than women in the same position.
Cut Out of the Picture diagnosed what it called a ‘‘vicious cycle’’ when it came to women getting directing jobs. It said that the low representation of female directors in the industry meant the common image of a director was a man, which led to industry professionals assuming men made better directors than women, so that fewer women were hired to direct. And on and on and on.
The study suggest hiring more female directors is the key to breaking this cycle. Some of those future directors are being trained by Ness Simons, head tutor at the New Zealand Film and Television School in Wellington.
Simons says the school’s roster is evenly split between male and female students. She makes a point of discussing the screen industry’s biases with each year’s group of students.
‘‘It’s certainly been a focus for me, here at Film School, having discussions with the students around not just what the industry has been in the past, and traditionally how closed that has been to a lot of people, but to those people who sort of sit in that group going forward, [how they can] identify talent and ability in people who may not be just like them.’’
It’s particularly important to have those conversations with the kind of people who traditionally have occupied positions of power in the industry. Simons say that group has the most potential to enact change.
‘‘For a lot of the young guys who kind of sit solidly in the people who have always made films and will continue to make films, it’s quite overwhelming for them, and I have massive respect for their ability to stay open to that discussion and to not feel - and we have conversations around guilt, and we have conversations around what can I do... I think trying to create a space where we can have that discussion without threat but keeping everyone at the table open enough to go, ‘This is what the future could look like, this is what I could do.’’’
A gender bias is not a problem limited to screen; statistically, women are less likely to get the top jobs in many industries in New Zealand. But Simons says it’s particularly important to address in creative industries like film and television because of the role they play in shaping culture.
‘‘I think in any creative industry - music, writing novels, journalism - it’s all about having that spread of voice and that depth of reflection. It always get interesting when we get into discussions like that, because yes, absolutely, we could apply these same issues to almost any industry, but we can’t let that be permission,’’ Simons says.
‘‘We could lead it, absolutely, we could lead some of that change. I’d love to see that.’’
There have been some positive changes in recent years that suggest industry paradigms could be changing. The film commission wants half the films it funds to be female-led by 2020. NZ On Air has started annually monitoring and publicly reporting on the roles of women in television development and production. The 2017 HP48 Hour film competition - an incubator of young talent - has put an increased emphasis on women in key creative roles; this year’s winning entry was directed by Lauren Porteous. One of this year’s standout New Zealand films was Waru, a film directed by not just one, but eight, Ma¯ ori women.
Gaylene Preston, trailblazer and industry veteran, is cautiously optimistic about the future of New Zealand women in the screen industry. She viewed all this year’s female-led 48 Hours entries in her role as a judge for the Gaylene Preston/Women in Film and Television best female director award (an award she introduced after observing how many females were pushed into producer roles over the course of the weekend’s film-making).
‘‘There’s a whole new benchmark. There’s a whole new confidence,’’ she says of this year’s entries.
Preston says her biggest regret about the marginalisation of women in film and television is the stories ‘‘that weren’t even thought of’’.
But it’s also important to remember the films that were made by women, despite all the obstacles. Preston’s 1985 comedythriller genre-bender, Mr Wrong, is one example. No New Zealand distributor would screen it because of its feminist leanings. Preston and producer Robin Laing had to hire a local cinemas and screen the film themselves to prove it had an audience.
‘‘Yeah we have sexism, yes we have racism, yeah we don’t have enough money to make our work, yeah in many ways we’re sort of marginalised, but we still - we’re doing it,’’ Preston says. ‘‘And there’s plenty of countries where that’s not the case.’’