THE WOMEN OF THE FORCE
Females are at last making a mark both in front of and behind the cameras
Jyn Erso is not a princess or a jedi. She is, however, the second female character with a lead role in a Star Wars movie in the past two years. It’s a statistic that would have been unthinkable 40 years ago when Princess Leia reigned alone in a galaxy of men and her dialogue was less than half that of the golden droid C-3PO in Star Wars (1977).
Even with the advent of back-to-back female protagonists, however, the women on screen are only now catching up with those working behind the scenes at Industrial Light & Magic, the special effects studio founded by George Lucas.
Take Rachel Rose, who has spent the past decade as an engineer at the studio. As a freshman at Grinnell College in Iowa, Rose had never programmed a computer. She was surprised to find that, in her introductory computer science courses, her classmates were all men and had been coding for years. Rose soon caught up with them and, by the time she graduated with her doctorate in computer science from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, she had become accustomed not only to software design and computer graphics but also to being the only woman in the room.
So she was stunned when she began work at the studio and found herself surrounded by women, particularly in leadership. “It made me feel less out of place,” she said.
After her development of virtual production and camerawork for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Rose was promoted to supervisor of research and development. She is part of a quiet revolution now taking place at the company, where women account for 60% of studio leadership and have created memorable effects for many blockbuster franchises, including Star Wars, Indiana Jones, The Avengers, Star Trek and Jurassic Park. Women also account for half of the company’s entry-level ranks.
The entertainment industry is not usually so welcoming. In 2016 women represented 19% of all behind-the-scenes employment in American films, according to the Center for Women in Television and Film. It is a percentage that has remained unchanged for 20 years.
Although the visual effects department typically hires the largest number of employees in big-budget films, the number of women working in the field is exceptionally low. Women made up only 5% of all visual effects supervisors on the 250 top-grossing films in 2014, the last year for which figures are available, and many teams employed no women artists whatsoever.
“The first step is for people in leadership to say this is not acceptable,” said Lynwen Brennan, general manager of Lucasfilm and president/ general manager of Industrial Light & Magic. While the visual effects studio was started to generate special effects for Star Wars, it is now the largest in the motion picture industry, working not only with Lucasfilm but also with studios around the globe.
Brennan is on a self-described “crusade” to remedy the entrenched gender inequality of her industry. As part of her mission, she and her team have carefully assessed how promotions are handled, asking why male candidates may be advanced over their female colleagues. To address what she called “false assumptions” that hinder female employees — for instance, managers might believe motherhood makes a candidate less able to handle increased responsibility — the studio offers on-site child care and schedule flexibility.
Additionally, Brennan is concerned about the pipeline of women entering the visual effects field. The industry relies heavily on computer science graduates, yet fewer women are majoring in the subject.
According to data collected by the National Science Foundation, 18% of computer science bachelor’s degrees were awarded to women in 2014, down from a peak of 37% in 1984. To broaden its reach, Industrial Light & Magic is hiring employees from a variety of different backgrounds, while eliminating experience and education requirements for entry-level positions.
Paige Warner has benefited from Brennan’s crusade. As a member of the visual effects team, she has been an integral part of developing the studio’s facial-capture development software, which allowed Rogue One to digitally resurrect cast members, notably Peter Cushing, who died in 1994, and to bring back a youthful Carrie Fisher.
Warner “absolutely deserves recognition as a driving force”, Brennan said. “Paige has been so passionate about facial capture.”
While the technology had been used before, its ability to accurately reproduce motion had been limited and faces posed a particular challenge because, as Warner explained, “everyone is an expert. We all look at faces all day long.”
And yet, Warner said, when Carrie Fisher first saw her image in Rogue One, she believed it was archival footage. “It was the biggest compliment I could receive,” she said. Warner will receive another compliment this month when she accepts a technical achievement award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
There is little doubt that facial capture technology played an instrumental role in Rogue One, tying the story together and creating a link with the original Star Wars in ways that would have been implausible previously. Executives credit the diversity of their team with the success of their visual effects.
“You need a lot of voices,” said Jessica Teach, executive-in-charge at the studio’s headquarters in San Francisco, as she described the technical advances made by Kaori Ogino, a creature supervisor on her team. “It’s not that a man couldn’t have done it,” she explained, “It’s just that Kaori did it first.”
Warner said her experience at the studio has been “extremely positive”. She feels well supported by colleagues, particularly during a challenging period in her life six years ago when she transitioned to the female gender. “My inbox filled up,” she said, noting that even Brennan, the president of the company, wrote her an encouraging message.
As supportive as the studio is of its female staff, there has been outside criticism. Star Wars has never had a female director and this year, at the Academy Awards, where Rogue One is up for sound-mixing and visual effects Oscars, the faces of the franchise will be mostly male. All six of the nominees are men. In fact, in the 89-year history of the Academy Awards, only three women have ever been nominated for an Oscar in visual effects.
This is a statistic that Brennan hopes to change. She sees her work as a continuation of George Lucas’s legacy. The high proportion of female executives at Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic can be partly attributed to Lucas, who sold the company to Disney in 2012 but advanced the careers of the women now running it. In Brennan’s nearly 30 years at the studio, all four of her supervisors have been women. The most recent is Kathleen Kennedy, the prolific Hollywood producer whom Lucas handpicked to succeed him as president of Lucasfilm.
Kennedy said there is no excuse for the lack of diversity in the entertainment industry.
“There is no doubt that the visual effects community and film industry as a whole need to be more inclusive and equitable,” she acknowledged, adding: “We are determined to strive every day to build a much more diverse and inclusive company. We will be better for it and the industry will be stronger because of it.”
Kennedy may help fulfil this vision if she hires a woman to direct a future Star Wars film. “It is going to happen,” she said at a women’s summit in 2015, “I have no doubt.”
Kennedy’s words are reminiscent of those of Jyn Erso, the heroine of Rogue One.
“We have hope,” she says, her eyes pleading as she addresses the assembly of rebel troops. “Rebellions are built on hope.”