Out of the margins
Julia Hart refocuses ’ 70s crime genre on the wife’s tale in ‘ Woman’
Five years ago, while she watched and rewatched 1970s and ’ 80s crime genre classics, certain scenes lingered with f ilmmaker Julia Hart: the moment the study doors close on Diane Keaton’s Kay in “The Godfather,” shutting her out of her husband’s inner circle; how Tuesday Weld’s Jessie is abruptly shuffled into a car in the dead of night and sent away from the action, an infant in her arms, in “Thief.”
Female characters in movies like these often exist in service to a male protagonist’s story — when they aren’t pushed out of the narrative completely. ( Or rendered mostly silent, as in Martin Scorsese’s more recent “The Irishman.”) Devouring these f ilms with her husband, cowriter and producer Jordan Horowitz, shortly after the birth of their f irst child, Hart wondered about the women left to the margins of the stories on- screen.
“In ‘ Thief,’ there’s a moment when Tuesday Weld’s character goes one way and the movie goes another,” said Hart, who’s built her career upending genres with female- driven stories. “But I couldn’t stop thinking about her character, about Jessie and her baby and what happened to her. How was she going to survive? How was she going to f igure out what was next for her?”
Her response is now streaming on Amazon Prime ( with a limited theatrical run where venues are open). “I’m Your Woman,” directed by Hart, produced by Horowitz and written by the couple, follows a 1970s gangster’s wife whose husband’s dirty deeds catapult her into a journey of self- discovery.
“I wanted to tell the story of all of those women in those movies who are relegated to the sidelines,” said Hart. “I thought, ‘ Wouldn’t it be cool to make a ’ 70s crime
drama ... but about the wife and mother, instead of the thief himself?’ ”
It’s a brisk November afternoon and Hart and Horowitz are sitting in the garden of the Los Angeles home they share with their sons, ages 2 and 6, looking back on “I’m Your Woman.” The couple began writing it years ago when they f irst became parents — even before Hart’s f ilm career started taking off and Horowitz was nominated for an Academy Award for producing 2016’ s “La La Land.”
At the time, Hart had recently made her own leap to the director’s chair, and Horowitz was realizing that he was a writer too. Fast- forward to 2020, and the duo have made and cowritten four pictures, each directed by Hart and produced by Horowitz: high school dramedy “Miss Stevens,” superheroine drama “Fast Color,” young adult musical romance “Stargirl” and now “I’m Your Woman.”
Movies have always been part of their life together. Horowitz is still producing other projects, including an Apple series with director Damien Chazelle and an Ike Barinholtz election comedy for Amazon. But he and Hart vow they’ll never write with anyone else — why would they, when creating together is so fun? In the Hart- Horowitz household, brainstorming and talking through ideas just naturally happens over dinner, or while watching f ilms together, or while caring for their sons.
Through this pandemic, the couple have kept busy writing and developing material for their Original Headquarters banner, although they’ve had no desire to write our current COVID- 19 reality into their f ilms. “I don’t really want to watch that. I’m living it,” Hart said. “I’d rather watch the world as it can be and hopefully will be soon enough again.”
“I’m Your Woman” was filmed in fall 2019. It isn’t the f irst movie the duo have released to streaming during this time: “Stargirl,” their musical YA adaptation about an effervescent teen, premiered on Disney+ in March. Soon after, the pandemic exploded and the pair had to complete post- production on “I’m Your Woman” before world premiering it virtually at AFI Fest.
Emmy and two- time Golden Globe winner Rachel Brosnahan (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”) stars in “I’m Your Woman” as Jean, a sheltered suburban housewife married to Eddie ( Bill Heck), a career criminal as charming as he is secretive. One day, Eddie brings home an infant for Jean to raise; soon, his latest job goes south. Then comes a knock on the door in the middle of the night. A panicked associate sends Jean packing with the baby, a bag of cash and a protector named Cal ( Arinzé Kene) but no answers as to Eddie’s whereabouts or what she’s supposed to do now.
From there, the similarities to Michael Mann’s 1981 neo- noir “Thief ” diverge, and the two films fall into intriguing conversation with each other. (“I’m Your Woman” is titled after a line spoken by Weld’s character to James Caan in “Thief,” and Mann is thanked in the credits.)
Rather than tracking Eddie, “I’m Your Woman” stays with Jean as she grapples with sudden motherhood and the uncertainty of her new life on the lam — aided by Cal and his wife, Teri ( Marsha Stephanie Blake), who reluctantly takes Jean under her wing.
The characters and story captivated Brosnahan, who makes her f irst foray into producing with the project. Re- centering the genre on Jean, a departure from the 1950s stand- up comedian the actress plays on her Amazon series, leads to rich interactions with Cal and Teri’s family, including their son, Paul ( De’Mauri Parks), and Cal’s kindly father, Art ( Frankie Faison), as well as her own baby, Harry ( played by Justin and Jameson Charles) — with no shortage of danger and action.
“There have been so many dynamic and fascinating women who are the side pieces in some of these beloved f ilms,” said Brosnahan, who was instrumental in bringing Blake on to play Teri and produced the f ilm alongside Horowitz ( she will next executive produce Amazon’s Dec. 31 all- female comedy special “Yearly Departed”). “I think it’s important that we are able to swing the lens on characters who often live in the fringes of these familiar stories.”
As they did with the superhero tale in “Fast Color,” which starred Gugu Mbatha- Raw as a woman with superpowers who was on the run, Hart and Horowitz here take a genre they love and “break” it, widening its scope.
“I’m Your Woman” was ambitious, with set pieces, car chases and atmospheric period detail. It would require a certain budget and the right home, particularly after what the f ilmmakers went through with “Fast Color,” a “heartbreaker” of an experience in which they struggled to f ind a distributor for the indie sci- f i darling, only to see it released onto just 25 screens and given the barest of promotion.
Unlike “Fast Color,” whose multigenerational Black heroines were not written with any background in mind before the casting stage, race and gender in “I’m Your Woman” were specific to the characters from the start. “I was interested in telling the story of a white woman coming to learn about intersectionality,” said Hart. “Understanding your oppression as a woman, but your privilege as a white one — it’s the reason our country is in the state it’s in, thanks to the ignorance of so many white women.”
She was also acutely conscious of the lens through which the story would be told. To write the protective Teri, played with nuance by “When They See Us” Emmy nominee Blake, Hart turned to the works of Angela Davis, Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison, among others, to inform her understanding of what Teri’s reality might have been at that place and time in history. “I will never take on a historic f igure of another race in my work,” said Hart, who is white. “But I don’t think that that means as white creators that we shouldn’t tell inclusive, representative, diverse stories.”
How Hart and Horowitz ended up making the movie with Amazon Studios had a lot to do with “Fast Color.” Although underseen upon release, the f ilm garnered fans among critics and industry folks, including Amazon Studios exec Scott Foundas and former cochief Ted Hope, who brought it to their TV arm. The company bought rights to the movie, which is now being developed as a series with Viola Davis’ JuVee Productions and LD Entertainment. Then, the studio asked: “What do you guys want to do next?”
The answer was “I’m Your Woman.” When Brosnahan came aboard, she pitched Blake to play Teri, with whom Jean develops a crucial relationship. “I loved her strength and her silence,” said Blake. “She’s a still- waters- run- deep kind of woman.”
To play Cal, who has his own walls up around his family and their past, Hart cast a wide net and stopped searching when she met British actor Kene over Skype: “It was the version of Cal that was in my heart, in front of me.”
With Amazon’s backing, filming began last fall in McKeesport, Pa., near Pittsburgh. Hart and Horowitz brought in crew from their previous movies, including production designer Gae S. Buckley, set decorator Patrick Cassidy, costume designer Natalie O’Brien and cinematographer Bryce Fortner, to make the 1970s setting feel present, and hired composer Aska Matsumiya, who wrote the evocative theme song within 24 hours of reading the script.
There were car stunts and a carefully choreographed nightclub shootout sequence tracking a chaotic scene with 300 background actors. Even so, Hart laughed, the hardest shots were moments of her youngest cast members simply sleeping. “Babies don’t know their role; they haven’t read the script,” said Brosnahan.
Hart’s set had a special energy, she said. “She’s incredibly generous with her time and her spirit and her talent,” Brosnahan said. “It brings that out in other people. It brings out sides to them you might not ordinarily get to see on a film set, and ultimately, it makes everyone’s art better.”
Just as Hart and Horowitz had written bits of their life into the f ilm, those moments took on new dimension as cast members found their own magic on set.
In one scene, an improvised line from Faison resonated so profoundly, Hart and Horowitz knew it had to stay in. Art, knowing the trouble that lies ahead, teaches an apprehensive Jean how to handle a gun by gently placing a pistol in her hand with a bit of advice: “Get used to the weight of it.”
“Get used to the way this weapon feels, that you’re going to have to control — but also, you’re going to have to get used to the weight of this new trauma in your life and what your life really is,” Hart mused of the line. Faison didn’t know at the time that Hart had dreamed of closing out the f ilm with Aretha Franklin’s cover of the Band’s “The Weight.”
After wrapping the movie, the words lingered with Hart. She got them tattooed below her wrist.
“Now, it feels even more appropriate, given what the world has gone through,” said Hart. “We’ve all been through our own stuff, but there’s no walking away from it. There’s no walking around it. You just have to get used to it and live with it. You have to get used to the weight.”