Interns meet with Oscar winners
BEVERLY HILLS — When asked by an intern how she continues to make movies despite the dismal opportunities for women behind the camera, Kathryn Bigelow said she’s fueled by her belief in each project.
“That’s what makes it possible, I guess,” the “Detroit” director told a group of aspiring young filmmakers during a candid question-and-answer session last weekend. “It’s a very arduous process. It’s not for the faint of heart. But it’s worth it.”
The audience of undergraduate and graduate students working as summer interns in the film industry sat rapt. For almost an hour, they chatted with the Oscar-winning director and several stars of her new film, “Detroit,” asking about story development, character trajectories and historical accuracy.
Her private appearance in the film academy’s executive board room was part of the new Academy Gold internship program, an entertainment-industry partnership to connect aspiring filmmakers from diverse communities with the Hollywood establishment. Sixty-nine filmschool students, most from underrepresented populations, were chosen to participate in the inaugural program: eight weeks of panel discussions, screenings and intimate conversations with filmmakers such as Bigelow, Sofia Coppola and Jada Pinkett Smith.
“People work many years before they get to meet people like Kathryn Bigelow and Sofia Coppola and all of these great people,” said 20-year-old Tracy Aivaz, an undergraduate student at University of Southern California and a summer intern in Panavision’s postproduction division. “Hearing from their experiences and knowing how they work on a set — especially since I want to be a director and I’m a woman — so seeing that people like them are out there in Hollywood being really successful, that just teaches me a lot of lessons about how I can manage my career.”
Twenty entertainment businesses — including the Walt Disney Co., Technicolor, HBO, Warner Bros. and Creative Artists Agency — funded the new internship program, which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences opened in June.
The academy has long employed summer interns, but the Academy Gold program was borne out of the growing recognition of a need for more diverse talents, said administrator Edgar Aguirre.