USA TODAY International Edition
Women lead the way in Caro’s ‘ Zookeeper’s Wife’
Wartime heroism tale one of few told from female view
LOS ANGELES This was a set that welcomed women.
There’s a photo from the making of The Zookeeper’s Wife, a new historical drama ( in theaters Friday) starring Jessica Chastain, that puts the experience in perspective.
The film, directed by Niki Caro ( Whale Rider), chronicles the efforts of a Polish woman who saved 300 Jews during World War II. In one shot, a huge group of the more than 60 women who worked on the film — producers, camera operators, production designers, stunt coordinators — are gathered.
“It seems as if it was by design, but it wasn’t,” says the director. “It was an organic act. I hire the best person for the job. Frequently, that person is female.”
For Chastain, it was eye- opening. “What’s the norm? Probably less than 10% ( of women) on a set,” says the actress, who plays Antonina Zabinski in the true story of how a woman and her husband used their Warsaw Zoo to hide Polish Jews during the Nazi occupation.
“The zoo and the home are still intact, so you can still go into the basement and see where they hid people in the tunnels. It’s incredible,” says Chastain, who went to Auschwitz to prepare for the role, and channeled Zabinski as she soothed elephants, zebras, lion cubs and even a skunk.
The film, based on the bestselling non- fiction book by Diane Ackerman, took years to get off the ground, and Caro credits Chastain’s star power with finally getting it made.
“We don’t see very many movies that speak of war from the female point of view,” says Caro, who shot the film in 2015.
At the time, the migrant crisis was heating up in Europe. Now the film arrives in a U. S. political climate rife with headlines about Mexican immigrants being split from families and deported, coupled with a rise in anti- Semitism, with Jewish Community Centers receiving bomb threats. “And so it appears that we have made a very relevant film for now,” Caro says Chastain toured the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum while debuting the film in Washington. “I was just stunned as I was going through it learning about the beginning of what had happened, and how ( Hitler) took power,” she says. “The first thing to do is attack the press and kill off intelligentsia and create propaganda.”
On Twitter, Chastain has become an ardent voice for women’s rights despite counsel from some, like a Hollywood director she hasn’t named, that being so vocal could harm her career.
“I’m not going to stop,” she says. “If someone doesn’t want to hire me because I believe in gender equality, then I probably don’t want to work with them.”