Of all the exuberant, heartfelt, and angry signs carried in January 21st’s historic Women’s March, one stood out as uniquely Hollywood in origin. It said, “We need more women directors.”
Maggie Greenwald, writer/director of Sophie and the Rising Sun, a new film opening this week, agrees wholeheartedly. “There are so many great stories to tell and we deserve to tell our own stories,” she says. Unfortunately, according to the most recent Celluloid Ceiling Report (published annually by San Diego State U.), the percentage of women directing the films you see remains in the single digits.
“I never started out to prove anything to anybody about what a woman could do. I just wanted to make movies,” Greenwald says. Now, an independent film veteran with more than 30 years on the job, she comments that it hasn’t gotten any easier. “In fact,” she adds, “of all my films, I think Sophie has been the most challenging to get to the screen.” After seeing the film, an uncommonly lovely period piece that echoes the anxiety America is expressing about immigrants right now, one wonders, ‘why?’ “Well,” explains Greenwald wryly, “it stars four women over forty and even though the numbers are in and the fact is that women over forty make up one of the one of the biggest audiences who go to the movies, the deciders are still primarily men who don’t relate to our stories.”
Source: Courtesy Jackson Lee Davis/Monterey Media Sophie’s story begins in 1941 when a badly beaten Asian man is found abandoned at the bus stop in Salty Creek, South Carolina. The town leaders decide it’s their Christian duty to help nurse him back to health. But when Mr. Ohta (Takashi Yamaguchi) and Miss Anne (Margo Martindale) bond around their shared love of gardening and Miss Sophie (Julianne Nicholson) begins skipping church to spend time painting in the marshes with him, southern hospitality turns hostile. After the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, all bets are off.
Producer Nancy Dickenson optioned Augusta Trobaugh’s novel, Sophie and the Rising Sun, in 2007, because she thought the parallels between American treatment of Japanese Americans then and mistrust of Arab Americans after 9/11 were so striking. Everyone agreed the project was timely but the struggle to get financial backing was compounded by the fact that the leading man wasn’t going to be Brad Pitt. “There aren't too many films that have been made in the U.S. with Asian leading men and I’ve made two of them,” Greenwald notes, referring to Sophie and her 1993 western, The Ballad of Little Jo, about a woman living undercover as a man in the Wild West.
Still one of the very few female directors ever to helm a western, Greenwald has a history of defying the odds to get her films made. She grew up in New York City where she remembers accompanying her father to Times Square to see westerns and samurai films. After studying drama at the Neighborhood Playhouse, when she was 21, she flew to LA to chase her dream of making it as an actress. Except, she says, “within months of arriving, I realized my lifelong dream had actually been to write and direct.”
Starting as a driver, then working up to assistant sound editor, Greenwald contributed to a string of 80’s studio hits like Trading Places, The Witches of Eastwick, and Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, while she developed her own stories.
“It was a fantastic money gig. I learned a lot and worked with fabulous people, but I was trapped in a catch-22 in LA. There was no way as a young, unknown woman I’d be hired to direct a studio film.” (That remains the case in 2017, although a number of ambitious young men have been hired to direct multi-million dollar pictures with little or no prior experience.)
Eventually, Greenwald headed back east where the indie film scene was exploding. In 1987, her first film, Home Remedy, made for $200,000, played at NYC’s prestigious Film Forum. Next up was The Kill-Off (1990), which Greenwald adapted from a novel by Jim Thompson. The gritty noir picture won the Best Director award at the Torino Film Festival and is considered one of the 100 Best American Independent Films by the British Film Institute.
After The Ballad of Little Jo made a splash, Greenwald began to pick up work directing Nickelodeon series like The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo and Pete and Pete. She expresses gratitude for the jobs but can’t resist throwing in, “after directing a western, being a woman, naturally people in the industry decided I’d be perfect to direct children’s television!”
Over the years, Greenwald's directed numerous TV movies for Lifetime and Disney, work she says that helped her hone her craft and support her during the long waiting game to get her own films to the screen. Songcatcher, another prize winner for the writer/director, came out in 2000. It follows a musicologist rejected by male-dominated academia, who travels to Appalachia and fulfills her calling by recording the music of the mountains.
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Do UV Tanning Beds Really Prolong Lifespan? Tenacity and patience aside, how does a filmmaker keep the interest alive when a project remains in limbo for so long? “You’ve got to have more than one thing going at all times, otherwise I would take to my bed and never leave!” Greenwald responds emphatically. “During the last two years of development on Sophie, I had three projects going that I was in love with. None of them was coming to fruition but they were creatively gratifying, nonetheless. Of course, it was even more gratifying when we finally got the financing and I was able to bring the film to life.”
Sophie and the Rising Sun (made for about 2% of what it costs to make an average Transformers movie) was shot entirely in McClellanville, South Carolina, an old fishing village on the Atlantic Coast that stood in for the fictional Salty Creek. Greenwald says simply, “it was a magical experience.”
Source: Courtesy Jackson Lee Davis/Monterey Media Although the project was a hard sell for some, it had no problem attracting a first rate cast, including multiple Emmy award winner, Margo Martindale. “I thought the script was incredibly moving and important,” she says” “It told a story I hadn’t heard before and felt very real. Women don’t just disappear at forty. They have full lives, they can fall in love, they can learn new things.”
Greenwald has words of praise for each of her leading ladies; “Margo’s humor and appetite for life embody Miss Anne.” Julianne Nicholson “projects the kind of depth that make you believe Sophie might have it in her to take the leap she does.” Lorraine Toussaint of Orange is the New Black “turned Salome, a character who was supposed to be subservient to the white women in the story, into someone you can’t ignore,” and “one of the last great movie stars,” Diane Ladd, plays Ruth, a well-meaning but interfering neighbor.
“Ruth’s son, John, was a creation of mine, not in the original book,” says Greenwald. “I thought that some of her anger should come from a deep hurt, so she wasn’t simply a nasty gossip. It was a way to bring the tremendous damage war exacts on small towns like Salty Creek to life.”
Greenwald says it was producer Brenda Goodman’s brainstorm to use an Iraq vet to play John, a World War One soldier whose life has been cruelly limited by his injuries. Bobby Henline may not have much screen time, but his presence in Sophie’s world is a jolting reminder of the wounded warriors who surround us.
As for Sophie’s controversial leading man, casting director Donna Morong found "our Ohta (Takashi Yamaguchi) right under our noses in LA” where he had moved after playing a small role in Letters from Iwo Jima. “He is sensitive, handsome and completely comfortable working with four powerful women," Greenwald says. "And able to hold his own with each of them.”
One gets the sense that Greenwald created a working atmosphere, which encouraged a generous flow of ideas from all involved. She’s certainly not shy about sharing the credit, something she says that comes with experience. “I am naturally defiant--sometimes too much so. Growing up in a family of highly opinionated people I knew it was stick to my ideas or drown. Aging has been good for me. As my confidence has grown, I’ve been able to take in the opinions of others and distill the good ideas without fear.”
She reserves a special shout out for the quartet of women behind the scenes on Sophie (Producers Brenda Goodman, Nancy Dickenson, Lorraine Gallard and Susan Lazarus). “I’ve loved collaborating with all the men I’ve worked with on my films but this was a tremendous pleasure. Through the long years it took to make the film this team knew the story we were trying to tell was a good one and we were undeterred by the rejection.”
By now, it must be obvious that it’s not a Woody Allen walk in the park to be the heroine of a Maggie Greenwald film, or the creator of one. The fact that Greenwald knows she is far from alone, doesn’t make it easier to accept the fact that while men are routinely hired to direct romantic comedies, female directors are rarely given a shot at action movies. Second chances are almost nonexistent for a female director whose film doesn’t immediately connect with an audience, and even when women directors break through with a critical and /or box office success, a decade can go by before they are heard from again.
When Sophie and the Rising Sun opened the Sundance Film Festival last year, producer Susan Lazarus remembers, “the very first comment after the very first screening came from a young woman who stood up and said she was representing the Muslim American Society and she simply wanted to say ‘Thank you for making this film’.” It’s writer/director hopes moviegoers “will have a moment of recognition that there’s a lot going on now in our country that went on then ...and where it led then was a black mark on our country.” On a more personal note, Greenwald adds, “Like Miss Anne and Mr. Ohta, I am an avid gardener. This film is my little tribute to the way gardening can bring diverse people together in their love of making things grow.”
As Sophie makes its way to a theatre near you this February, Greenwald is staking out new territory; directing episodes of some of television’s top-rated series, like Madame Secretary and Nashville. “TV has now emerged as the most powerful medium for the kind of storytelling I’m interested in," she says. "I’ve fallen in love with binge watching series as a new long-form experience and for the past five years I’ve been developing a series of my own (inspired by her volunteer work with women in prison) called Higher Ground. My sincerest hope is that this will be my next project.”
“It’s the stories I get to tell, not the size of the screen that counts.” Maggie Greenwald still has many stories to tell and urges other women to get out there and fight to tell their own. “It’s time.”
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