The Complex Gender Politics of the 'Wonder Woman' Movie
by Tatiana Siegel May 31, 2017, 6:00am PDT
Can Patty Jenkins make the superhero world safe for female directors? Warner Bros. gambles $150 million on its first woman-centered comic book movie with a filmmaker whose only prior big-screen credit was an $8 million indie: "I can't take on the history of 50 percent of the population just because I'm a woman."
Patty Jenkins is sipping some sort of healthy soup-like sludge at a restaurant in Burbank called Olive & Thyme. Dressed in black jeans and a white tank top, with a pair of aviator sunglasses perched on her forehead to keep her straight black hair from falling into her brown eyes, she looks like a grad student taking a break between classes. You'd never guess that this petite woman drinking green gunk is actually the most important female film director in the business today. She doesn't think so, of course.
"I can't take on the history of 50 percent of the population just because I'm a woman," says Jenkins, bristling when asked about the heavy responsibility of directing Wonder Woman, the most expensive film ever shot by a person with two XX chromosomes (its $150 million budget surpasses Kathryn Bigelow's $100 million K-19: The Widowmaker). "I'm just trying to make the greatest version of Wonder Woman that I can for the people who love the character as much as I do and hope that the movie lives up to all the pressure that's on it."
And that pressure is superhuman, to be sure. When the biggest female-centered comic book movie ever premiered at the Pantages Theatre in L.A. on May 25 (it goes wide June 2), it was Jenkins' name leading the credits. That would be nerve-wracking enough even for a director with lots of experience working on big-budget superhero movies. But aside from the pilot of AMC's The Killing and occasional gigs on other high-profile TV shows — shooting episodes of Arrested Development and a couple for Entourage — Jenkins' biggest accomplishment (indeed, her only big-screen feature) was 2003's Monster, the indie drama about a female serial killer that earned critical raves and Charlize Theron a best actress Oscar.
Hiring Jenkins, 45 — who had come close to directing a superhero movie before, the 2013 Thor sequel, but ended up backing out — was obviously a big gamble for Warner Bros., a studio that has been having creative if not necessarily financial issues with its superhero franchise films ever since the Dark Knight trilogy. But her taking the helm of Wonder Woman is also a big deal for pretty much every female director in Hollywood with tentpole ambitions. If Wonder Woman is a hit, then doors that have been kept shut for decades could potentially swing open (they are already, at least a crack, with Gina Prince-Bythewood just getting hired to direct Sony's Spider-Man spinoff Silver & Black). If, on the other hand, Wonder Woman turns out to be another Catwoman, the superhero universe could remain a boys club for eons to come.
"That's the challenge — how to tell a story of a woman and make it universal," says Gal Gadot, the 32-year-old Israeli actress who stars as the Amazonian princess with bullet-deflecting bracelets. "We are all used to having male protagonists in movies [directed by men]. But the way Patty has captured the Wonder Woman character, she is very relatable to everyone. Boy, girl, man, woman — everyone can relate to her."
Photographed by Miller Mobley
"Wonder Woman can be charming and warm — she just happens to be a demigoddess who can beat the **** out of you," says Gadot.
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Jenkins grew up in California. And Thailand. And Kansas. And Germany. Her dad was an Air Force captain (who won a Silver Star in Vietnam) and her mom an environmental scientist; and Patricia Lea, as she was christened, spent most of her childhood moving from one air base to another. As far as she's concerned, it was the perfect training for a future career in filmmaking. "To be a director, you need to be reliable, on time, confident, calm, all of those things you see demonstrated in the military," she notes.
As a kid, she'd always been interested in storytelling and visual arts. Her first job in movies was during junior high, when she was a production assistant on a documentary directed by a friend of her mother's. She ended up studying painting at Cooper Union in New York, where she took a course in experimental filmmaking, and after graduation spent nine years in New York learning filmmaking by working on "literally thousands" of commercials and music videos until she moved to L.A. and enrolled at AFI for directing.
After AFI, she made a couple of shorts of her own, which she used to raise money ($8 million) for her first feature. It was at this point that she first demonstrated a talent for making unexpected but fortuitous choices: She cast Theron, then considered more of a pin-up than a serious actress, as the film's lead, the decidedly unsexy serial killer Aileen Wuornos. "I said to her, 'You know, you're absolutely f—ing crazy,' " remembers Theron of her conversation with Jenkins over her casting. "Nobody else would have done that. It was very, very unusual. She looked at me in a way that nobody has ever looked at me."
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Entertainment
Jenkins (left) with Gadot on the Italy set of Warner Bros.' $150 million Wonder Woman.
The film became such a breakout success that dream opportunities began falling into Jenkins' lap. Famed test pilot Chuck Yeager approached her to make a movie about his life story, but she opted to develop it independently rather than at a studio, and it eventually fell apart. Then she was set to team with Ryan Gosling on an indie drama titled I Am Superman (no relation to the DC Universe). But she got pregnant with her now-8-year-old son (she's married to travel writer Sam Sheridan; the three live in Santa Monica, where Jon Favreau is a neighbor), and it got put on hold (she still plans to make the movie with Gosling). Instead, she started directing TV shows — a much less time-consuming job for a new mom — including that pilot for The Killing, which drew critical raves and earned Jenkins an Emmy nomination.
At one point, Jenkins was attached to direct Marvel's Thor: The Dark World, the critical misfire that Alan Taylor wound up shooting after Jenkins left the project (it ended up grossing $645 million worldwide). She won't say what transpired with that film but will talk more generally about a certain unnamed tentpole that she ultimately walked away from (rhymes with "s'more"). "There have been things that have crossed my path that seemed like troubled projects," she says. "And I thought, 'If I take this, it'll be a big disservice to women. If I take this knowing it's going to be trouble and then it looks like it was me, that's going to be a problem. If they do it with a man, it will just be yet another mistake that the studio made. But with me, it's going to look like I dropped the ball, and it's going to send a very bad message.' So I've been very careful about what I take for that reason."
Photographed by Miller Mobley
"I can't take on the history of 50 percent of the population just because I'm a woman," says Jenkins.
The problem is that tentpole opportunities for women — or any movie directing jobs, for that matter — are still pretty rare … and getting rarer. Despite an increased spotlight on diversity and inclusion, female filmmakers actually lost ground in 2016. Women made up just 7 percent of all directors on the top 250 films, a 2 percent decline from 2015, according to San Diego State University's Celluloid Ceiling report. That downward trajectory puzzles Jenkins. "I'm sure there's a long history of belief that certain jobs are masculine," says Jenkins. "But why a director would fall into that [category] makes me very confused. Because it feels like a very natural job for a woman. It's incredibly maternal in a way. You're caretaking all of these sorts of things."
But around the same time Marvel was making its sequel about the Norse god with the big hammer, Warner Bros. was trying to figure out what to do with its greatest untapped superhero resource. The studio had been toying with the idea of making a big-screen Wonder Woman for decades, with producer Joel Silver going through at least a half-dozen screenwriters (including Joss Whedon) looking for a greenlight-able script (until Silver was relieved of the brand when Diane Nelson was named entertainment president and tasked with shaking up the studio's comic book development). At one point in 2010, there was an effort to bring Wonder Woman back to TV for the first time since Lynda Carter wore the tiara on ABC in the 1970s, with David E. Kelley writing a pilot for NBC. But that never panned out either.
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