After my first film, I was having trouble finding a second film. I had a lot of attempts that failed.

Susanna Fogel

Categorized in : First Finding Trouble Film

If you're a filmmaker who grew up wanting to make a movie for people to have that female experience of sitting in the theater together, it's hard to do unless you can compete with the bigger spectacles that are being offered to them.

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Our friendships are really the epicenter of our social world and emotional lives.

friendships emotional social world

I want to be someone who takes risks but also stays engaged by trying new things.

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Sometimes my friends and I are sill,y and sometimes we're serious, and sometimes we're emotional, and sometimes we're not.

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My way of dealing with not really fitting in at my very crappy New England high school and junior high was to write sketch comedy and satirical takedowns of the social hierarchies. At the same time, I was developing a love for movies at the height of the '90s New York indie movie explosion: everything from 'Rushmore' to Nicole Holofcener movies.

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When the mumblecore 'Tiny Furniture' thing happened, it reminded me of the thing we were trying to do in my little 1995 way.

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So many of my favorite stories, in any medium, are about friendship. Those relationships are so often just as emotional and complex as any romantic or family dynamics, and yet there's a dearth of resonant, grounded films about platonic bonds in American films.

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My writing partner, Joni Lefkowitz, and I love studying girl friendships in particular because they seem defined by a combination of codependent intimacy and subtle, constant passive-aggressiveness.

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Have confidence in your own voice, be entrepreneurial, and take big risks with the knowledge that, by default of being a woman, people are going to advise you to be conservative, play it safe, make sure everyone likes you, and constantly question whether or not you're ready to be in charge.

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Culturally, as women, we're raised to be very concerned with others' approval in a way that men aren't, but an inevitable part of directing and being visionary is that you have to be a boss, and as such, not everyone is going to like you all the time or agree with your choices.

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As a consumer, I love action movies and have a lot of opinions about how action comedies don't really do justice to what I find exciting about an action movie, which is the genuine thrill of watching something that feels really high-stakes. A lot of times, it's played for laughs and action, which waters down the sense of danger.

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Men starting out have so many options of filmmakers to connect with artistically and be shepherded by and collaborate with. I just didn't have an older, more experienced me to help me. So I hope all the women making movies now are aware we have the opportunity to be that to new filmmakers.

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I didn't have a lot of men to ask questions of when I was starting out. There were two female directors people suggested I talk to when I was starting out, and they were Nancy Meyers and Kathryn Bigelow.

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I have these wonderful friends, and they're supportive and loving, and you can really be yourself around them in a way some people even can't with their partners.

be-yourself yourself you people

I have felt that there's a lot of receptiveness to female stories now. I think some of it has a little bit - a lot of it is economically driven and driven by, just, kind of studios wanting to check that box because now they know they have a woman problem that they need to solve.

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It's been increasingly hard to make small stories about female friendship, and, definitely, those stories don't have any shot of getting a theatrical release.

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I was constantly reading books about how to direct, and asking directors, 'How do you do it?' And when I finally actually started doing the work, it seemed like you have to be decisive and have an opinion. But also you have to be a good collaborator and hire the right people to shore up whatever your skill set is.

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As women, I think we're used to looking around to see what people think about this, who's approving of us, who's criticizing us, and whether we have to internalize their thoughts on us.

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I love watching action films, and especially the little moments of wit and humor in the choreography in a lot of them. The editing of an action sequence often has great moments of comic timing.

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On 'The Spy Who Dumped Me,' it wasn't fear as much as it was feeling overwhelmed because there were so many moving parts. But I felt that I knew what I was doing. And on a movie like this, there's so much preparation that goes into it that by the time you were there, you had done months of planning.

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