Female directors remain a rarity in Hollywood

Old boys' club reigns in Hollywood
Which brings us to the issue of the kinds of movies women have been expected to make. Mimi Leder is an anomaly for having directed the action movies “Deep Impact” and “The Peacemaker”; so is Kathryn Bigelow, who was behind “Point Break” and “K-19: The Widowmaker.”

“Hollywood is still an old boys’ club and boys are bullies. ... The ultimate symbol of the film industry is a man, Oscar, clutching a sword and standing on a reel of film because he’s defending his turf,” said Tom O’Neil, columnist for theenvelope.com Web site. “I think that says it all.”

“Part of it is society’s fault,” he said. “When a man and a woman on a date decide to see a movie, the man is less likely to see ‘Thelma & Louise.’ ” (Which, by the way, was directed a man, Ridley Scott.) “When the genders combine to go out to see a movie, the man still rules. It has to appeal to him. They will go see ‘The Departed’ but they won’t go see ‘The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.’ ”

Delpy says she fought for two decades to direct screenplays she’d written for thrillers or political dramas. Even an Oscar nomination for co-writing 2004’s “Before Sunset” didn’t help much. To get the money for “2 Days in Paris,” she said she tricked her financiers into thinking she was making a romantic comedy about a French woman (herself) and an American man (Adam Goldberg).

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“Which it’s not,” she says, laughing. “It’s almost like a horror film on relationships. It’s kind of a mean comedy and people say horrible things to one another.

“What’s funny is, now people are trying to contact me to do movies,” Delpy adds, “like, they’re looking for a female director, and it’s all about a relationship. You know what? I don’t want to make a movie that they want a female director for. To me, first of all, it’s condescending. What does that mean? Is it about breastfeeding?”

More than just ‘chick flicks’
In “Talk to Me,” Cheadle plays Ralph Waldo “Petey” Greene Jr., an ex-con who served as the voice for urban blacks during the tumultuous 1960s. The movie contains rioting, explosions, and a whole lot of sex and rough language.

Clearly, Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) has made the furthest thing possible from a “chick flick.”

“It feels very, very me,” she says of the material with a laugh. “It really does. I had one second of self-consciousness before my first meeting to go in as the director, one moment of like, ‘OK, I’m a woman, I know I have to convince them that I’m capable of directing a movie like this, or that I’m the right person.’ And it was not just being a woman, it was based on my past work — like, ‘Am I versatile enough to do a piece like this?’ ”

Berman has directed a variety of films with her husband, whom she met at Columbia University film school, including the documentary “Off the Menu: The Last Days of Chasen’s” and the inventive biopic “American Splendor.” She finds that she and Pulcini approach their work differently, though not in traditional gender roles.

“I’m a little bit more of a fighter. He’s a quieter person. I’m actually more of the pit bull, which is not what you’d expect from the woman and the man. You can ask anyone who works with us — Bob shies from conflict more and I kind of go right at it. Bob is very visually inclined, he likes to spend a lot of time with the cameras, and I like to spend a lot of time with the actors. Maybe discussing feelings or emotions might be more of a female-oriented thing.

“I do find that we get treated differently by the crew,” she added. “People have a hard time seeing me as the director if Bob is around. There’s always a little bit of, they go to him. It’s a fight sometimes to be taken seriously as a director.”