Original-Cin Q&A: The Assistant director Kitty Green about filmdom's toxic beyond-Harvey atmosphere
By Bonnie Laufer
Writer/Director Kitty Green is hitting a nerve with her new film, The Assistant, and rightfully so. It's about a young woman who works for a media mogul and the degrading way he treats his young assistant and the climate he's created at the office.
Read our review of The Assistant
The timing of the release of the film couldn’t be any better with the Harvey Weinstein trial in full swing. But Green says it’s not just about Harvey Weinstein. This film focuses on the entire system in all of our workplaces and it how it really must be addressed on every level.
The Australian-born Green is a career documentarian (Casting JonBenet) making her dramatic feature drama debut with The Assistant.
Julia Garner plays Jane, who learns the hard way about what a toxic work environment means
Our Bonnie Laufer spoke in Toronto with her about the film.
The Assistant opens on February 7th in Toronto, Montreal and on February 14th in Vancouver and March 6th in Ottawa.
ORIGINAL-CIN: This film was so well done and a huge punch in the gut. I've had so many discussions with people already with different views, and I have to say it definitely sparks discussion. We know the premise stems from Harvey Weinstein, but It's so much bigger. It's the whole system and it's not just the film industry, it's everywhere. Tell me a little bit about how you started and what kind of research you did.
KITTY GREEN: “As a filmmaker, I try to gather inspiration from all over. I think it all started while doing 10 years on the film festival circuit, traveling around, and I found I was getting really irritated and kind of rather depressed by the way that I was being treated by certain men in the film industry.
“I was being kind of dismissed immediately when people met me and would just assume that my producers, who are men, were creatively in control of whatever I've created as opposed to myself.
“So I was kind of fed up and feeling a bit like, being a woman, I will never be taken seriously. I'm always often mistaken for the assistant and I started thinking about power structures and gender imbalances and was sort of thinking that they're the themes I wanted to explore.”
OC: It really must have made you so angry but also a bit sad to not be taken seriously.
GREEN: “Oh absolutely. And I knew I had to do something about it. So I went to a bunch of colleges, because, on many campuses, they are having discussions about consent and power and are addressing all of these issues.
“I went to Duke, the University of Tennessee and then I went to Stanford. And while I was there chatting to a theater troupe that deals with those themes, the Weinstein story broke.
“And I had a few friends who had worked for him or for Scott Rudin, you know the bigwigs. And they were telling me stories about working for these men. So I started interviewing them about their work environments and how gendered they were. And I was really shocked to hear about a lot of women leaving the film industry because they felt like there was no place for them within it.
“And so that became the focus. How can we get more women into positions of power and create safe working spaces for women? So, it was not just about dealing with the misconduct, which is one issue, but also about the bigger broader kind of sexism that we needed to combat in order to change things.”
OC: Did you end up speaking to a lot of females and males about their own experiences?
GREEN: “Yes, a lot of what I was hearing were the same stories again and again. I wasn't that interested in the kind of crazy stories, like being on yachts, but more in the everyday kind of micro-aggressions that mess with a woman's self-confidence and demonstrate just how the behavior of the boys can be so dismissive and condescending.
“I would hear the same stories over and over about the gender division of labor. I interviewed a lot of people who worked as assistants - not only in the film industry, but also in tech and finance and engineering. And they all had very similar stories about duties they felt a little bit uncomfortable about doing. I started scripting a narrative around these tasks - tasks that women were being sort of asked to do, particularly with a focus on gendered labor. And so there was this idea that the women are often getting the coffee and getting the lunches, and the boys kind of get to sit in on meetings and get kind of quickly promoted.”
OC: Then you cast the wonderful Julia Garner (Ozark) in the lead role as Jane the Assistant, who is such a great actor and is so expressive. You have a documentary background, but I love that you didn't choose to make this a documentary, because Jane really is the face of all of us.
GREEN: “Nothing in this film is new or revelatory. It's just all kind of packaged together, and it kind of allows you to emotionally connect with it and identify and put yourself in her shoes.
“It takes you on some sort of emotional journey, which I think fiction can do better than docs, because you can kind of structure it so that you can get these tiny little moments in and they can have a lot of impact. I think with documentaries you miss those small moments, you're not getting that full picture of the power dynamics also that are at play in these experiences. So I think I think fictionalizing it was probably the best way to get that to get that across.”
Kitty Green: An acclaimed documentarian gets real with a fictional drama.
OC: What was Julia's initial reaction to the script and how much input did she have on her performance?
GREEN: “The script was really short. It basically says, ‘She photocopies, she cleans up,’… stuff like that. We gave it to her and she read it, and we met for a coffee and she seemed to understand what I was trying to do.
“She signed on knowing that we had a month in pre-production to talk about the character and her motivations. We also met with a bunch of assistants and chatted to them about their experiences. She also went and observed assistants and in her manager's office and different places.
“So, I think it was a process where we really figured the character out together which was kind of wonderful for me because I come from documentary, so it was interesting to the way that process happens.”
OC: She really gets it and makes us feel for her and what she is going through in that environment.
GREEN: “She hasn't been an assistant. But she knows. Having worked in the film industry since she was like a teenager, she had some insight. She seemed to understand the character and her motivations pretty quickly.
“I can’t speak for her, but she does talk about how quiet the film was and how there's not much dialogue and it became very internal rather than external. It's about everything that’s going on. Like you can almost see the wheels turning with her, she’s got very expressive eyes.”
OC: Can you discuss the structure of the workplace within the movie? Because I found it particularly interesting how alienated Jane felt, and how she was treated like garbage by the males who were her supposed equals and shared her work space.
GREEN: “Even though they were probably hired around the same time as she was, they made it quite clear that she answered to them. One of the most obvious examples is when the children of the boss arrive at the office and immediately, the two men that are working in that same room assume that it's the woman's job to take care of the kids.
“Or when the bosses wife calls, they make her deal with it. So this becomes a woman's work. This kind of stuff is assigned to the women, and the boys can continue to do, you know, the real work. So, those are sort of the markers of a system that really can destroy a woman's self-confidence.”
OC: There are so many cringe-worthy scenes that, sadly, so many of us can relate to. But one that struck me is when Jane gets up the nerve to go to the Human Resources manager, played brilliantly by Matthew Macfadyen (Succession). I understand that's the most dialogue you had written for your script, something like 12 pages out of the 60?
GREEN: “Yes, the most dialogue I wrote for the film.”
OC: What was it like to shoot that scene?
GREEN: “It was an interesting one, because I knew that if he was angry, mean and swore at her it would almost be pointless. The more calm, cool collected and coherent he is, the more awful it felt. So he's kind of poking holes in her argument. She doesn't have enough information and he's making it clear to her that she doesn't and is really making her doubt herself.
“It’s an example of gas-lighting. The poor girl comes out completely confused about why she went there in the first place. It was difficult to write and difficult to watch. But I wanted to make sure both of them had a point of view. I wanted to make clear he was there to protect the company and she was expressing her concerns and was completely shut down.
“It was interesting because I had never worked with two actors of that caliber before, and just seeing them do it was extraordinary for me. They did it again and again and again. And every time they kind of discovered more in it, and it became more kind of dense and textured. I was really fortunate to have them both play out that scenario.”
OC: How do you think that scene would have been played out if the HR person was a woman?
GREEN: “Well, I think it would have been quite similar, to be honest. One of his strongest lines when Julia’s character tells him about an incident with a new woman in the office is, ‘She's a woman. She's a grown woman. Don't you think you can take care of herself?’ So then that kind of makes Julia’s character think, ’Oh no, I'm judging this woman,’ and she gets really rattled.
“I think a woman could have easily been in the scene and maybe it would have even gotten a stronger reaction from the audience if a woman was covering for a man. Sadly this happens, a lot. There are plenty of women in HR who are there to protect their jobs and their bosses.”
OC: Congratulations, the film opened over the weekend in the U.S. in selective theaters and did really well. It’s obviously striking a nerve. What kind of reactions are you getting when you attend screenings and Q and As?
GREEN: “I am finding that it is definitely touching a nerve with them. But a lot of them are kind of excited to see themselves on screen. I've had women that don't work in the film industry and they all said, ‘That is me! I can see myself in her.’
“We also get men that are very uncomfortable. What drives me crazy is that in some of the early reviews they’ve been saying that this isn't an issue anymore. Like it's fixed now, and it was an issue up until two years ago and so now we're fine.
“Kind of crazy if you ask me. Do people really think that this idea behavior doesn't continue? It's really absurd.”
OC: Even with the #Metoo movement, and all the progress that has been made over the last few years, sadly a lot of this behaviour will never change.
GREEN: “You are exactly right. Just trying to highlight the behavior that is kind of toxic is like an entry point to misconduct. You let them get away with this, you get away with that, and you know, they think they can get away with the next thing.
“So if we can kind of just kind of curb that, or change the way places are run and the way we behave within them. I think all of that needs to be looked at. That was my main goal with this movie. Shift the focus away from the Harvey Weinstein's and toward the kind of bigger cultural and systemic problems.”