“The Hunger Games” centers on a strong female protagonist. Two of last year’s biggest moneymakers — “Bridesmaids” and “The Help” — featured a mostly female cast.
So why is it still hard to get a movie that might appeal to women made?
Tanya Wexler isn’t quite sure. And she just went through the process of making one.
The 41-year-old director of the just-released “Hysteria,” starring Hugh Dancy and Maggie Gyllenhaal, spoke to me by telephone about getting her third film off the ground.
“It was very difficult to get it made, which I was surprised about. It had a big hook,” she said. “But I was obsessed and I had to make it.”
The “big hook” she refers to is the real-life background against which the fictionalized romantic comedy plays out. Women were once diagnosed with the disorder of the movie’s title in fairly large numbers.
“Someone pitched me a two-page idea: a romantic comedy about the invention of the vibrator in Victorian England,” she recalled. “I laughed. And said, ‘Yes, I have to do that.’ ” When filming began, her four children were still small. She jumped at the chance to take on a project whose very idea entertained her, despite her stress-filled lifestyle.
That subject matter might have immediately attracted funding — or it might have scared possible investors away. Wexler found most executives in the latter camp.
“I think that people didn’t know how to take it,” she said. “I knew exactly what I wanted it to be: play it straight, like a classy Merchant Ivory film, and let the comedy be in the fact that it really happened.”
But the truth is, even after the surprise success of last year’s “Bridesmaids,” which cost just $32.5 million to make and grossed almost $170 million just at the domestic box office, executives are still slow to invest in movies that aren’t targeted mainly to teenage boys.
“They just go, ‘Well, that was an exception,’ ” Wexler speculated. With “The Hunger Games” — which couldn’t have made $392 million and counting without males seeing it in large numbers — they said it owed its massive success to its source material, the best-selling books.
Wexler has a laid-back attitude to the problems of financing films — and dealing with criticism once they’re released. She’s the first to note the reviews of “Hysteria” have been mixed. “It’s a love-it-or-hate-it movie,” she said. That doesn’t bother her much. What does is critics who think her light comedy should have dealt more with the serious issues lurking beneath its frothy surface, such as the role of women in society. That’s the problem with making independent movies, she argued: People expect each one to make a grand statement on its subject.
“No one says, ‘The problem with that blockbuster is that it doesn’t get into the military-industrial complex,’ ” she noted. “And nor should it.”
Kelly Jane Torrance is The Washington Examiner’s movie critic. Her reviews appear weekly and she can be reached at [email protected].
