Gurinder Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham was a commercial hit.
About 10 days ago, I went to chair a discussion of women film directors at the ICA, with Gurinder Chadha, Antonia Bird, Vicky Jewson, Carine Adler and Gabby Dellal, for the Observer Review. These women are in a tiny minority. In Britain, only seven percent of film directors are female, and in 2005, only seven per cent of the 250 top-grossing films in America were made by women. These are scandalous statistics, and I can't help thinking that if this imbalance were the case in most other professions, there would probably be some attempt to legislate against it. Why is it that film-making continues to be the most unbalanced career in the arts?
When I got to the ICA, the women, squeezed on to a balcony together, were having their picture taken - a crowded balcony scene - and they looked great, smiling to the camera. It was as if they had known each other for years, which actually, for most of them, wasn't the case at all. But, as the conversation would reveal, there were lots of reasons not to be smiling from ear to ear.
Two things really surprised me about the discussion. The first was the way in which being a woman was a subject that, at first, they all resisted talking about but which kept creeping its way back in and dominating everything else. The women did and didn't want to talk about it. I wondered what that inescapability says about being a woman director - or just about being a woman. They kept coming back to questions of gender, and the difficulties of working in a male-dominated industry. I would love to have heard more about the ways in which being a woman might be an advantage. But perhaps, in this context, is just isn't?
I was also really surprised to hear that Hollywood may be less sexist than we think. According to Bird and Chadha, when they were working in Hollywood they felt far more supported than they ever have done in Britain. There was no sense of being discriminated against as a woman. I wonder whether this is because, if you are working in Hollywood, it is a sign that you have already successfully climbed the career ladder? If, like Chadha, you have a whopping commercial hit - Bend it Like Beckham - to your name, then your career is, surely, almost certain to get easier no matter where you work?
But the truth is that it is really hard to make films (no matter what sex you are) in Britain, and that creative people have to spend far too much time fundraising. The second theme that came out of the discussion was the sense that power is so absolutely with the marketing men - you have to work the system, play the game. There is so much courage involved in being a film director - and it is such a gamble, too - but must the first question always be: is this commercial? And if this becomes the only question that matters, then, after a while, that is surely going to mean risk-taking, original films are much harder to make?
Rachel Millward, director of the Bird's Eye View Film Festival (showing women's films from all over the world at the ICA from Thursday), told me it is never straightforward judging what will be commercial. Risk-taking work is not, by definition, uncommercial. But it may be difficult to sell. She thinks "patronising" decisions are often taken about what audiences may want to watch. Chadha mentioned that there was an appetite throughout the world for "quirky comedies" from Britain. Don't we excel at unquirky tragedies too? Notes on a Scandal, say - not quite a tragedy, but still... And isn't variety essential? Is it naive to wonder if there is any way of making marketing men less powerful so that women film directors are able to go ahead with the films they actually want to make? And, above all, what needs to happen for more women to feel that directing a film is a possible - and potentially fantastic - future career?
