Mimi Leder

FEATURES:
Pay It Forward (2000)
Deep Impact (1998)
The Peacemaker (1997)

MOVIES FOR TELEVISION:
The Innocent (1994)
Rio Shannon (1993)
A Little Piece of Heaven (1991)

SELECTED TELEVISION SERIES:
Vanished
Related
The West Wing
Johnny Zero
John Doe
ER
China Beach
L.A. Law

AWARDS:
Emmy, Outstanding Achievement in Directing for a Dramatic Series, ER (1994)
DGA, Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Dramatic Series, ER (three nominations—1994, 1995, 1996)

Dawes: How important was it for any of you to see female role models when you were first trying to follow this path?

Heckerling:  Lina Wertmüller was a big role model. It was great to like think, OK, Lina Wertmuller—she’s not just a woman, she’s fucking awesome.

Sanford:  And Agnieszka Holland, when she did episodic television. She did a Cold Case.

Gordon: When I was in drama school I remember seeing the credit for Mimi on China Beach and it made my heart go pitty-pat. The more we see women doing good work, it does inspire us.

Dawes: How does it play out in your own lives? Do you find yourself being a role model for others?

Gordon:  I have a male name. So frequently, I’m not even thought of as a woman. I’ve been hired sometimes with people thinking that I’m a guy, and then I show up, and it’s extremely amusing. But your question was…

Dawes: Do young people coming up get energized by the fact that you’re a female director?

Gordon:  They do, they’re astonished. I’ve gone to speak a couple of times. I think we owe it to the world to toot our own horn that way, to talk about what we do and what we’ve accomplished.

Holofcener:  I think I’ve disappointed some teenagers. They’re like, ‘You’re a woman director? That’s what it looks like?’ ’Cause I’m such a housewife, a mom, a soccer mom.

Gordon:  What does a woman director look like?

Holofcener:  It doesn’t look like this. They think it doesn’t, but it does.

Leder:  My daughter is 19, she’s going into her second year of college. This summer I’m doing this series at Fox called Vanished, and I’m the executive producer and I’m directing the pilot. My daughter came to work as a wardrobe P.A. Now, she was in my films, when she was just a kid. But she comes to work with me on this series, which is high intensity. The first week, it was like, ‘Fourteen hours a day? How do you do this?’ The other day she goes, ‘Mom, you know I never realized what you did. I never really watched and saw what you do, and how you do it.’ And she said, ‘I have so much respect for you.’It was shocking, it was lovely. All of a sudden besides being her mom, I’m this role model. She grew up on sets. But it’s different when you’re 19 and you’re becoming your own woman, your own person.

Dawes: (to Heckerling) You’ve got a new movie coming out that you wrote and directed, called I Could Never Be Your Woman, with Michelle Pfeiffer and Tracey Ullman.

Heckerling:  The story’s about an older woman and a younger guy. Originally it was at a studio run by a woman. And she said, ‘Nobody’s going to care about an older woman with a younger guy.’

Holofcener: Even if the older woman is Michelle Pfeiffer?

Heckerling:  Yeah. It was like, ‘Can’t they be closer in age?’ And I’m like, ‘then the story doesn’t make sense.’

Sanford:  Women are sometimes harder on other women.

Glatter:  That can be true. (to Mimi) We’ve helped each other, and we’ve had that experience, because our paths crossed. But, I hate to say this, I feel like I’ve been helped more by men than by women. We have to change that. You grab the hand of the next generation, and help open the door as much as you can.

Heckerling:  But also, they’re always trying to get rid of us. I don’t think we have the freedom to fail that men do.

Glatter:  That’s really true. If a man makes a movie that’s successful, he gets maybe five more out of it. If a woman makes a movie that’s successful, you get one more. But it’s not going to work all the time. And if you do one that doesn’t, you really do have to pull yourself out of that.

Sanford: (to Heckerling)  You made a couple of movies that were enormous, and then you made a movie that wasn’t as enormous.

Heckerling:  And then it was like, ‘Get the hell out of here.’

Leder:  You make a movie that’s perceived as a failure, or you stub your toe, and you’re in movie jail—for a while.

Glatter:  That’s what’s distressing, that ‘game over’ thing.