'Girlfight' Director Karyn Kusama on Michelle Rodriguez and the Best Boxing Movies

In this edition: Two recent Oscar winners (Anora and Flow), Gene Hackman’s performances in The Conversation and Scarecrow, Mickey 17 on IMAX, and three events this weekend celebrating women in film: Julia Roberts’ Oscar-winning performance in Erin Brockovich, a book signing event for the new release Cinema Her Way alongside a screening of Girlfight, and a conversation around environmental awareness paired with Agnes Varda’s masterful documentary The Gleaners and I.

Read on for details on all of that, plus a very special interview with Girlfight director Karyn Kusama looking back on the movie’s 25th anniversary.

As usual, I encourage you to reach out to me here with any feedback, questions, or comments about the Playhouse.

Many thanks to the crowds who came out for our first-ever Oscar party. It was a blast to get to know the folks in the community who have as much fun watching the film industry’s biggest awards event as I do.

We had so much fun with our Playhouse-themed trivia on commercial breaks throughout the night. Our friends from Sen in Sag Harbor did a lovely job complimenting the evening with their stellar sushi. Kudos are in order for Michael Burns, who won our very first Oscar pool, nailing not only Best Picture but also a number of trickier categories, including Best Original Song.

Also, a big shoutout to Friend of the Playhouse and Anora director Sean Baker, the first person to win four Oscars for one movie in the 97-year-history of the ceremony (for those keeping score, Walt Disney won for four different movies). Baker’s Best Picture winner is screening at the Playhouse all week. In his Best Director speech, Sean gave a rousing endorsement of the theatrical experience that elicited an appreciative cheer from our audience.

“Where did we fall in love with movies? At the movie theater,” Baker said. “Watching a film in a theater with an audience is an experience – we can laugh together, cry together, scream in fright together, perhaps sit in devastated silence together – and in a time in which the world can feel very divided, this is more important than ever. It’s a communal experience you simply don’t get at home.” His speech, which is worth a listen in full, can be found here.

A brilliant dark comedy of NYC misadventures and confused romantic entanglements, Anora screens at the Playhouse all week. However, if you’re looking for something more family-friendly from the recent award winners, let me point you in the direction of Flow, which continues its run on Saturday at noon and Sunday at 11 a.m.

We loved seeing so many families come out for Paddington in Peru, and Flow is yet another animal adventure set against an exciting jungle backdrop. The Oscar winner for Best Animated Feature Film is a Latvian production, though it doesn’t have a single line of dialogue, which helps universalize its plot. Director Gints Zilbalodis spent years crafting this visually dazzling story of a nameless cat who navigates a flooded landscape with some other animal pals. Flow is at once exciting and ethereal, making its cinematic mastery appealing to all ages, and so worthy of the Oscar it won on Sunday.

One powerful moment from the Oscar broadcast came with the “In Memorium” tribute, which included a prolonged shoutout to legendary performer Gene Hackman, who died at the age of 95 this past week. Hackman’s talent was practically synonymous with American movies of the past 50 years, from The French Connection to Unforgiven.

We have two of his finest achievements back on screens at the Playhouse this week: a beautiful 4K restoration of Frances Ford Coppola’s riveting thriller The Conversation, and the poignant road-trip comedy Scarecrow, in which Hackman stars opposite a young Al Pacino as a couple of wayward travelers attempting to open a car wash together.

Both movies won the celebrated Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, in large part due to the blend of charisma and uncertainty that Hackman brought to each of his characters. Viewed together, they embody the dualities of Hackman’s screen presence: In The Conversation, he’s a subdued, paranoid sound engineer who begins to suspect his own life has been the subject of eavesdropping, while in Scarecrow he’s a charming hustler with the uncanny ability to diffuse tense situations through comedy. See for yourself what made him such a singular talent.

Oscar season may feel like a culmination, but most filmmakers who win get right back to work. We’re thrilled to open Mickey 17, Bong Joon Ho’s first movie since his Oscar-winning Parasite, which hits the IMAX screen this week. It’s a delightfully twisted premise: Robert Pattinson plays a futuristic lost soul who signs up for a program in which he can die under a series of grueling experiments only to be reborn through a 3D printer again and again.

The result is a kind of deep-space slapstick comedy that splits the difference between Buster Keaton and Starship Troopers, with Pattinson delivering a zany performance that grows more soulful by the end, and Bong injecting the sci-fi circumstances with shrewd social commentary throughout. It’s a total blast on the big screen.

And if that’s not enough leftover Oscar buzz, our “Women in Film” series includes Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich, with her fiery turn as the activist who uncovered a polluted water scandal and became a national hero as a result.

Roberts’ Oscar win still shines bright 25 years later. The movie (directed by Steven Soderbergh, whose Black Bag opens at the Playhouse next week) goes beyond the conventional limitations of the biopic genre by building the entire movie around Brokovich’s evolving suspicions of corporate malfeasance. This allows Roberts to dominate virtually every scene of the movie, transforming the real-life Brokovich’s commitment to her cause into a crowdpleasing centerpiece.

Roberts’ Oscar win was essentially assured in her famous “two wrong feet in ugly shoes” speech, where she resists an attempt by another law firm to diminish her intellect. It’s the right kind of scenery-chewing performance, one fully in tune with what makes her so compelling to watch in a movie theater. That’s star power in a nutshell.

Erin Brockovich wasn’t the only release centered on the female experience worthy of celebrating 25 years down the line. The year 2000 included several major achievements for women behind the camera as well, and we’re celebrating two of them alongside a new book that singles out their achievements.

To mark the occasion of International Women’s Month, our “Women in Film” screening series features a book signing event for the newly-released Cinema Her Way, film critic Marya E. Gates’ wonderful collection of interviews with women filmmakers from several generations. We’re pleased to welcome Marya out for this event on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. alongside Caryn Coleman, the founder of the essential organization The Future of Film Is Female. After a screening of Karyn Kusama’s riveting Michelle Rodriguez boxing drama Girlfight, we’ll hear from Marya and Caryn about the importance of that film and the era in which it was made. Marya will sign copies of her book in the lounge following the screening.

More on Girlfight in a moment, but first: On Saturday afternoon, we’re screening The Gleaners and I, an extraordinary 2000 documentary from French New Wave auteur Agnes Varda. This poignant achievement, which rejuvenated Varda’s career just as she turned 70, follows the filmmaker as she explores the history of gleaning throughout France. As she turns her handheld camera on the stories of rural people who build a lifestyle around farmland leftovers, Varda unearths a powerful metaphor for her own life.

It’s also a poetic riff on the environmental documentary genre, so we’ll kick off the screening with a brief talk featuring Lynn Arthur, the co-chair of the Sustainable Southampton Green Advisory Committee, to put the film’s themes in context. This is a unique lens to appreciate Varda’s vision of a sustainable ecosystem that resonates with even greater power a quarter-century down the line.

Speaking of movies that get better with age: Girlfight, the first-rate sports movie that turned Michelle Rodriguez into a major Hollywood star, has lost none of its bracing energy. Rodriguez delivers a riveting turn as Bronx teen Diana Guzman, who finds an escape from her troubled personal life in a male-dominated gym. But the movie also helped establish the career of its director, Karyn Kusama, who won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival for her feature-length debut.

I spoke to Kusama this past week over Zoom. In our conversation below, she recalls the circumstances that led to this rousing achievement, and how it sits with her today.

What was your relationship with boxing movies prior to directing Girlfight?

It’s such an interesting question, because with distance, I’ve actually been able to think more about what was unconsciously drawing me to a story like this. It’s easy to internally diminish it as simply a “sports movie,” and yet when I really think about my relationship to those movies, it’s not even about the stories themselves. It’s about the concept of claiming one’s own physical existence and selfhood. My favorite movies in that genre, whether it’s The Hustler, Fat City, Somebody Up There Likes Me, or Raging Bull, are really about losing. They’re not about the experience of triumph so much as the experience of facing your failures day to day and facing incremental, tiny steps toward progress or change. In retrospect, I’m realizing that’s the way I was trying to make my own version of that story. The issue of sports movies around the release of Girlfight at the time was that we just hadn’t seen that many young women occupy the center of those stories.

In recent years, there have been more conversations about the need to support women directors and movies centered on women characters. Looking back on the year 2000, how much were you cognizant of these issues as they pertained to your own career?

Even 10 years ago, I would’ve probably found some illusory, progressive, upward line suggesting more and more women are telling their stories freely and getting to make their own weird, imaginative representations of their reality. In fact, I think we’ve had a backward swing toward a reactionary environment – not just for female artists, but for artists in the world in general. But at the time, all I knew to do was to tell the story of walking into a gym like that one, which was primarily – well, it was entirely – a male space. I entered that space in the 90s as a boxer myself. It was about the experience I had noticing I was different, then being welcomed in, and essentially becoming somewhat invisible in that space like every other boxer.

The gym was solving problems that went unaddressed outside.

The thing I noticed at the gym as a young person was how many young men were around me whose exterior world outside of the gym was far more perilous than them being in the ring for three minutes at a time for a sparring session. There’s a referee, a coach, a lot of father figures to take care of these young men. Then they walk out of the gym and it’s the wilderness again.

I knew they had sisters, girlfriends, other women in their lives, and I wondered what it was like for those people in those communities facing incredible strain and neglect. And then I started to wonder, “What if one of those women felt she needed to claim what was happening in that gym?”

The boxing gym can be an exhausting place. How do you manage to keep a film shoot going under those circumstances?

You just have to surrender to the space. It’s so loud. Physical bodies are sweating so much. The smells in those places are just completely and utterly human. It would make a pack of coyotes freak out. It’s such an alive space. To imitate that actually required a ton of thought and choreography of space. As I’ve gotten older and developed as a filmmaker, that lesson about the choreography of space is what filmmaking has become for me: How do we recreate a reality? That was a huge production challenge on our very modest budget.

For Michelle Rodriguez, this was a real breakthrough moment. It’s strange to read that you were pressured to cast an established actor in this role, since the production circumstances you just described aren’t the most inviting for a star.

Totally. Also, it’s hard to find a name actor who legitimately looks like a teenager, who has the unformed look of being between childhood and adulthood. You just don’t find that very often. With Michelle, it worked because she had never acted before and she had just turned 20. By her own admission, she was probably a pretty immature person. She kind of radiated “senior in high school who had lost her way.”

Was it hard to work with someone who had no prior acting experience?

I think the only way this casting works is if we’re in the presence of someone so watchable that everything else falls away. You need to feel like this face, this person, can occupy the screen. There was something about Michelle where even though she was so inexperienced and had never had a job before beyond a two-week stint at Toys ‘R’ Us, she was incredibly charismatic. She photographed so beautifully. Even though I resisted that she wasn’t a trained actor, I kept bringing her in and looking at her tapes. There’s something about those actors who just occupy the space when you’re filming it and she was one of them.

Girlfight was an entry point for both you and Michelle as newcomers to the film industry. In retrospect, what do you wish you had known about the challenges of making movies back then?

I would never take anything back, though I think that it’s not dissimilar to an athlete’s trajectory. As much as I came to experience incredible success early on, I also came to experience the worst kind of failure [with Aeon Flux, where she did not have control of the final cut]. It was a real learning curve to me in terms of understanding that in this business, the first success doesn’t protect you from the first failure.

I didn’t understand what it meant to be at a studio in which the entire administration was fired and replaced by new people while I was making the movie. I didn’t understand what it meant when that happened again while I was in post. The sense of whether or not my movie and I would be supported by the very studio making the movie – I just assumed, quite naively, that a studio always wants to support the movies it has financed. That’s not always true. Learning that was an incredibly hard lesson. But I’ve always said that I will be the person to learn more from failure than success.

What did you make of Michelle’s trajectory? She was an overnight star, landing in The Fast and the Furious immediately after Girlfight.

I felt tremendous fear and uneasiness, like she was just being thrown to the wolves. She did not grow up going to auditions and chatting in rooms with her colleagues wondering if they’d get the part. There was a lot that she had to learn, too. It was a rocky beginning.

In the 25 years since the movie came out, have you ever thought about revisiting this story? What happened to Michelle’s character, Diana Guzman?

That’s a really inspiring question. I’m usually against the notion of sequels, but I think you are on to something when it comes to the relationship to time and the idea that so much can change in 25 years. Where is the story in there? I would have to think hard about where Diana Guzman is now. I suspect the struggles would be similar in her world. There’d still be a lot to fight for.

The Playhouse thanks Kusama for sharing her insights with us. Check out Girlfight this weekend and, hey, why not make it a double or triple bill? We’ve got plenty to choose from.