How Many Wonder Girl Are There

[Kena Sugrue]

Heroes are not meant to be perfect. In fact, it is their imperfection that helps bring us closer to them. We want our heroes, fictional or real, to stand for something better than ourselves, but we also need them to have struggles and flaws. They may have inhuman powers, but we need them to demonstrate a connection to a shared sense of humanity.

Putting aside the odd details about the journey the fictional character of Wonder Woman travelled, I can say without argument most of society has shaped Wonder Woman into a positive role model, one whose virtues are appealing to all, male or female.

In the current manifestation of Wonder Woman, the Wonder Woman movie finally represents the proper and complete expression of the true nature of what many people believe Wonder Woman should represent. It is not unusual that a fictional character evolves beyond the original vision of their real life creator. Wonder Woman has long been held up as a role model for girls, but we miss our opportunity to embrace the unifying virtues that Wonder Woman embodies.

Wonder Woman has known many incarnations, and with the release of this movie, has matured to the persona the character deserves. We are drawn to these characters, even in their imperfections, because they are more honest than most of those currently serving in Washington, D.C., and sometimes we just need to believe in good.

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Download LinkedIn's This is Working podcast to listen to our full interview; this is a longer version of our January video. Please be sure to leave a review. Those help the podcast spread. And leave comments below; I try to answer as many as I can.

Patty Jenkins: Sure. It's an interesting thing to find yourself in this position. There's obviously a huge pay disparity, and there's been a disparity of success across the board. We're all becoming more aware of that. I was never so aware of it years ago, but now I really see it. And there are a couple of things in place that keep that as it is.

In Hollywood, the thing that has been keeping it that way, there is something that we call the quote system, which makes sense if you are someone who's been hired for X amount of money, and now you're being hired another time. You can ask for a small raise; subsequently you move your way up. However, when people have big successes, it breaks the rules with that. They go from being on a soap opera to being a movie star. It breaks those rules.

One of the places where it really fails is when it's holding women to build up their quote system the same way men do, because women have had a harder time getting their movies made. It means if you direct a lot less often you're never getting that chance to build your rate up.

We could talk about those things all day long, but at the end I want to be being paid a parallel to the men who are directing blockbusters of this type. And the only way that we ever get here is by saying that that's absolutely necessary for me to make a stand.

If I was a guy, and I was paying hardball, it would be totally different. But as a woman playing hardball it was treated a little differently. So I've seen it happen with other friends of mine who were women who had to go through the same thing, and you just have to muscle through it. It was made much easier because I believed in its importance.

We're not there yet, but I'm hoping it's right around the corner. Certainly there are women who have gotten to great power in their careers: Oprah Winfrey, JK Rowling. There are people who have become incredibly established in their success and it's no longer a question. They're successful and powerful people. I think that's wonderful.

PJ: No. I'm a lot of things. I have complex thoughts about it. It was a surprise that it would be such a topic in my career. I had grown up watching lots of films by all kinds of women and men, and all kinds of international [stuff]. Living in New York, what you watch is very universal, and even before I lived here you're seeing indie films and small films.

I was surprised where we were in the world when I realized this was such an issue, women directors and different kinds of stories. Therefore, yes, it's a bummer that it so defines one's career, but I'm also aware that it has to be talked about, so therefore I'm perfectly willing to talk about it. I don't want to stick my head in the sand. It's a real issue.

PJ: It's not that I consider myself an extremely hard worker, I do believe in the discipline of working hard, so I am trying to always give absolutely everything I have to something. It's interesting: I'm probably that way anyway, and my father was a fighter pilot and very that way as well. And so I probably come from that training, even as a child.

I have carried that over to my directing career, where it's like: Got to be there before call, an hour before call at least, and so that you can see what's happening, and you have to be prepared, and all of those things. You know, definitely there is a lot of directors I deeply admire who do it totally differently, and I don't know, that's their way, that's their style. This is my style. I sort of believe in that kind of approach.

For me, I put that on myself because I don't want to be wasting time once we start shooting because I just got here and I just realized I hate that rug. That's my own, but my crew, who just needs to come, and is working very long hours and long days, they don't have to do that. Yes, I do expect seriousness about work. I'm not great when people went out drinking all night long and aren't prepped. That would definitely be unacceptable for me.

DR: Are you someone do you like to take people under your wing, do you like to have interns? How do you make sure that people are learning beside you? Are you doing it hands on, or are you expecting them to watch and see how you operate?

PJ: I think it's a little of everything. I feel like all of my assistants, one of whom is here today out in the next room, are all young filmmakers, often they're people who are smart and capable,

DR: You're back in TV. You're doing a few episodes of I Am the Night. Since you last have done TV, the world of episodic storytelling has changed with Hulu and Netflix entering and playing a much bigger role. Do you notice the difference?

PJ: Big time. When I made Monster, and it was successful, it was such an intense experience making that film. I have always worked. When I was a camera person, I worked all the time. I remember immediately facing that whatever my next film was going to be was my next film, and I wanted to pick the right one and I wanted to write the right one, but I also wanted to work in the meantime because I believe in kind of working on spec a lot of the time, so I didn't want to go to choosing a feature for money.

So I made a concerted effort to go into television, and it was unusual then to be working in that direction. Everybody was very taken aback, and kind of like why would you want to do TV? I was saying because I want to work, and because I like to learn at the same time. By doing.

I went immediately and did Arrested Development. I loved the show. It was my favorite show. I loved the actors, and was friends with some of them. And it was great. It was shooting in a different style. I had come up around a lot of comedy. So it was nice to jump into that after doing something so dark.

Then I started moving on to doing pilots, and that's more akin to doing a feature because a lot of people don't know what a pilot director does. A pilot director takes a script and turns it into a show. You're looking at just pages, and then you cast it and you build the sets and you build everything. Then you may not stay, but still that's a very attractive pursuit for a director.

And gradually over those years, more and more people started to cross back and forth and do both, and now it's becoming much more fluid. There's still something interesting about it, like there's something funny about what counts and what doesn't. I think we're just now starting to get to the place where I don't see the difference that much. I did this as a limited series because it was the right way to tell this story, and I do a feature because the way to see it is on the screen, in the massive audience. You do things for the right place.

PJ: Kind of. I worry about everything. Any choice that you make does that. However, I do consider myself a writer-director, and so I don't want to just do every feature. And I didn't have a feature that came to my desk that I wanted to do, but yet there were many that I wanted to write, and I don't believe in development process a lot of the time.

PJ: So the development process is when I go and pitch the studio, I want to write this thing, pay me X amount of money to write it. They say yes. I was hot off the heels of Monster. A lot of people were gonna say yes. Then you start to make the movie with that person, and they start giving you notes, and it turns out that you aren't creatively in sync at all. Now they own the project. As a writer-director, that's a lot of power for very little. It's a lot of money, but it's like you own now everything that I'm doing. So for me, I just thought for features, let me just write them on my own, and then you'll know whether you are on the same page, then we'll have something we're talking about.

PJ: I would, particularly if it was someone new. I would. I think give the things that you do the very best chance to succeed, and the very best chance to succeed is keep it whole and undiluted as long as possible. Because then you can really find the right partners. This show, I Am the Night, we wrote almost all the scripts before we ever sold it. It was what it was. When we were able to go out with it, we were able to say: This is it, and this is when we want to shoot it, and this is how it is.

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