It’s a shame that the distinction of “female director” still has to be made. It’s 2017 (you probably already knew that), and very few women are given the reigns of big budget movies by Disney or Game Of Thrones episodes. And when projects are female-focused, they are inundated with calls of pandering.
Director Niki Caro has been at the front lines of this struggle her whole career. She recently sat down with HitFix host Miri Jedeikin to talk about her latest film, The Zookeeper’s Wife, and the current landscape of being a woman in a continuously male-dominated industry. Caro, who’s also the director for the upcoming live-action Mulan, discusses the lead played by Jessica Chastain and offers advice to other women trying to succeed in Hollywood. Between her helming the film and Chastain’s “very strong yet very soft” character, it’s quite possible that The Zookeeper’s Wife will be the most female friendly film of 2017. Caro also goes into the unintended parallels that the story draws between Poland in the 1930s to the Syrian refugee crisis of the modern world, and why it’s disturbing that movies focused on the Holocaust contain messages that are just as relevant today as they were sixty years ago.