Features: Julia Hart (“The Keeping Room”)

There is a movie coming out this weekend in select theaters here in North America I recommend you see. It’s called The Keeping Room, written by Julia Hart, directed by Daniel Barber, and starring Brit Marling and Hailee Steinfeld. I interviewed Julia back in February 2013 and will be running that series starting Monday, a terrific conversation in which Julia delves into the writing of The Keeping Room.

In honor of this fine movie’s release, here are two features on Julia Hart. In this Movie Maker article, a first-person essay, Julia talks about how the Toni Morrison novel “Beloved” was an influence for her in writing The Keeping Room.

I was 15 when I first read Beloved in my high school English class. And the weekend we were assigned the last chapters of the book, my friend Kristen and I were calling each other every 20 pages until the end, gasping and screaming and crying and hanging up to keep reading and calling back to keep talking. We were so moved, so engaged, so locked in, so excited. And this was all because of the incomparable genius of Toni Morrison and the way in which she was taught to a bunch of teenagers by our extraordinary teacher, Ms. Jewett.

Morrison gave this privileged white girl a glimpse into a world and a time and place from which I could not be more removed. I had learned what slavery was in history class, but it wasn’t until Beloved that I started to understand what slavery meant. That it meant a woman would kill her own beloved child to keep that child from slavery.

Morrison’s genius moved me to empathize with Sethe, this woman, this mother, in the act of killing a child. And not only did I empathize with her, I loved her. Thick, thick, protective, compassionate love. And now that I’m a mother myself, I love Sethe even more. And it is through this love that I finally begin to understand slavery. In the corners of my mind I begin to comprehend the existence of something so horrific that killing what you love most is an act of mercy. No history lesson alone could teach me that. Art is necessary. Art is powerful.

Something else that always struck me about Beloved is that is has genre elements. It’s a ghost story, a horror story, the ultimate horror: slavery. Morrison’s main character is literally haunted by slavery through the ghost of the child she killed. With The Keeping Room I wanted to explore that same idea of how we are haunted by the horrors of history, of the present, of war, of slavery and of ourselves. I wanted to make a horror film about slavery and, more broadly, about war. And in doing so show that for some horror is not a genre, it’s a reality.

In this Bustle feature, Julia talks about the need for more female-led stories:

In The Keeping Room, a new Civil War-set film starring Brit Marling, Muna Otaru, and Hailee Steinfeld, the three female characters are left alone on the family plantation, surrounded by the wasteland of the war-era South. With no one else around, they band together against the threat of two Union soldiers out front of the rapidly approaching Northern army. It’s the type of bold, female-centric story rare for Hollywood — and according to Keeping Room screenwriter Julia Hart, it’s part of an effort to reclaim the female narrative.

“At the moment, we have most of our stories and most of our characters being created by men,” Hart tells Bustle. But “both genders have an interesting perspective to bring to their own gender and to the other gender.”

In fact, a 2014 study released by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film found that women made up just 11 percent of screenwriters on the top 250 grossing movies that year — and 35 percent of those top films employed one or zero women. In other words, movies like The Keeping Room are a rarity. The film (out Sept. 25) isn’t just unique for its behind-the-scenes production, though. It begins with a myth — a story of unmarked Union graves at a Civil War-era plantation home — and the movie in turn constructs its own mythology, based around gender.

“There’s so much that’s documented about the male experience in our history, and particularly the white male experience in our history, so I think what we have to do a bit as women is mythologize and tell stories,” Hart says.

Here is the trailer for The Keeping Room:

For the movie’s website, go here.

Declare Your Independents! Watch for The Keeping Room when it opens in your local theater and support independent cinema.