Intervew (Written): Amy Heckerling

A Vulture interview with writer-director Amy Heckerling (Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Clueless):

Twentieth Century Fox and Paramount both have no female directors on their rosters until 2018. What’s going on?
Wow. At one point, an agent of mine called and said, we could show your script here and here and here, but Disney already had their female for now. They had one. You couldn’t go there because they weren’t going to have more than one.

What if that happened?
The world would explode. Walt would rise from his frozen death. Who knows. I’m thinking of a hysterical moment in the Family Guy where they have Walt Disney getting up from his grave and saying, “Are the Jews gone yet?” (Laughs.)

Now we have so much more data available to counter these antiquated notions, right? For instance, the audience for The Hunger Games was 61 percent female.
Whenever there’s a study that women want to see X or Y, then they go, “Wait a minute, now women want to see a woman with a bow and arrow,” but only in that genre. There’s always a reasoning behind it. When Sex and the City became a popular movie, people said, “So it’s okay to show women of a certain age? Only if it’s a Sex and the City equivalent.” There’s always an excuse for whatever change they should be looking at that they’re not looking at.

The young female audience is not taken seriously. If anything caters to young people, it caters to boys, and then girls were thought to go along with it. After Clueless there was a lot of movies with young females, like Legally Blonde, Confessions of a Drama Queen, whatever. Like it was okay to be young and female.

I met with Amy once and she said Trojan War, a script I co-wrote, was “the best script I’ve read in 5 years.” Coming from her, I considered that a high compliment.

For the rest of the interview, go here.