From IndieWire by Colin Brown

Jane Campion remains the only woman director ever to get a hand on the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival when her film “The Piano” shared the Palme d’Or with “Farewell My Concubine” back in 1993. This week, the same New Zealand-born filmmaker notched up another Cannes milestone of sorts by becoming the first woman other than an actress to serve as the festival’s Jury President. But even if her jury ends up bestowing laurels on one of the two solitary women filmmakers in competition this year, Campion herself remains unimpressed by such belated dents on the celluloid ceiling. “You’d have to say there’s some inherent sexism in the industry,” she lamented at Wednesday’s news conference on the Croisette.

“You can’t name a situation where a major franchise has been given to a filmmaker who did a film for under $5 million who is a woman – and yet you can name half a dozen who are men,” said Dan Cogan. “The bottom line is very simple: people don’t trust women to make money. And this is as true of women running film studios as it is of the men in charge. They don’t trust women directors to make commercial movies. The numbers are astonishing and shocking. You are more likely to be a woman nuclear engineer than you are a woman film director. You are also more likely to be a woman running a Fortune 500 company. It’s shameful.”

Speaking alongside Cogan at our monthly Soho House event was Jonathan Rubenstein, who enjoyed Sundance success this year with a woman-directed film, Maya Forbes‘ “Infinitely Polar Bear.” But while that comedy-drama scored a multi-territory sale to Sony Pictures Classics, Rubenstein says the trailing assumption among so many of his investors is that there is just maybe one woman director capable of making the kind of suspense thrillers and action films that can play well globally. This is a self-fulfilling myth, of course. “This year at Sundance, the most sought after horror film was made by a woman,” said Cogan, referring to Jennifer Kent, the writer-director behind the Australian psychological chiller “The Babadook,” which was executive produced by Jonathan Page and Jeff Harrison. “So there are women out there who want to do these sorts of films, but not getting access to capital. And if they thought they could get access to that capital, there would be more of them,” he added.

In an effort to provide just such capital, Cogan has teamed up with co-founders Wendy Ettinger, Geralyn Dreyfous and Julie Parker Benello to create Gamechanger Films, the first for-profit film fund dedicated exclusively to financing narrative features directed by women. Mary Jane Skalski is a senior advisor to the fund; Mynette Louie, who will be one of the lead speakers at the Filmonomics Talks this coming Monday in New York, runs Gamechanger as President. “The reason that we started this had to do with the fact that the only thing that will change the gender disparity in the film business is women directed movies making money,” said Cogan. “Money speaks much louder than prejudice.”

Fortunately, market data is entirely on their side. As Cate Blanchett reminded the world from her Oscar podium this year, the success of movies like “Blue Jasmine” and “Gravity” demonstrates that female-centric stories are far from niche experiences “Audiences want to see them,” said Blanchett. “In fact, they earn money.” Not only that but women have enormous purchasing power simply as ticket-buyers – a potency hammered home just this week when the female-driven lewd comedy “Neighbors” squished “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” at the box office.

Measuring gender equity is by no means straightforward. Some critics have simply looked at the ratio of male characters to female characters. Others have tried counting how many screen minutes each gender enjoys among the lead performers and supporting roles. And then there’s the Bechdel test, the now-standard benchmark for quantifying storytelling depth and range. Films that pass the Bechdel test require that at least two women characters – with actual names – talk to each other about something other than a man. And there are some surprising economics pay-offs for those that do.

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