Take 61 - Director Tessa Blake, NCIS Hawaii, American Horror Story

SPEAKER_04 0:00

Any of us who've been in it for long enough, our entire career has been littered with jobs that we didn't get, projects that we thought were gonna go for sure, dozens of unproduced scripts littering the floor.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

All of us are running into both major and minor failures in Hollywood every single day.

SPEAKER_02 0:20

For every success, there is months, sometimes even years, of hype failure.

SPEAKER_00 0:26

This is one of the only businesses I can think of where failure is the default. That's the norm you have to be able to persevere. Like everything in our business, your hands can count. That bounce does take care.

SPEAKER_04 0:43

I was being told by my manager it's yours to lose. And I promptly lost it. And I remember thinking, like, well, that's it for me. I blew my one big shot. What I've realized from that moment is it's never one big shot. There will be other shots.

SPEAKER_02 1:00

Welcome back to Screaming Into the Hollywood Abyss, a podcast about rejection of failure and adversity in the entertainment industry. I am, as ever, your British non-entertainment co-host, Dan Rutstein.

SPEAKER_01 1:12

And for this second, I am still your industry co-host, Noah Ebbslin. Today I'm excited to have on Tessa Blake. Tessa is an award-winning filmmaker and television director who has worked on such shows as American Horror Story, A Million Little Things, Station 19, and NCIS Hawaii, amongst many, many others. Tessa's films have premiered at Cannes and South by Southwest, have won awards at Nantucket Film Festival and the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. Tessa also works as a screenwriter with her husband, Ian Williams. They've sold projects to NBC, ABC, Fox, Warner Brothers, and others. Welcome, Tessa.

SPEAKER_03 1:46

Thank you guys. Happy to be here.

SPEAKER_02 1:49

So we're not um we're not the sort of podcast that's our sort of industry news type stuff. Um so I'm not gonna ask you about what happened at the Oscars in a specific sense because everyone's takes on that are either wrong or unhelpful. Um, but I am gonna ask it in a general sense, actually, because not about I don't care about any exactly what happened in the Oscars, but as an industry, obviously everyone works in the industry, the Oscars is a time where a lot of people from the outside suddenly start caring about it and forming very strong views based on one evening's entertainment. Um, but as somebody who genuinely works in the Hollywood entertainment world, when you come away from sort of an Oscars like that, do you think it makes any difference to the day-to-day work and the things that you're doing, or it's just heat and noise, and then you can go back to your normal lives?

SPEAKER_03 2:47

I think it's actually quite impactful. I think it is um, for better or worse, the high school prom, you know, or and and or whatever metaphor works best for you culturally. But we um it is a time where the film industry comes together and and and when we're at our best, honors our art form and honors the people who contribute to it. And I will say that for me personally, um, you know, I've been a fellow traveler, a friend, a buddy with Sean Hayter for a long time, who won Best Adapted Screenplay, whose film Coda won the Academy Award, and whose actor, her actor won an Academy Award. And so um it's quite substantial to me and to many people, male, female, any underrepresented or represented population, to have best picture have been directed by a female director and best director, a female director. Um, it's pretty watershed. And I think it's always complicated to point to the exceptions and show that things are changing, because there'll always be exceptional people who can achieve against the obstacles in their way. Um, it's even better when you know average people get parody. Um, but it's very cool. And I know I'm purposely not talking about the thing that everyone else has been talking about about the Oscars. It's very, very cool uh to have seen uh that kind of representation on stage for a worthy, beautiful project directed by a friend. So, like for me personally, it was a massive celebration. Um and then there's this other thing that happened: Lady Gaga and Liza Minnelli were friends. Um, and that was also really amazing to watch. And then there was another thing that happened, and um, I don't know what to make about that. I it certainly was discussed on the set I was working on. It's certainly part of the question of like the analysis of what went down and that other thing um interests me much less ultimately than celebrating uh a night of celebration. One other thing though. I don't know why we're isolating now categories out of the Academy Awards. Our our costume designers, our editors, the people who the extent to which I'm a success as a director is the extent to which every single person around me is a brilliant storyteller. You know, it's not it's not that these are work, these are not drones. I mean, and who is? Everyone's a human, but these are major artistic collaborators to the process. And um, I would prefer that there was were less song and dance numbers and more just award giving to the people who really deserve the recognition.

SPEAKER_02 6:04

That's thank you. I I I like the answer mostly because of the fact that you talked about the important parts of the night. Um so actually, on on that, uh on that last point, um so on this podcast, obviously, most of our guests have been writers, and obviously, because Noah is a writer, uh we focus quite a lot about that part of the industry. And one of the things we talked about this season is getting other people on, so obviously directors, but also actually all of those people who weren't allowed to be presented their awards on television, um about that part of the craft, because actually the rejection, failure, and adversity that we hear a lot about writers presumably happens to everyone the costume designers, the sound people at various stages you have uh uh interactions with them much more than maybe Noah does, you know, the writers are very in their writers' rooms to an extent because you see all of that and you lead these people into it, how do you sort of when you when you're on set, as you say, these people need to be celebrated more? How do you actually, as a leader of people from very different backgrounds and skill sets, how do you lead people and celebrate people?

SPEAKER_03 7:18

That's an excellent question. I mean, the first thing I do is I try to learn their names, which would seem like a really minor thing, but I walk in as a particularly as a guest director to you know 200-ish people, 300 overall on set, somewhere between 100 and more. Um, and I have to really quickly come up to speed, right? And I I joke that sometimes my greatest training to be a director, well, two things in in combination. One is that for a hot second, I was, you know, uh ethnographer anthropologist, right? Like pursuing that. So culture interests me. I was also a cocktail waitress. So somewhere between those two, those two is a guest director for television. Um so that is to say, um, as a cocktail waitress, you learned really quickly who does what, um, what people's names are, you know, find out what they care about. Um, and basically just honor that. So you're right, there's this distinction. I'm a writer as well, as Noah knows, and um and he's a writer-producer, so he comes to set, and many writers come to set and have the onset experience, particularly in television, is much more hands-on than writer, a screenwriter experience and a screenplay where you may never even get to set, or if you do, you're sort of relegated sometimes. But as a director, it is my job to take the page and do this highly creative thing of imagining it, right? Imagining the images, imagining the performances, and then this highly clerical thing of kind of rendering it back for an audience. And that's a process that all those artisans do with me, right? And do alongside me and do of their own. So the costume designer reads the script, understands the circumstances and the environment, reads deeply into character, and then imagines what that character's wearing. I heard this great, I listened to this. Um Deborah Natalman Landis is the head of the costume graduate department at UCLA. She's somebody you should have on your show. She's really quite incredible. She's responsible for some of the most distinct silhouettes in the history of cinema from Raiders to the Lost, Raiders of the Lost Ark to the Blues Brothers, and many, many more. And she has all the uh Oscar-nominated costume designers come and speak at UCLA now on Zoom. I'm gonna listen to it. And I was listening to it last week, and I believe it was Jenny Bevan who said, you know, when asked, what is the greatest um misunderstanding of our profession? She said in this brilliant British accent, you know, I I I don't care about fashion at all. I barely care about clothes. I only care about character and storytelling. And that's what's happening around me on set. And if I honor that, if I honor that the props person is telling a story rather than bringing cheese, that's how I respect the people with whom I work.

SPEAKER_01 10:34

That's a really good answer. I I want to spend a second, and I I don't think I don't do this very often, but I want to spend a second shining a light A on you, Tessa, first. And then that's going to lead me to a question because I've worked with you. Uh, we worked together on NCSYE. That's what led to this, you coming on this podcast. And Dan asked, kind of, your directing style. And I can say that coming from the outside, watching her direct this episode of television that I didn't, but I was very involved with, there was sort of this sort of effortless grace that you brought to a very challenging job, which is like you know, you have so many people to manage at all times, and you were this, you came in and you were instantly the sort of this like the leader, you know, for the the eight-day shoot or whatever we were doing. And and you you you were able to manage all the departments with sort of this sort of like uh like orchestral sort of conductor way, and always with a smile and always with really good positive energy. That takes years of experience to get to the point where you can do all of that. And then you were sharing with me on the side, this is the program I use to do this, this is the things, you know, the amount of prep that went into it. Can you talk a little bit about the way up? Obviously, you don't get to the point on day one where you can be this person that can run these sets and direct these episodes the way you do. Can you talk a little bit about the struggles you faced as a young director breaking into the industry and and how you sort of overcame that and to get to where you are now?

SPEAKER_03 11:55

Um, thank you. That was your I enjoyed being on set with you. Um, I listen, there's so many ways to address the question of coming up. And for some reason, I'm struck in your asking to address the piece of it, which was my own development as a director from a craft perspective, because I came into directing. I mean, the stupid joke is like I went from bossing around my friends to being called a director, right? Like my DNA is highly directorial. Like I have I have a strong sense of what things should be and how to get them there. But I was an actor, uh I directed uh we didn't call it that in sixth grade. I did some dumb little thing. I had a camera and we did things, right? That was sort of directing. And then um it was in college when I was acting and I was complaining about all the directors in my theater program, so mad that they didn't do this right, and they didn't do this right. And you know, a friend who was annoyed with me turned to me and was like, Um, I think you should direct. I was like, Yeah, I should totally direct. And then I was like, Oh, I should totally direct. So I submitted to the process of the play and the people and the hand I got the play and I was able to direct it and put it up at the University of North Carolina, the lab theater. And I remember walking out the door to my first rehearsal and turning to my housemate and being like, Do I dress like a director to direct? She was like, You're fine. Um, and I started directing theater and I directed largely experimental theater and I directed, then I started writing and directing, which was really heaven. Um and in theater, I had a very, you know, coming from acting, I had a very strong storytelling sense, which was innate and learned, right? I was learning it all through the process of being a reader, all through the process of being a watcher of things that I loved, movies and theater, telling stories through the um instrument that was my own body and voice and face as an actor, embodying story in that way. Um, and so I had such a clear and strong sense of story and had also, as a photographer, an imagistic sense. But when I directed my first films, uh, I was not fully a visual storyteller yet. You know, I just wasn't, I I just wasn't much better than a documenter of actors. Like I just didn't really know dimensionally, even though I used camera and I saw image and I responded to things positive or negatively. I have to say that in in many ways, um, I just credit the the full education. You know, I went to the directing workshop for women at the American Film Institute, which I was rejected by, I was rejected twice, I think, before I got in. We can talk about that process. Um, Sean Hayter, also directing workshop for women, back to the Oscars of the other night, um, to become a more dimensional storyteller. So I I I was a successful storyteller in spite of the fact that I hadn't grown into being a strong visual storyteller. And then I became somebody who really loved camera and camera movement and light and painting with light. So all that intuitive knowledge became learn knowledge. And then I took the further steps to create for myself a preparation process, um, wherein, as you know, I walk on set highly prepared, but only highly prepared in order to be very flexible, in order to have the artistic engagement with my colleagues, in order to have the humility to see a better decision when it comes along. And the only way I can do that is by being rigorously well prepared enough to know that I'm not losing the story or the heart of what needs to be said. Um, I'm not destabilized by change. Um, and I'm able to sort of meet the moment because there's no, I don't have any noise if I've done my preparation. It's like meditation. You just show up and are able to be present. So, anyway, that's a sort of long way round on the craft side of it. Um and I'll just lean into the professional side of it because it was replete with rejection as a director. You know, I was, I came out of university, I applied to four film schools. Um I had been doing exclusively theater. I had almost no shot material at all. Um, I was uh in New York, um, loved New York, happy to be in New York, and didn't get into either NYU or Columbia. And I was like, but I live in New York and I don't know how to live in LA. I was accepted at UCLA and I honestly can't remember USC. I may have may have been waitlisted at USC. And I was like, LA, I don't, I'm too pale for LA. I can't go to LA. It's too sunny. Um, and I I was so confused by I was so ill-equipped, I so didn't know what I was doing. That I I don't think I even responded to UCLA. I just hid and in New York cobbled together kind of a film school education. I did some, as I mentioned, this anthropology film program at NYU for a while. I studied at the School of Visual Arts, I studied at Parsons, you know, I sort of studied around. And then I I sort of whipped out of that graduate school program in ethnographic film and was like, oh, my family is kind of an ethnographic film. And I did this crazy documentary called Five Wives, Three Secretaries, and Me about my multiply married Texas dad, which did super well. And then all of the four agencies wanted to meet with me. And I went to all of these meetings and they asked me, um, you know, what do you want to do next? And I said, gosh, I you don't get better at directing unless you're directing a lot. I only uh the only place you can do that is in television. I want to direct television. And it's a podcast, no one can see what my eyes are doing, but I'll show the two of you and then we can describe it. They went, yeah, that's not gonna work. What they did is they sort of scanned my physical person and said that's not gonna work. Um, and I didn't know what to make of it. I didn't know, I thought they had like some x-ray vision to my insides to see that I was not equipped for this job. And I ran away to New York um and pursued directing, continued directing, but kind of got the memo that I would never be paid as a director. And I built a career as a writer where I could get paid. Um there's a PS to that story that I rarely share, but because this is about rejection, I'll tell you this part. One of those agents said to me, Who do you know? I said, Well, I know some of the law and order people, um, but they're they're uh they're not very nice or something. They're intimidating. She said, That can't matter. That can't matter. You have to go, you have to go for it. Doesn't matter, make them your friend, you know. She sort of laid out, she was tough. She laid out this whole agenda of how I had to make this case for myself. And I wasn't up to that. So part of the rejection piece is also the internalized piece of like, I don't understand any of this. I don't know how to ask for help. I don't know how to stand up in front of scary people and tell them what I want. And I patterned, you know, we know the female, typically female brain patterns rejection faster and quicker. And I took my marbles and went home. So part of that story is on them, and part of that story is on me. Um, and I think that's this really particularly interesting piece about rejection and failure is the interpretation, your own personal interpretation of it.

SPEAKER_01 19:53

Oh, yeah, absolutely for sure. I I want to uh circle back a little bit to this moment where the the agent said to you, you know, basically, as a woman, you're not gonna be an episodic director. And you you overcame that. And and there's you know a number of really talented female directors who are working on episodic TV today. So obviously, and obviously the Academy Awards was a reflection on that is fundamentally not true. So I want to talk a little about what was inside of you that said, I'm gonna break through this, whatever this thing is, and I'm gonna keep going, I'm gonna make this thing come true, uh no matter what. A, and B, you know, talk a little bit about systemic stuff. You know, we we we talked about it a little bit, about being a female director and and the the silent things, the quiet things that you need to overcome that maybe people aren't quite even realizing that half, not half, but the whole segment of directors is dealing with all the time.

SPEAKER_03 20:49

Yeah. Listen, I mean, I think the first thing to say is that when they when they looked at me and said, you're not going to be able to do that, I wish they had known themselves what they meant, because then I could have done battle with it, right? It that they were functionally coming out of so much unconscious bias that all that they knew was that people who looked like me weren't working, right? That wasn't the that's not who they could present and move forward. So their unconscious bias was so determinate, um, they didn't know even what they were coming from, right? It was the moment for me, and it really almost was like a single moment where I was reflecting. My my husband and I had built a career as developer, basically pilot writers, you know, we've written pilots and were making decent money. But I had the frustration of like, oh God, all my work like lives and dies in Burbank. Like I traded in a life in New York where I made things but no money for a life in Hollywood where I make money but no things, nothing to show for my work, um, my heartache. You know, um, I was always so sure when they passed on it in January that I'd be fine and on to the next thing. And I was a puddle of sorrow every time. Um, and I was thinking about I was I had just directed another short and I was like, why did they say that to me? This is six years ago, seven years ago, maybe. Why did they? I don't understand it. Like the guys I came up in theater with are directing, directing at a really high level. All the guys that I came up in film festivals with are working a lot. Oh all the guys, all the guys are working. And then I started investigating my own history and thinking, oh, the women I come came up with as directors are not working as directors professionally. The people of color I came up with are not working professionally as directors. Um, and I understood in an instant, because I didn't think there were like mustache twirling villains in the halls of Hollywood. I mean, there probably are a few, but mostly those people were just regular people. I understood that unconscious bias was at work. And that seemed relatively easy to me to do battle with. What did not seem easy to me was the idea that I was somehow wrong for the job. I had internalized that it was me, not my gender. If I had understood it as structural, if I had understood it as gender bias, I would have been like, oh, okay, well, let me prove you wrong. You know, but the piece that was internal was the piece that was most damaging that kept me away from the profession for a long time. Now, it's also worth saying that when I broke into an episode of television in that year, uh only 12% of the episodes were directed by women. Um it has been a really profound five years, you know, like I think that was five years ago or six years ago in January. It has been a very um expansive time where women and people of color have gotten the opportunity to work much, much, much more and have begun to normalize the idea that the director's chair can be held by different non-dominant culture people. Um, but you know, part of your question is also what do I do? How do I recognize that there's gender bias going on in this? I recognize that there's gender bias going on in that. And um often it's stuff around, not in the case of NCIS Hawaii, because we know the wonderful stunt department there, um, who I've known for so, so long. And there's a female stunt coordinator in the mix as well. But stunts, cars, um often male actors who have come up under male directors are very uncomfortable. Um uh it it's not, it's sometimes you find it in weird corners of things where you're um getting some odd pushback and you're like, oh, right, right, that's structural. That's structural. And when I understand and recognize that it's structural, I depersonalize it and actually becomes quite easy to interface with. I don't, it's like if I don't have to take it personally, I'm liberated, and then we can figure it out together most of the time.

SPEAKER_02 25:28

The the distinction between well, I guess the the realization that it's not personal and it's structural, and then how you dealt with that and the fact that you found that in some ways easier makes total sense. But I guess go being a bit more granular in in the moment. So when you realised what the problem was, and then as you said, yeah, I let me prove you wrong. When you were doing your first episode, was there and obviously forgive my lack of knowledge about the exact craft of directing, but presumably there are times where you need to ask for extra things or something to be done differently, or you need a last minute change, not because you're not prepared, but because you realize something needs changing. Were there times where you're like, well, if I say this, they're gonna think because I'm a woman, I don't know what I'm doing? Or were you able to sort of think, I'm just gonna do this the way it should be done, and I I'm not gonna worry about what they think about what I'm doing, because I'm still trying to get to the end product, which will be the right end product, or did you start sort of second guessing yourself because you were worried that because it was a woman asking for what might be exactly the same as a man asking for, then that structural part would then start working against you?

SPEAKER_03 26:43

It's a great question, and I um I'm not sure. I mean, I uh it's interesting to do sort of the forensics on the first or first few episodes to see where that might have been at play. Um I I do know I can't answer this though. I didn't answer and then I didn't answer, and now I'm sort of not answering. I'll get there. Um I I it's one of the reasons I'm so evangelical about prep, because if I'm highly prepared, I am much less engaged in how I'm being perceived. Right? If I know if I'm rooted in my deep understanding of the storytelling and the needs of the storytelling, I just am kind of like a little a little deaf to the way in which um that might strike people. No, obviously, if I strike them, I I can I read people decently well, it's kind of part of the job. Um but assuming that we're all there for the collective intention of the storytelling helps me a lot to be out of the question of how am I being looked at. We know statistically that underrepresented populations, again, women and people of color, there's also ageism, LGBTQIA, um trans, you know, and differently abled, etc., many more places underrepresented in the director's chair. We know that underrepresented people are much more vulnerable to being fired. Now, that's not exactly what happens in television. You get the gig, you complete the gig. It's very rare that you would be pulled off a job in the middle of the sort of like hellfire of those couple of weeks of directing. But not being asked back on a show is tantamount to being fired, right? And we're only sort of as good as our next ask back. And we know that women and people of color, which are the two that we look at most carefully, are much more vulnerable to not being asked back and are much more vulnerable to having the reputations unraveled, right? So we know statistically that's at work. And I know that, I carry that with me. I understand that, I understand it, but the best I can do to combat it, um, and maybe this would be perceived as an unfair burden, is to be better, better prepared, artistically engaged, more committed, earlier, you know, like all those sort of superlatives. I feel the burden as an underrepresented director to be better than the represented director, because that's what inculcates me against having my reputation unraveled.

SPEAKER_01 29:43

Yeah, I I wanted to confirm that exactly what I was going to follow up and say is I've seen you do that, and I've seen you do that. And I don't want, I'm not going to say inflection to anyone else I've worked with because that wouldn't be fair. But I've worked with a lot of directors. I've been on in this industry for a long time now, and it feels like, you know, your level of preparation does sort of shield you from some of that. And maybe some people, some men who've been doing it for a long time, or even not who haven't been doing it for a long time, don't need the level of preparation because they can float, they can get by with leaning on their departments, doing mean director can always lean on somebody who'll help them in that moment, right? And and you know, and they don't have the flexibility uh to not even flexibility, the the you know, they don't have the ability to uh I'm trying to figure out what I'm saying. They don't, they they they have they it's it's a it's the the the strength and the power for them to be able to just sort of just just wing it. And and it's a little bit unfair to see that sometimes where so many people are unable uh to wing it. And I've seen you come in, you know, excessively prepared, which allowed you to wing it, but never because you weren't prepared. It allowed you to pivot, it allowed you to churn and change. And I've seen other directors who came into a scene and had no idea what they needed to do and it and what they should be doing, or only a vague idea, and it was a very different approach for different people, and it does strike me as slightly unfair, but I do know Dan had a follow-up question that I want to send over to him as well.

SPEAKER_02 31:14

I wish Noah was as nice to me as he is to you. Um, so uh in the early episodes and you took I you know I asked you about whether you were under more pressure, and obviously you responded that you you made up for it by let's say uh being more prepared, being better than other people. Are there uh looking back, maybe in the first few episodes you did, are there things that uh you didn't do that you now wished you had in terms of maybe uh asking for an extra thing from somebody or you know uh doing a scene again or or wanting to take a little bit more time, something because you were worried about how you might be perceived. And now today's Tessa Blake would just immediately do it because you don't care now, because you're you know you're good and they know you're good, but then because you were worried about not looking like uh you wanted you were being difficult, and so on. So, were there little mistakes you made early on? Not just the little mistakes everyone makes when they're not very good at their job, but actually you were almost scared to ask for things because you uh didn't want them to see weakness in you.

SPEAKER_03 32:26

Yes, and I I think um I think that is partially about being underrepresented and just partially about being green, because you're vulnerable as an incoming, you know, there's no depart, there's no ladder to climb as a director. There's no structure. There's no, you know, in the room, in the writer's room, you come up. You know, in almost every other department in our profession, you can come up the ranks. Um, and because of that, you also have colleagues and backup. And as a director, there's this unique vulnerability of there's you're a department of one. You know, you you have this specific and distinct job. Now you have a colleague on the visual storytelling side with your DP, you have a colleague on the production side with your AD, you have a colleague on the tone side with your writer, you have you have collegial relationships. The script supervisor helps with continuity. But there's just when you're green as a director, um, the seams can really show, you know, man, woman, or turtle. Um, you know, and the uh the fear of not being asked back, or the fear of failing, and the fear of being perceived as uh, you know, one of the things, one of the weird reputational things that women battle is um ambivalent, indecisive. Women are indecisive. This is a thing that I've heard levied. And so I carried that. I actually have a sort of a good story. I had a um my first episode was NCIS New Orleans, which is a giant show, giant show. So this is sort of like a great um way in which we have this like um family tree all the way to NOAA and NCIS Hawaii, because it's you know, one flu went right into the other. But um, and I was aware, and I thought, I think I need to like, I'm kind of a goofball. You probably noticed by now. You know, I'm a little bit silly. Um, I will, you know, like if there's good music, I'll dance. I um engage anyway. I'm a loose, I'm pretty loose as a person, um, which is an interesting contrast to the level of preparation, but that's part of what allows me that, right? And I thought I need to kind of like rein this in a little bit. I need to be a little harder to please. I think. I think I need to wear a baseball cap. I need to be a little bit more male-identified, right? I need to like go on to NCIS New Orleans with a little bit more like dude. I need to be a little bit more of a dude. And then like by day three, I'm sitting crisscross applesauce on the edge of a bed at a monitor, looking at it in my usual way with this, you know, crazy enthusiasm I have for what's happening on the screen. Um, and I was like, well, I guess that didn't work. So I did find that even in my effort to now there's real fear around the margins and there were real risks. And I didn't come back right away on that show, actually. I made some missteps and I didn't get passed back right away, even though I thought I was going to. Um uh, but there was also like indelibly, like, I don't know, as a director, you kind of have to be who you are because you're it's you're so utilized. A million percent of yourself is in. Um, and I I found and I have found for me that um I don't really have any other choice but to show up as myself um and fail or win, you know, that that even when I try to protect for the outcome or the thing I might be vulnerable to, I kind of end up just being me.

SPEAKER_01 36:13

I want to thank you first for you know coming on and sharing some of these stories. You know, full disclosure here, you know, Dan and I have been doing this podcast for 60 episodes or so, and we've had some trouble getting high-level directors, writers, female to come on and share rejection adversity stories because, and you know, this is just a theory that the playing field's still not equal for people. And and when you're sharing uh stories about the hardships you faced, you're you're you're sharing your vulnerable side. You're not presenting as this tough, like you're not putting the Tesla baseball cap on, right? And trying to do this thing. You're you're saying, I've struggled. This was hard for me. And and it, you know, it reflects in sort of you know, until today, people wanting to come on and share some of these things on our podcast. And luckily, we are finding people to come on and share stories with us. But do you think you said there's been a seismic change in the last five years? And and I felt it too, and I've seen it too, and I feel like it's changing every day. And I think, you know, I'm not gonna get into my opinions on the Academy Award either, but that was such a spectacular night on so many levels in regards to this change. And nobody was talking about that because this this other thing overwhelmed all of that. So, that aside, do you think we're there's gonna be more good change in the future? Are we feeling good about just the industry in general, some of the changes it's made? Does it have still a lot of work to do? Combination of both.

SPEAKER_03 37:36

Yeah, I guess combination of both. I mean, I think that we um we have had moments of historically we've had moments of profound change and then retrogression, right? And so I'm aware that um even establishing a new normal doesn't mean we will maintain that new normal. In fact, the United States is uniquely poor at this. Like we will have um social justice gains and then we will unravel those social justice gains and start over again. Um whereas other leaderships sort of take the social justice change and then build from there, right? Um I am optimistic, I am optimistic that that at least a good portion of this change will stay in place just because you now have really formidable careers. You have women and people of color with really substantial careers. And and you know, once we get past the unconscious bias, which is normally at a distance or on a page, um, and we dimensionalize human people, you're competitive. It doesn't matter who you are, you're in competition. The it's a wonderfully competitive landscape right now because there are more people in it at the moment, and more types of people are eligible for jobs. Um, and I hope that the like plurality of voices continues because it just makes it better and more fun, more interesting. Um, you know, there's an interesting, we saw the the Rooney rule at the NFL, right? Dan Rooney put forward. Um, it wasn't even, by the way, a rule. I think it was more a suggestion that at the final hiring level, um the the decision makers had to have at least one underrepresented coach in the uh one underrepresented candidate for the coaching job. And it made a huge difference. In 2006, there were 8% of the coaches were um were black head coaches, and the next year it was 22%, right? It's a big leap. Um part of that rule came out of knowing that there were fewer, in particular black head coaches, and that when they they were there, they were fired much more quickly for you know equivalent seasons as white coaches. So not only is it harder to get hired, you're more vulnerable to being fired. Um, and the Rooney rule is looking to change that. We're back now. I don't know, I think there are like three head coaches who are non-traditional, right? Or not underrepresented, um, historically excluded is actually the language I prefer. Um, because it puts the onus on the excluder rather than the excluded, right? Um, it's an active verb, um, passive experience for the one person, active for the other. Um, so what do we make of this uh halting progress and regression, halting progress and regression? And I have this very odd metaphor that occurred to me in all of this, which is I felt very discouraged to see that the Rooney rule sort of had made a big change and then kind of fell apart, which is that I used to smoke. I think we probably many people smoked, we all smoked, and I would I quit, so I was better than other people, and I would see them trying to quit and they'd quit and they'd smoke again, they'd quit and they'd smoke again, and I would imperiously think, oh, poor people trying to quit, they're never gonna quit because they're practicing failure over and over again, right? But I was wrong, I was 100% wrong because here's what the truth is. The truth is the more you try to quit smoking, the more likely you are to quit smoking, right? So they're actually practicing success. That is the better way to look at it. And the Rooney rule, while it's not perfect right now, I hope the NFL makes another run up to it, makes another effort to try a version of this. Um, because I would like to think of it more like the process of quitting smoking. The more we practice plurality, the more we practice inclusion, the more we practice diversity, even when we fall down, even when we make a hash of it, even when we fail, let's try again, keep at it so that we could sort of all enter into like a really rich, creative, and collaborative world where lots of voices get to be at the table.

SPEAKER_02 42:01

Magnificent answer. Um, in lots of ways. And I think it's interesting because in the in the in the NFL, there are lots of obviously arguments about what's worked and what hasn't, but the historically excluded groups there are more you know, there was the first ever female coach in a Super Bowl two years ago, I think it was, and now you know a good number of teams have got uh female coaches at different levels, and so even if the head coach quality isn't quite there, and there have been some very obvious instances of people uh using tokenism for the interviews rather than actually doing it properly, but the overall level is definitely rising and the diversity is rising, because as you say, they're forced, people are forced to look at things slightly differently, and then strong candidates just end up rising because you have to talk to people and realize they're stronger in the way that you forced yourself to be in a position where somebody let you direct, and actually you were very good. And if they let you direct at the beginning, rather than assuming that you couldn't do it, they would have found out earlier that you and many other people are very good at these things. So um I think sorry to interrupt you. No, no, go on.

SPEAKER_03 43:22

I I think one of the things that that is really worth surfacing to around these issues is that um the question of what makes someone qualified has inherent bias in it. So if you're looking at the historically included candidate, their qualifiers are have everything to do with their privilege. They were already they were in contention for awards because of their privilege, therefore they won awards, right? They were in contention for the jobs, so they got the jobs, and they're For they continue to validate, but they got they started with the privilege that allowed for the end game. And so, and I'm in no way, I just wanted to respond to tokenism, which it is really an interesting question here, because sometimes because people have been historically excluded from the dominant pathways to achievement, that they may not look like as qualified as the dominant origin peer, right? Um, and again, I'm not taking you to task personally, just sometimes that question is worth really unpacking because as a filmmaker, you know, my path was more circuitous. Many women's paths are more circuitous, men of color, women of color are having very different qualified paths to the same place. Whereas the guy who has had privilege throughout looks more qualified, but it's an imbalanced scale. So I don't actually give a shit about tokenism. I think we should get people who maybe don't look as qualified as their peers to the table because their experience is different, but maybe parallel and maybe it doesn't matter.

SPEAKER_02 45:24

Anyway. So 100% agree. I think we actually might be violently agreeing because um when I said tokenism, I didn't I actually meant it the other way around where people being naughty, where they'd already decided who they were going to give the job to, who is white, and interviewing uh an underrepresented candidate just to say that they could. So it's tokenism not fulfilling the rules rather than the other version of it.

SPEAKER_03 45:46

Um right. So yeah, what you yes, I now understand. You really meant they were doing a theater of uh inclusion and they weren't and they had already made a decision. I totally get that now. Great. I like violent, it's one of my favorites.

SPEAKER_02 46:00

Yeah, good. And also I'm gonna start using the server theater rather than tokenism, because I meant that, but you explained it better because you're uh you're better at storytelling than I am, which is why you're doing what you're doing, and I'm just the podcast host. But uh one thing about being a podcast license is I get to decide when the podcast is over, and unfortunately it is now uh because we've run out of time. Um so I have to ask the final question, which is if you could give a single piece of advice to somebody wanting to enter the industry, and obviously, in your case being a director, what would that piece of advice be?

SPEAKER_03 46:33

Don't lose your sense of humor.

SPEAKER_01 46:38

Excellent. Right to the point and and and and different than than than than we've heard before, and absolutely necessary.

SPEAKER_02 46:46

It is. It's difficult because obviously for people like Noah, he never had a sense of humor to start with. But I but for other people I can see that that would be excellent advice. Um Tessa, this has been an extraordinary episode. Thank you very much for coming on and being so open and honest and clear and articulate about all of the answers that you gave. It's been a real privilege to have you on the podcast.

SPEAKER_03 47:07

Thank you so much, guys. It was lovely to be here.

SPEAKER_01 47:10

Thank you so much. And that's a wrap on this episode of Screaming Into the Hollywood Abyss. As always, we want to thank James Launch for the amazing theme music.

SPEAKER_02 47:25

Do you before we sort of thank our wives and stuff, do you think anyone actually listens this far, or do they stop when the music comes back in?

SPEAKER_01 47:32

I think they normally stop after you mention your second and third podcast, obviously, I guess. I haven't mentioned them yet, though, have I? Uh if you do want to reach out with us to us for criticisms, complaints, or praise, uh, you can either reach out to us through the website or I am at nebslin on Twitter. And Dan, you have an account?

SPEAKER_02 47:51

Not that anyone really cares about. So if you've got complaints about the show, go to NEbslin and feel free to air those. If you have praise or you want to pay us in some way for something, come to at Dan Rutstein. And have a great day.