Emerald Fennell, who did PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN and SALTBURN, might be worth talking to, as would Greta Gerwig of BARBIE fame—both have beaten the odds as Academy Award-winning female filmmakers after (or in Fennell's case, during) careers as actors.
While we're on the subject of women directors, how about Ana DuVernay, a Black Woman filmmaker who was nominated for an Oscar, then handed a big-budget project based on a classic of explicitly-Christian (and very VERY White!) Young Adult fiction...and I suspect told to make it more "Multicultural". For that matter, Chloé Zhao won Best Director and Best Picture for NOMADLAND, Marvel handed her THE ETERNALS—and while I can see her hand in it if I squint (in the same way I can see Sam Raimi's hand in SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME!), the Mighty Marvel Movie Machine kind of ground up what makes her work distinctive and we ended up with a movie that had too many characters for its runtime.
Then we get to the guys—the Daniels, who swept the Oscars with EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE, which is a triumph of invention and visual effects over a budget that would, at best, pay for Zack Snyder's Starbucks tab. And let's not forget Gareth Edwards, another filmmaker who makes Special Effects-heavy movies on lower budgets than you would suspect—even if THE CREATOR didn't exactly set the box office on fire, the fact he made a "mid-budget" (by today's standards!) movie heavy on the effects is genuinely impressive.
And finally, how about interviews with Neveldine/Taylor and Lord & Miller, teams that do pretty great work on their own, but once they work inside the studio system or for a franchise they didn't create everything just...doesn't work, somehow? Same goes for Andrew Stanton, who's made some of the most beloved Pixar movies ever, and faceplanted so spectacularly with JOHN CARTER that somebody wrote a book about it?
Emerald Fennell, who did PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN and SALTBURN, might be worth talking to, as would Greta Gerwig of BARBIE fame—both have beaten the odds as Academy Award-winning female filmmakers after (or in Fennell's case, during) careers as actors.
While we're on the subject of women directors, how about Ana DuVernay, a Black Woman filmmaker who was nominated for an Oscar, then handed a big-budget project based on a classic of explicitly-Christian (and very VERY White!) Young Adult fiction...and I suspect told to make it more "Multicultural". For that matter, Chloé Zhao won Best Director and Best Picture for NOMADLAND, Marvel handed her THE ETERNALS—and while I can see her hand in it if I squint (in the same way I can see Sam Raimi's hand in SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME!), the Mighty Marvel Movie Machine kind of ground up what makes her work distinctive and we ended up with a movie that had too many characters for its runtime.
Then we get to the guys—the Daniels, who swept the Oscars with EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE, which is a triumph of invention and visual effects over a budget that would, at best, pay for Zack Snyder's Starbucks tab. And let's not forget Gareth Edwards, another filmmaker who makes Special Effects-heavy movies on lower budgets than you would suspect—even if THE CREATOR didn't exactly set the box office on fire, the fact he made a "mid-budget" (by today's standards!) movie heavy on the effects is genuinely impressive.
And finally, how about interviews with Neveldine/Taylor and Lord & Miller, teams that do pretty great work on their own, but once they work inside the studio system or for a franchise they didn't create everything just...doesn't work, somehow? Same goes for Andrew Stanton, who's made some of the most beloved Pixar movies ever, and faceplanted so spectacularly with JOHN CARTER that somebody wrote a book about it?