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      ‘Maestra’ Shows the Power of Women on the Concert Podium

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      The director of “Maestra,” Maggie Contreras, discusses making the documentary and the challenges faced by women in classical music.“Girls can’t do that.”That’s what 9-year-old Marin Alsop was told by her violin teacher when she expressed interest in a conducting career. Today, she’s one of the world’s best-known conductors, and she remembers that exchange in a scene from “Maestra,” a documentary directed by Maggie Contreras that’s premiering at the Tribeca Festival, which runs Wednesday to June 18 in New York City.The documentary spotlights a profession — conducting — which historically has all but excluded women. It tracks five candidates vying for the top prize in La Maestra, a female conducting competition co-founded in 2019 by the French conductor Claire Gibault, and held in Paris every two years.In the film, Ms. Contreras, 39, a documentary producer making her directorial debut, delivers an up-close-and-personal portrayal of the contestants as they rev up for a competition whose judges include Ms. Alsop and Ms. Gibault. The five contestants profiled in the film were from France, Germany, the United States, Greece and Poland.In a recent video interview, Ms. Contreras recalled the making of the movie and the challenges faced by women on the concert podium. The following interview has been edited and condensed.How did you find out about La Maestra?During the pandemic, on National Public Radio — where I get a lot of my ideas. My fellow producer Neil Berkeley heard it as well, and said, ‘Do you think you should direct this one?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’ It made perfect sense. The classical music world is a world I’ve been tangentially tied to.The conductor Zoe Zeniodi is shown in the documentary eating a boiled egg in the tiny kitchen of an Airbnb in Albuquerque. The filmmaker believes the scene will shatter preconceived notions about the profession.How so?I grew up with classical music in my house at all times. Pop music was not something my family listened to. For better or for worse, I wasn’t exposed to what was on the radio.Growing up in Tucson, Ariz., whenever there was a free concert of the Tucson Symphony Orchestra in the park, my mom would make sure we went. My head was in the pit, wanting to talk to the timpani player. The Boston Pops was a concert series on PBS when I was growing up, and I was obsessed with the conductor John Williams. When you asked me as a kid what I wanted to be when I grew up, John Williams was my answer. I would wave the wooden spoon wanting to be him. I didn’t have a Marin Alsop to name.What was it like raising money for your documentary?Everyone was always excited about this film. They loved it from the moment they pressed play on our teaser. But there was always this barrier to committing. We almost stopped production twice, and didn’t have the financing to go to Paris until about three and a half weeks before the competition. In that time, we pulled together a 16-person crew to follow those women around.Our film is a microcosm of what society needs to be. Throughout the process of making this film, men in privileged positions said: “Hey, you should do this.” David Letterman gave us our first amount of money. He happens to be a classical music fan who wants to use his money to make things that are good for the world. The man who is now the executive producer is a banker in Washington, D.C.How did you choose the five women?I chose them out of 14, somewhat haphazardly, because the pandemic was on and I couldn’t go to all countries. I am a firm believer that if you put anyone under the microscope of a lens, they are going to be interesting. You’re going to find a story about them.How important was it that you were a woman making this movie?I don’t think I’m ever going to be the filmmaker who chases social issues. The feminist themes that are critical to this story and critical to our societal conversations are a byproduct of audiences being sucked in by the story, of being superentertained.Could a man have directed this, persuaded the five women to open up and express themselves as quickly as I was able to? I would question that, and would like to think not. This is why representation is so important when it comes to nonfiction storytelling. There was a sense of safety. I was sitting there with a camera in people’s bedrooms while they slept.In one of my favorite scenes, you see the conductor Zoe Zeniodi in the tiny little kitchen of a crummy Airbnb in Albuquerque eating a boiled egg. There are these preconceived notions about what a conductor’s life looks like, and the reality is the exact opposite. Conductors are eating boiled eggs in a very inexpensive Airbnb.Maggie Contreras, a documentary producer whose film “Maestra” is her first venture into directing.Ryan MusickHow did it feel to shine the spotlight on one of the most sexist artistic professions of all?When I was first pitching this project, my attitude toward it was: I am reluctantly telling a story about yet another glass ceiling that needs to be broken. The concept of having to break glass ceilings in 2023 is boring to me. I don’t want to have to be telling these stories, but they’re there to be told. I hope I never have to tell another one.Your movie is more about women than about female music makers. Why?Because if I need to fight against this world that isn’t accessible in the first place — if someone is going to say, “I’m not too sure my viewership is going to be into classical music” — then I have to make it as accessible as possible.It was very important for me to strip down the stereotypes of what a conductor is: the image of that authoritarian character belittling the musicians, who are quaking in fear and reverence. Women are not only having to step into that role, but also having to figure out how to get rid of that stereotype.What would you like your film to achieve?I want people to hire these women. I want all five of these women to not stop working. And I’m hoping that people can walk away from the film with the ability to answer the question: “What does a conductor do, anyway?”For me, I hope that people now see me as an individual artist, instead of a producer in relation to other artists. I hope my next film will not be as difficult to finance as this one: that for the next story that I want to tell, I’ll have the support behind me, because now I’m not a first-time director anymore. More

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      Women Directors Make Progress at Tribeca Festival

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      In a milestone, women outnumber men this year as directors at the Tribeca Festival. Three of them shared their paths to the director’s chair.For the director Olivia West Lloyd, it was good, old-fashioned networking that earned her the chance to make her first feature, “Somewhere Quiet.” With no film school on her résumé, she took every bottom-rung job she could get on a production set, and then connected with other peers on their way up, building a team ready to seize the moment when the opportunity to make a movie together came around.Gabriella A. Moses, whose first directing feature is “Boca Chica,” credits the film industry itself, and her participation in fellowships designed to give women and other newcomers a leg up, for getting noticed by the “right people” who offered the chance to helm the project.Maggie Contreras, the director of “Maestra,” said that she got her break from male colleagues who had already found success in the movie business and decided to give a woman they trusted a chance. Now she is making it a no-excuses priority to bring other female filmmakers along.No matter how women are getting the chance to direct these days, the sentiment that they need to lead a new generation of female filmmakers seems to prevail. All three directors, whose films are showing at the Tribeca Festival, gave key jobs — as producers, writers, designers and editors — to other women.The momentum to put more women in top positions manifests itself in a milestone this year. For the first time, the festival, which runs Wednesday to June 18 in New York City, will have more women than men vying for prizes. A considerable 68 percent of all competition films were directed by women, according to the festival.Jennifer Kim in a scene from “Somewhere Quiet,” a thriller directed by Olivia West Lloyd. Her character, Meg, is trying to readjust to normal life after a heinous abduction.Conor MurphyThat is not to say that women have achieved parity in the industry overall. Female directors remain far behind men at the top, according to a study published in January from the Inclusion Initiative at University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Male directors outnumbered women 11 to 1 when it came to the 1,500 highest-grossing films from the last 16 years.Stacy L. Smith, who founded the Inclusion Initiative and led the study, called that tally “abysmal.”“It doesn’t reflect the proportion of women and girls in the U.S. population nor in the world,” she said. “It’s not related to the proportion of girls and women studying in higher education. And most certainly, it doesn’t represent or reflect the number of girls and women enrolled in film school around the country.”Ms. Smith said the problem was with film company executives who failed to see women as viable directors on high-profile, big-budget films — particularly action films, which tend to do best at the box office. The playing field was more even on smaller projects, she added, and those are what make it to the rosters of film festivals, such as Tribeca.“I think that many of the institutes and film festivals have really started a concerted effort to think more critically about how they select, and who the committee is for selecting films, because we know that is where bias comes in,” she said.But the news from Tribeca suggests that a more equitable future is possible, particularly because its roster relies heavily on newcomers likely to continue creating films.How any woman makes it to the director’s chair is a personal story, of course, that starts with her own skills and ambition, but the aforementioned directors show how some women have cut a path and did it across genres.Ms. Lloyd carved out a niche in the horror/suspense category, where relatively few women are working. “Somewhere Quiet” is a tense, claustrophobic thriller set in a remote cabin in the woods. Viewers are kept guessing whether the tormented lead character Meg (Jennifer Kim) will make it out alive.“I love horror,” said Ms. Lloyd, who also wrote the screenplay. “I have since I was a teenager.”Ms. Lloyd, who has carved out a niche in horror and suspense, also wrote the screenplay for “Somewhere Quiet.”Emma HannawayShe said she believed that getting the film made was “fated in a way.” The deal was cut during the coronavirus pandemic when projects with small casts and closed locations were in demand. But she also had the pieces in place to make it happen.During her stints as a production assistant, she bonded with Taylor Ava Shung and Emma Hannaway, who were building careers as producers. “We would just talk at length about movies, and how we wanted to make movies, and what we would prioritize when given the opportunity,” Ms. Lloyd said.They were ready to go when they saw an opening, tapping their own advice network that included the producer Mollye Asher, whom they met assisting on the Oscar-winning film “Nomadland,” and her partners, Derek Nguyen and Mynette Louie.“They were super helpful in just introducing us to other production companies and getting us in touch with various people who could actually come on and make the movie,” she said.Ms. Moses’ first feature took her in a different direction, to the Dominican Republic, for “Boca Chica,” a drama about 12-year-old Desi (Scarlet Camilo), who works in her family’s beachfront restaurant but dreams of becoming a singer. The film’s intimate moments and lively music underscore its exploration of issues like human trafficking and sex tourism.Scarlet Camilo in “Boca Chica,” which features a Spanish-language script.Selene FilmsThe director had other plans for her career, envisioning herself writing and directing her own movies. To get there, she attended the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and began seeking mentorships designed to bolster young filmmakers. She received support from the Sundance Institute, New York Women in Film & Television, and others.In 2018, she participated in the Tribeca Institute’s Through Her Lens program for rising female filmmakers and used its resources to make the short “El Timbre de Tu Voz.” After completing that project, she began lining up what she assumed would be her first feature, a story she wrote called “Leche.”But her early work came to the attention of the producer Sterlyn Ramírez, who approached her about directing “Boca Chica,” which featured a Spanish-language script written by Marité Ugas and Mariana Rondón.“It was actually through this institute, and the never-ending grant-writing and fellowships, that the producer on ‘Boca Chica’ found me,” she said.Accepting the job was a tough decision. Ms. Moses’ mother is from the Dominican Republic, but Ms. Moses herself was born in the United States and her own Spanish was lacking. Still, the movie’s themes echoed her own artistic goals and she decided “to go along for the ride.”“It was a sink-or-swim situation where I was like, ‘OK, it’s hard to make your first feature no matter what. It’s going to be even harder to do it in another country and not in your mother tongue. And it’s going to be deeply personal and probably more emotional than anything to do it in your mother’s country,’” she said.With her first feature making the cut at Tribeca, she is turning her attention back to “Leche.”A still image from “Maestra,” a documentary about female orchestra conductors directed by Maggie Contreras.Isabelle RazavetWith “Maestra,” Ms. Contreras stepped sideways into directing. She had worked extensively as a producer, collaborating with the documentary maker Neil Berkeley. She first took him the idea of directing a film about an international competition for female orchestra conductors after hearing a report about it on NPR.Mr. Berkeley surprised her by suggesting that she direct it herself. “It was as simple and profound as that,” she said.The job came with challenges. She saw her own situation as a first-time director mirrored in the women competing for a spot on the podium: They were trying to break into a profession historically dominated by men. She decided she needed to pass on the baton, so to speak, to other women.“From Day 1, I said we would have at least 80 percent women behind the cameras making this film,” she said.Ms. Contreras put together a female-led crew for “Maestra.”Ryan Musick“Maestra” follows the several conductors leading up to the charged competition, with interviews in the United States, France, Poland and Greece. In some of those places, it was difficult to find female workers, Ms. Contreras said. With a tight schedule and budget, there was pressure to fill jobs with men. She held firm to her quota.Ms. Contreras credits the female-led crew for the project’s success. Her subjects open up, telling tales about child abuse, discrimination and body insecurity. “Because of my own experiences as a human being, as a woman with my own thoughts and fears and struggles and joys and the way I show up in the world, we were able to have a conversation,” she said.That perspective, she said, echoes other arguments for giving women more opportunities: Diverse directors expand the possibilities of storytelling, which is the heart of filmmaking.Her next directing project centers on an “Erin Brockovich” type who triumphs, though in a different context from classical music. She plans to keep the same philosophy when assembling an inclusive production staff.“It’s now my responsibility to hire people who will then hire other people,” she said. “That chain cannot be severed or we go backwards.”Ms. Smith, whose academic research has made her a leading proponent of equity in the film business, said that chain affected the experiences of audiences, as well as the careers of female filmmakers.“If you have a female director, you’re more likely to have a whole series of things,” she said. “More female-driven story lines, more women over 40 in films, more women working behind the camera, and more people in below-the-line crew that are women.” More

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      How Geena Davis Continues to Tackle Gender Bias in Hollywood

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      “Transforming Spaces” is a series about women driving change in sometimes unexpected places.Geena Davis and her family were returning from dinner in their small Massachusetts town when her great-uncle Jack, 99, began drifting into the oncoming lane of traffic. Ms. Davis was about 8, flanked by her parents in the back seat. Politeness suffused the car, the family, maybe the era, and nobody remarked on what was happening, even when another car appeared in the distance, speeding toward them.Finally, moments before impact, Ms. Davis’s grandmother issued a gentle suggestion from the passenger seat: “A little to the right, Jack.” They missed by inches.Ms. Davis, 67, relayed this story in her 2022 memoir, “Dying of Politeness,” an encapsulation of the genially stultifying values that she had absorbed as a child — and that a great many other girls absorb, too: Defer. Go along to get along. Everything’s fine.Of course the two-time Academy Award-winning actress ditched that pliability long ago. From “Thelma & Louise” and “A League of Their Own” to this year’s coming-of-age drama, “Fairyland,” back-seat docility just wasn’t an option. Indeed, self-possession was her thing. (Or one of her things. Few profiles have failed to mention her Mensa membership, her fluency in Swedish or her Olympic-caliber archery prowess.) But cultivating her own audaciousness was only Phase 1.Next year will mark two decades since the creation of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. When her daughter was a toddler, Ms. Davis couldn’t help noticing that male characters vastly outnumbered female characters in children’s TV and movies.“I knew everything is completely imbalanced in the world,” she said recently. But this was the realm of make-believe; why shouldn’t it be 50/50?It wasn’t just the numbers. How the women were represented, their aspirations, the way young girls were sexualized: Across children’s programming, Ms. Davis saw a bewilderingly warped vision of reality being beamed into impressionable minds. Long before “diversity, equity and inclusion” would enter the lexicon, she began mentioning this gender schism whenever she had an industry meeting.“Everyone said, ‘No, no, no — it used to be like that, but it’s been fixed,’” she said. “I started to wonder, What if I got the data to prove that I’m right about this?”Amid Hollywood’s trumpeted causes, Ms. Davis made it her mission to quietly harvest data. Exactly how bad is that schism? In what other ways does it play out? Beyond gender, who else is being marginalized? In lieu of speechifying and ribbons, and with sponsors ranging from Google to Hulu, Ms. Davis’s team of researchers began producing receipts.Ms. Davis wasn’t the first to highlight disparities in popular entertainment. But by leveraging her reputation and resources — and by blasting technology at the problem — she made a hazy truth concrete and offered offenders a discreet path toward redemption. (While the institute first focused on gender data, its analyses now extend to race/ethnicity, L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+, disability, age 50-plus and body type. Random awful finding: Overweight characters are more than twice as likely to be violent.)Geena Davis accepting the Governors Award for her institute during the Primetime Emmy Awards last year. At her left are the screenwriter Shonda Rhimes and the actor Sarah Paulson.Kevin Mazur/WireImage, via Getty ImagesEven when braced for it, the institute’s findings are staggering: In the 101 top-grossing G-rated films from 1990 to 2005, just 28 percent of speaking characters were female. Even in crowd scenes — even in animated crowd scenes — male characters vastly outnumber female ones. In the 56 top grossing films of 2018, women portrayed in positions of leadership were four times more likely than men to be shown naked. (The bodies of 15 percent of them were filmed in slow motion.) Where a century ago women had been fully central to the budding film industry, they were now a quantifiable, if sexy, afterthought.“When she started to collect the data, it was kind of incredible,” said Hillary Hallett, a professor of American studies at Columbia University and the author of “Go West, Young Women! The Rise of Early Hollywood.” “This wasn’t a vague feeling anymore. You couldn’t claim this was just some feminist rant. It was like, ‘Look at these numbers.’”Ms. Davis is by turns reserved and goofy offscreen — a thoughtful responder, an unbridled guffawer. (At one point she enunciated the word “acting” so theatrically that she feared it would be hard to spell in this article.) On a recent afternoon in Los Angeles, she took a break from illustrating the children’s book she had written, “The Girl Who Was Too Big for the Page.”“I grew up very self-conscious about being the tallest kid — not just the tallest girl — in my class,” she said. “I had this childhood-long wish to take up less space in the world.”In time she began to look beyond her height — six feet — to the insidious messages reinforcing such insecurity.“Hollywood creates our cultural narrative — its biases trickle down to the rest of the world,” she said in “This Changes Everything,” the 2018 documentary she produced about gender inequity in the film industry. The documentary takes its name from the incessant refrain she kept hearing after the success of “Thelma & Louise,” and later “A League of Their Own.” Finally the power and profitability of female-centric movies had been proven — this changes everything! And then, year after year, nothing.Geena Davis, right, with the director Penny Marshall on the set of “A League of Their Own” in 1992.Columbia Pictures, via Everett CollectionIt was here that Ms. Davis planted her stake in the ground — a contention around why certain injustices persist, and how best to combat them. Where movements like #MeToo and Times Up target deliberate acts of monstrosity, hers would be the squishier universe of unconscious bias. Did you unthinkingly cast that doctor as a male? Hire that straight white director because he shares your background? Thought you were diversifying your film, only to reinforce old stereotypes? (Fiery Latina, anyone?)It’s a dogged optimism that powers Ms. Davis’s activism — a faith that Hollywood can reform voluntarily. When she goes to a meeting now, she’s armed with her team’s latest research, and with conviction that improvement will follow.“Our theory of change relies on the content creators to do good,” said Madeline Di Donno, the president and the chief executive of the institute. “As Geena says, we never shame and blame. You have to pick your lane, and ours has always been, ‘We collaborate with you and want you to do better.’”If a car full of polite Davises can awaken to oncoming danger, perhaps filmmakers can come to see the harm they’re perpetuating.“Everyone isn’t out there necessarily trying to screw women or screw Black people,” said Franklin Leonard, a film and television producer and founder of the Black List, a popular platform for screenplays that have not been produced. “But the choices they make definitely have that consequence, regardless of what they believe about their intent.”He added: “It’s not something people are necessarily aware of. And there’s no paper trail — it can only be revealed in aggregate. Which gets to the value of Geena’s work.”“Hollywood creates our cultural narrative — its biases trickle down to the rest of the world,” Ms. Davis said in “This Changes Everything,” the 2018 documentary she produced about gender inequity in the film industry.Magdalena Wosinska for The New York TimesUnique to the institute’s efforts is its partnership with the University of Southern California’s Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory, which uses software and machine learning to analyze scripts and other media. One tool born of that collaboration, Spellcheck for Bias, employs AI to scan scripts for stereotypes and other problematic choices. (Janine Jones-Clark, the executive vice president for inclusion for NBCUniversal’s global talent development and inclusion team, recalled a scene in a television show in which a person of color seemed to be acting in a threatening manner toward another character. Once flagged by the software, the scene was reshot.)Still, progress has been mixed. In 2019 and 2020, the institute reported that gender parity for female lead characters had been achieved in the 100 highest-grossing family films and in the top Nielsen-rated children’s television shows. Nearly 70 percent of industry executives familiar with the institute’s research made changes to at least two projects.But women represented just 18 percent of directors working on the top 250 films of 2022, up only 1 percent from 2021, according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film; the percentage of major Asian and Asian American female characters fell from 10 percent in 2021 to under 7 percent in 2022. A 2021 McKinsey report showed that 92 percent of film executives were white — less diverse than Donald Trump’s cabinet at the time, as Mr. Leonard of the Black List noted.“I think the industry is more resistant to change than anybody realizes,” he added. “So I’m incredibly appreciative of anyone — and especially someone with Geena’s background — doing the non-glamorous stuff of trying to change it, being in the trenches with Excel spreadsheets.”Ms. Davis has not quit her day job. (Coming soon: a role in “Pussy Island,” a thriller from Zoe Kravitz in her directorial debut.) But acting shares a billing with her books, the diversity-focused Bentonville Film Festival she started in Arkansas in 2015 — even the roller coasters she rides for equity. (Yes, Thelma is now Disney’s gender consultant for its theme parks and resorts.)“We’re definitely heading in the right direction,” she said. “Bill Gates called himself an impatient optimist, and that feels pretty good for what I am.” More

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      ‘Black Panther’ and the New Blueprint for Female Warriors Onscreen

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      Danai Gurira: For Dominique to be out there now is thrilling. We’re both children of immigrants and, though our journeys are different [Thorne’s family is from Trinidad; Gurira’s is from Zimbabwe], we have that similarity when your parents come from another place and you’re used to a dual cultural existence. There’s something courageous in her; she’s not going to walk into a space unprepared. She’s wise for her years and grounded. There was a tender day on set [for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” filmed after Chadwick Boseman, the franchise’s original star, died in 2020] when we connected deeply. You never expect grief; it just hits when it wants. We had to lean on each other, and Dominique understood what we were dealing with.When I was in grad school [for acting, at N.Y.U.], I was distraught about how terribly African women were portrayed in the West, if they ever were. Putting out stories that countered that — whether through acting in my first play [“In the Continuum,” 2005, co-written with Nikkole Salter] or watching others in my subsequent plays [including “Eclipsed” on Broadway in 2016] — felt like what I was meant to do. The joy for me is to see Black women from around the world getting our stories told: Letitia [Wright, another “Black Panther” actor] is Guyanese British, and she had to learn a ton of Shona when she was the lead in my play at the Young Vic [“The Convert,” 2018-19, in London]. To have her doing our accents and intonations beautifully was like seeing the diaspora embracing itself.culture banner More

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      Taylor Swift Mania: Fans Seek Sweatshirt

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      TAMPA, Fla. — Did you hear about the women who hid all night underneath the truck?Rumors were flying outside the Raymond James Stadium more than 36 hours before Taylor Swift took the stage of the 75,000-seat site on Florida’s west coast.They went from person to person, as in a children’s game of telephone. But the lines outside the stadium last week were made up of fans of all ages willing to put up with hours of discomfort to buy souvenirs tied to the singer’s Eras Tour. Many of them arrived well before sunrise.When word went out that certain prize items might be sold out, some Swifties spoke darkly of resellers with suitcases who had bought up boxes of T-shirts and sweatshirts at previous tour stops. There was also talk that a couple of women had spent the night beneath a merchandise truck.That turned out to be true. One of the women, Larisa Roberts, had the selfies to prove it — grainy photos showing that she and a friend had spent hours taking shelter from the rain under the official Eras truck.“No one was here,” Ms. Roberts, an interior decorator from Trinity, Fla., said of the scene outside the stadium when she arrived between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. on Wednesday. She added that she planned to buy sweatshirts for her daughters, Lilly and Daisy.Z Souris, left, with her mother, Selma Souris.Zack Wittman for The New York TimesA fan passes the time by making a friendship bracelet.Zack Wittman for The New York TimesSwifties lined up on a sidewalk in the early morning rain outside Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Fla.Zack Wittman for The New York TimesJonathan Amador wore a metallic blanket to protect against the elements.Zack Wittman for The New York TimesProvisions were scattered on the sidewalk.Zack Wittman for The New York TimesShirley Vogler, a nurse in Tampa, said she had made it to the Eras truck at 10 p.m. the night before. Like other early arrivals, she had been moved from spot to spot by security guards in the rainy predawn hours. At 5:45 a.m., she was among the hundreds of people camped out on a sidewalk next to the six-lane West Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Ms. Vogler, 31, was seated on the ground toward the front, chatting with two other women whom she had befriended.Fans were able to buy merchandise inside the stadium on each of the three nights that Ms. Swift would perform at the home of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. So why bother waiting all night in the rain? Ms. Vogler, who had tickets to a show, said it was because of what she had seen on social media — specifically, “the TikToks about how bad all of the arenas are with the merch lines and the traffic.”Several other fans mentioned having seen posts by Bailey McKnight-Howard, one half of the twin influencer duo @brooklynandbailey, an Instagram account with nearly nine million followers. A few days earlier, Ms. McKnight-Howard had put up pictures of herself waiting outside AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas.She had also modeled a newly purchased blue crew neck sweatshirt, the most-sought after item among fans. Nearly every person outside the stadium on Wednesday morning was trying to buy one, or two, or as many as they were allowed to have.There was nothing flashy about it. The sweatshirt had no sequins or embroidery or hidden pockets. It was just your average everyday sweatshirt, with Ms. Swift’s name and “Eras Tour” printed across the front and the tour dates and the titles of her albums on the back. If you closed your eyes and conjured a blue crew neck sweatshirt with some writing on it, your mental image would probably match up with this in-demand item.One thing that made it special was the fact that, unlike some other tour souvenirs, it was not available in the “merch” section of taylorswift.com. It was also, notably, the rare garment for sale that day without Ms. Swift’s face printed on it. In the weeks since the start of the Eras Tour, fans had elevated this unexceptional article of clothing to cult status.“Every Swiftie wants the blue crew,” said Debbie Losee, a 60-year-old teacher who said she was waiting in line on behalf of her daughter.The rain cleared off as the fans lined up outside the trucks selling tour souvenirs.Zack Wittman for The New York TimesThe apparently limited supply made it even more prized. “The resale on the sweatshirts is $300, Jake!” one fan was heard shouting into her phone. She was correct. The sweatshirt is available on eBay for more than four times its $65 list price.“I’ve been having nightmares about getting this crew neck,” said Emily Rottkamp, a 20-year-old employee at Disney World. “I haven’t been sleeping.”Alyssa Misay, a personal injury specialist from Land O’ Lakes, Fla., joined the line before 5:30 a.m. She said her teenage niece had given her strict instructions: “‘The sweatshirt, the sweatshirt!’”“Social media just makes things a bigger deal than what they are — like, almost unattainable,” Ms. Misay, 36, said. “Like, if you don’t have it, you’re not cool in school.”Nearby, Venisha Jardin, a sophomore at Wiregrass Ranch High School in Wesley Chapel, Fla., wore a hooded plastic poncho to protect her from the rain. In the hours before sunrise, the glow from her phone illuminated the area around her. “I’m missing school for this,” she said.Her mother, Chrys, was sitting in a nearby parked car.“I was like, ‘There’s no way I’m missing merch just to go to school,’” Ms. Jardin said, describing how she had managed to convince her parents. She added that she planned to buy at least five items, including the you know what.The item most coveted by fans in Tampa was a simple crew neck sweatshirt commemorating the Eras Tour. It cost $65.Zack Wittman for The New York TimesDespite the chill in the air and the steady drizzle, spirits were high. Gina Delano, 27, walked up and down the sidewalk telling people she had a cooler full of free snacks and drinks. Wearing a cardigan that had gone on sale at taylorswift.com at the time of the singer’s 2020 album “Folklore” (which includes the song “Cardigan”), Ms. Delano said she had traveled from her home near Buffalo.“The weather could definitely be better,” she said, “but if this is what it takes to get merch, then this is what we’ll do.”Elsewhere in the line, Jess Montgomery, a wedding photographer from Dade City, Fla., cradled her 7-week-old son, Denver, in a blanket. Standing beside her was her 11-year-old niece. “I’ll be 40 next year,” Ms. Montgomery said, “and when she’s my age I want her to look back and say, ‘My aunt was super cool.’” She added that she had struck out in her attempts to score tickets for any of the three sold-out Tampa shows.Fans reacted to a TV news crew as they lined up in the lot outside the stadium.Zack Wittman for The New York TimesThe people outside the stadium included teenagers who had never known a world in which Ms. Swift wasn’t an international superstar and women who had grown up alongside the 33-year-old singer. The hours of waiting gave them a chance to feel at home among hundreds of others who shared a love for Ms. Swift’s songs about high school bullies and first loves, about heartbreak and loss.“The worst kind of person is someone who makes someone feel bad, dumb or stupid for being excited about something,” Ms. Swift said in a 2019 interview. It’s a line that her fans have often quoted on social media in reply to the haters.Shortly after 7 a.m., Matt Langel, a Tampa resident, was sitting on the sidewalk decked out in Pittsburgh Steelers gear while his daughter, Alexis, filmed the scene for her mother. Ms. Swift’s music had become a lifeline for the family, Mr. Langel said, adding that his wife was disabled. “My wife, since she’s been bedridden, pretty much Taylor is what got her through,” Mr. Langel said.At 8 a.m., two hours before the merchandise was to go on sale, stadium workers opened the parking lot. Some fans tried to respect the existing line as others rushed toward the front. Because many people had been waiting at different locations, there was a scramble. Fans who tried to abide by an honor system found themselves more or less out of luck.“Everyone started running from all different directions,” Ms. Roberts, the woman from under the truck, said after she had managed to secure a spot near the front of the line.Farther back, some people squabbled with those trying to cut in. “Back of the line or I’m going to have to put you in jail,” an officer with the Tampa Police Department can be heard saying in a video of the scene recorded by a fan and reviewed by The New York Times. Some people cheered as several of the apparent line-cutters obeyed his order.As 10 a.m. approached, local TV news crews showed up to interview fans, and a helicopter whirred not far above the merch truck. Strong winds whipped across the lot, stirring up dust. Tears streamed down Haylee Lewis’s face.“I just feel like camping overnight is a little much,” said Ms. Lewis, a 21-year-old college student who lives in Orlando. The line was already over 1,000 people long when she had arrived at 8:30 a.m., she added. “I understand it, maybe, for concert tickets, but for the merch line it’s actually insane,” she said.Bailey Callahan with her freshly bought Taylor Swift souvenirs.Zack Wittman for The New York TimesDolly, wearing a homemade Taylor Swift T-shirt, waited with two fans, Clara Rath and Brittany Mendes.Zack Wittman for The New York TimesThe front of the line, at last.Zack Wittman for The New York TimesLarisa Roberts, who spent part of the night beneath the merchandise truck, with her haul.Zack Wittman for The New York TimesA pair of fans, Kaila Shelley and Amanda Stiemann, in their custom Eras Tour jackets.Zack Wittman for The New York TimesThere turned out to be two trucks selling merchandise. Next to the Eras truck, which was patterned with images of Ms. Swift’s face, there was a plain black truck topped with a sign reading “COOL STUFF” in big red letters. Both trucks sold the same items.Inside the trucks, sales people prepared for the rush, unpacking boxes of shirts, tote bags, light wands and posters. They wore black Eras Tour T-shirts, the same ones they would be selling for $45 apiece. (Online, some fans have complained that certain shirts fade noticeably after washing.) There was one rule for the day: only two blue crew neck sweatshirts per customer.At 10 a.m., the line lurched forward. A pair of AirPods flew into the air and landed on the ground, their owner seemingly oblivious. Things progressed slowly as the fans who made it to the very front asked to see various sizes and mulled their options. The mood was tense but jovial.Less than an hour later, the vibe shifted as word circulated that the prize sweatshirts had sold out. Anna Avgoustis, a 26-year-old fan, got one of the last ones.“By the time I got to the front, they were taking them off the wall,” she said. “I was like: ‘Please give me the last one. I will do anything for you. I’ll run you guys Starbucks.’” A few hours later, true to her word, she returned with coffees for the sales crew.Kristi Kall, 38, and her daughter, Kaylee, 11, said they would try to buy a sweatshirt at the concert. “I just wish they would have had a little bit more, because they knew that’s what everybody wanted,” Ms. Kall said.“I’m a little upset,” said Kaylee, who bought an Eras Tour-branded water bottle instead.Brisk sales meant empty boxes.Zack Wittman for The New York TimesIn the afternoon, Laura Gavagan, a 33-year-old fan in Baltimore who had come directly from the airport, joined the line outside the truck, her suitcase rolling behind her. “I’m getting some looks,” she said.Jaclyn Quinn, a high school English teacher from Joliet, Ill., said that Ms. Swift’s work came in handy in her lessons. “We use ‘The Man’ to teach critical lenses and talk about the feminist lens versus the genderqueer lens,” she said. “We use her song ‘Bad Blood’ to talk about metaphor.” She bought an Eras Tour wall tapestry for her classroom.As 5 p.m. approached, the salespeople began straightening up the trucks and peeling off the tour T-shirts. When asked if they got to keep the shirts they had worn that day, one of the workers said, “No.” Instead, they folded them and returned them to the stacks to be sold to the next day’s fans.“Isn’t that so gross?” the salesperson said. “Don’t tell.” More

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      in Television

      ‘Yellowjackets’ Shows Us the Teenage Girlhood We Were Hungry For

      by

      In a cabin in the wilderness, a group of starving teenage girls, a teenage boy and one adult man wake to an unfamiliar smell. Their noses twitching in the air, they leave their thin blankets and head out into the snowy wild in socks and insufficient clothes. Outside, their friend, whose body they tried to cremate last night, has turned into smoked meat. They surround her corpse, girl-shaped but foodlike, like a pig from the barbecue pit. One of the girls stands near the charred flesh, knife in hand. “She wants us to,” she says. A few moments later, the feast begins.Thus “Yellowjackets,” Showtime’s hit drama, answered, in the second episode of its second season, the question teased throughout its first: What and whom are these girls going to eat? Named for a New Jersey high school girls’ soccer team whose plane crashes in the Canadian Rockies en route to the 1996 national championships, “Yellowjackets” toggles between the team’s 19-month sojourn in the wilderness and the present day, when the surviving members struggle with the aftereffects of what happened to them. The show has become a sensation, garnering five million viewers per week, making it Showtime’s second-most-streamed show ever. In addition to the standard BuzzFeed meme roundups, the show has spawned exuberant fan fiction and forums that include suggested paper topics (“ ‘Yellowjackets’: Yellow Wallpaper for the 21st Century”) and frenzied theories about what, exactly, the Yellowjackets did in the woods.Plot mysteries abound: What happened to the hunter who died in the cabin where they shelter? Is there a malevolent spirit in the woods, and will it follow the girls to safety? But the show also grapples with questions of a more existential tenor, making it catnip for a demographic aging out of youth and into middle age, performing the excavations and re-evaluations that accompany midlife. Do people ever really change? Does trauma echo forever?As Showtime teased the second season (which began streaming in late March) and the internet forums buzzed with anticipation for the revelations promised therein, I headed to the frigid north to see for myself. The sky over British Columbia was ashen and spitting indifferent snow as I navigated the slush to the Vancouver soundstage where much of the show was filmed. On the way to the set, I listened to the official “Yellowjackets” playlist, groaning with pleasure as one after another 1990s jam issued forth. I was vibrating with excitement.I first came to the show as an exhausted mother with a free Showtime trial, repulsed and compelled by the unforgettable first scene of the pilot, written by the creators (and spouses) Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson and directed by Karyn Kusama. In it, a girl runs barefoot through the snow in a filmy nightie, blood in her tracks, until she falls into a pit and is impaled by sharpened sticks. Later, figures shrouded in animal pelts string her up naked and bleed her dry. It’s one of the most gruesome opening sequences I’ve ever seen on television, but “Yellowjackets” doesn’t sustain the wild pitch. One of the show’s winning qualities is the way it juxtaposes brutal violence with familiar scenes of soccer practice, futile groping in frilly bedrooms and the malaise of middle age, all against the soundtrack of the ’90s.Two hours and a rapid PCR test later, I sat in the dark of a tent, watching as two young women formed a kind of Pietà in a pool of warm yellow lamplight. One, Courtney Eaton, playing the character Lottie with eerie poise, lay on her side in a nest of blankets. The other, Sammi Hanratty, portraying the marvelously weird Misty, knelt behind, her frizzy blond hair aglow, bringing unspeakable news from beyond the cabin’s walls. Karyn Kusama was behind the camera, making minute, courteous corrections to the angles and expressions of the actors’ pliant faces over the course of two scenes. The spoilers fell thick as the manufactured Canadian snow blanketing the adjacent stage. I was watching the season finale unfold in real time.‘We didn’t want it to be about being women in a man’s world.’It was the last few days of shooting, and many of the primary executives were also on hand: the showrunners, Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson and Jonathan Lisco, and the producer Drew Comins. Comins was immediately identifiable as the show’s hype man; “Buzz, buzz, buzz!” was his cheerful greeting when we were introduced. They gathered together in the tent to watch the shoot. “Karyn loves to live in the painting,” someone murmured, seeing the same Pietà in the light of the lamps.Kusama joined us for a moment between shots. Lately, she has enjoyed vindication following the commercial flop and subsequent cult ascension of her 2009 film, “Jennifer’s Body” (another representation of women doing upsetting things). I asked her about something she said in a previous interview, about the ongoingness of TV and the way it allowed celebrated characters like Tony Soprano and Don Draper to not change — to occupy the uneasy Dantean position of being midway through the journey of life, but without Dante’s final ascent up to virtue and improvement. “Yellowjackets” claims its own form of ongoingness, giving female characters the same opportunities to flail in midlife, while anchoring them to a traumatic formative experience that made them heroes, of a sort, in their own lives. Kusama took on an oracular aspect in the dark as she spoke. “Any marginalized psyche is often positioned as an object, not a subject,” she said. The Yellowjackets “are characters who got through most of high school, learning that hard terrible lesson in female adolescence, that you’re not the subject of your own story.”The first episodes of the first season established this truth with a light touch, showing the girls leaving something nasty behind them: the guys yelling “Show us your tits,” the mean girls who prank call, alcoholic mothers, violent fathers. After the crash, the problem is simply the Yellowjackets, trying to survive. It’s the perfect canvas for Kusama, who was drawn to the idea of “living completely in your appetites and starvation.” Kusama believes questions of appetite “are very rich ideas for women: being hungry, being fed, feeding each other.” For her the show conveys “a very pure relationship to the metaphor,” and indeed these were the subjects of the day’s scenes, about which I now possessed sinister knowledge.When Kusama, who is also an executive producer, first met with Lyle and Nickerson to discuss the pilot, she likened it to a war story. She told me that the real wilderness of the show is “female interiority, female experience, female transformation and the presence of a kind of unchangeable chaos in women,” a delicious phrase. “It is progress to see ourselves change,” she said, “but the reality of many people’s lives is that the patterns we learn early are the patterns we enact and re-enact for years to come.” Part of the show’s inquiry, she said in the darkness, is “to what degree is positive change possible,” given that there is “very real anguish in their past.”As the sounds of activity outside the tent picked up and it was clear our time would soon come to an end, I asked Kusama about the challenge of exploitation that invariably lives in a show about cannibal teenage girls. “Yellowjackets” is in some ways a quintessential Dead Girl show, an idea explored by the writer Alice Bolin in her book on the subject to account for shows like “True Detective” and “Twin Peaks.” These mysteries are structured around beautiful, dead white girls and “the investigator’s haunted, semi-sexual obsession” with them. In “Yellowjackets,” it is the audience who steps into the inspector’s role, only to find our voyeurism thwarted, at least most of the time, by a conscientious editorial sensibility. It’s a fundamental conundrum of storytelling, Kusama said, “the urge to entertain and engage versus the urge to confront and provoke.” She approached her episodes with a firm rule: “None of this is a joke,” she told herself and her colleagues. It was imperative for her to treat these characters “with some degree of gravity, because otherwise I really wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.”I walked through the extant sets — a remarkable recreation of the Canadian forest replete with the scent of real (salvaged) pine trees dangling from the rafters — past rooms of stacked up crates with labels like “antlers” and “fur.” I followed Lyle, Nickerson and Lisco to the warren of modular offices tucked above the soundstages. I admired Lyle’s outfit as we walked, an array of ’90s layers befitting the “Yellowjackets” universe: a leopard cardigan, a red animal-print skirt, black tights, boots. It was such a good outfit that I forgot to look at the men.We took off our masks and sat in a circle. Trucks bearing the material of filmmaking rumbled around the buildings on the roads below the window. I raised the topic of covertly dignified treatment of teenage girls. Lyle and Nickerson, who previously wrote for “Narcos,” Netflix’s drama about the life and death of Pablo Escobar, knew that they wanted to make a show about women. “But we didn’t want it to be about being women in a man’s world,” Lyle said. “So we were like, ‘Well, I guess we can drop them into the wilderness in a plane crash and see what happens.’” For Nickerson, the frame was less important than the development of the characters, to give them “the dignity of a point of view” and let them proceed from there.When I suggested that the first season was a bit of a bait and switch, because audiences drawn in by the cannibalistic first episode will find all kinds of other complex human dramas playing out, Lyle agreed. “That slightly salacious or plot-driven outset to the story with the plane crash and the cannibalism,” she said, is “a little bit of a Trojan horse to just make you care about these women.” She went on, “It’s interesting that you almost need something like that to tell a story about women that is hopefully nuanced and complicated.”Lisco, who previously worked on hits like “N.Y.P.D. Blue” and “Halt and Catch Fire” and came on as a showrunner after Lyle and Nickerson sold “Yellowjackets,” spoke to the show’s juxtapositions as its strengths, its blend of the gruesome “reality of what they’re going through with real comedy, because the bizarre incongruities of life are with us always.” He thought people longed, perhaps because of the pandemic, “to feel something and feel the totality and richness of their human experiences.”“Yellowjackets” does have a little something for everyone. There’s a fundamental humor in the show’s timing: one moment of grotesque violence in the past, one moment of mundanity in the present, contrasts à la “The Sopranos” or “Breaking Bad,” but with teenage girls doing the things, broadening the innate disconnect. Gliding brashly and mostly successfully among horror, buddy detective, melodrama and light camp, the show also achieves something that I can only describe as the sometime triumph of Prime Time over Prestige, the marriage of surreality and strong character development within the confines of fast-paced entertainment doled out a week a time. It harks back to the golden age of weird prime-time shows like “Twin Peaks” or “Lost,” which delighted, shocked, titillated and annoyed, but never in quite the way audiences expected.Like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” another fan favorite that trucked in teenage-girl archetypes, “Yellowjackets” is occasionally quippy and self-referential. “Wow. I’ve never been in a French farce before,” says one doomed character when he hides from a husband in a bedroom closet. As adult Misty (Christina Ricci) prepares to kill a nosy reporter (long story), she ponders who might play her in a movie adaptation. “Who’s the one in that thing about those rich ladies that kill that guy?” she asks guilelessly, a nod to “Big Little Lies,” one reference to which Comins compared the show during pitch meetings. “Big Little Lies” disguised a searing portrait of abuse as a piece of gossamer lifestyle porn. “Yellowjackets” performs a similar trick: It sneaks a thoughtful excavation of teenage girlhood and middle-aged floundering into its genre pleasures.Toward the end of the day, I visited costumes, where Amy Parris, who like me is nearing 40, kept a stack of ancient magazines as reference material: Seventeen and Sassy and YM, which could have been mine. One magazine contains a photo of a teenage Christina Ricci and Elijah Wood — who joins the show this season as Walter, one of Misty’s fellow citizen detectives from the true-crime forums — together at the height of their early fame. It’s a potent reminder of the psychic resonance the show holds for someone who grew up with these referents. I read some headlines aloud: “A ballerina and her eating disorder.” “So you think you want a nose job? Read this first.” We briefly observed how nasty it was to be alive and teenage in the 1990s. And yet these nostalgic artifacts opened a yawning chasm of feeling. Perhaps the real resonance of the show is the age of its present-day characters — early 40s, just tipped into the zone of midlife where women have historically become invisible, a tendency that popular culture dances with and occasionally fights against.Retrospection is in the air. Younger millennials, apparently, are rewatching “Girls” in record numbers to parse the just-vanished particulars of their early 20s. Before “Yellowjackets,” I binged “Fleishman Is in Trouble” and was totally caught up in the backward excavation of its hapless middle-aged characters. I exchanged texts with my peers about the promised reappearance of Aidan on “And Just Like That,” an unheimlich but irresistible return to “Sex and the City,” a show that gave my generation a formative if deeply inaccurate picture of what our adulthood might hold. Cultural offerings like “Impeachment” or “I, Tonya” take up the specifics of the 1990s’ sensational moments and examine them in a new light. What a time, then, for both of the “Yellowjackets” story lines: its murderers’ row of former icons — Juliette Lewis, Christina Ricci, Melanie Lynskey, now Elijah Wood — playing middle-aged roles, as well as the opportunity to see those characters as their past selves, a vicarious simultaneity.The show takes the common awfulnesses of teenage girlhood in that era (which of course persist today, with their own temporal inflection) — the unsettling sexual experiences or outright assaults; the casual racism; homophobia and misogyny; Kate Moss languishing in her underwear — and discreetly moves them out of the way. A primary love story in the woods is a queer one; the romance between Van (Liv Hewson) and Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) is a loving and fully realized relationship from the jump. The only adult man present, the team’s coach, Ben Scott (Steven Krueger), is gay, and his period-appropriate terror of being outed is understood and neutralized by the empathetic perspicacity of Natalie (Sophie Thatcher), who navigates her own halting romance with Travis (Kevin Alves), the only teenage boy in the cabin. Unlike the characters of “Euphoria,” whose goal seems to be to show as much pretend-under-age boob as possible, those in “Yellowjackets” have access to a form of fundamental self-respect and agency that many middle-aged women took years to attain. Maybe that’s part of the fantasy, too.There’s something fundamentally melancholy, though, about all this looking back. Toward the end of the first season, in a wilderness interlude, Van is attacked by wolves, her face torn open. Back at the cabin, the girls work together to hold her down while one draws a curved needle through her cheek to stitch the wound. In the next moment, we see 40-something Taissa (Tawny Cypress), now at Shauna’s modest New Jersey ranch house, where Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) makes up her teenage daughter’s bed, beneath a poster that reads “Keep Calm You Can Still Marry Harry.” The two old friends lie in bed, and Shauna muses about what would have happened had they not crashed, had she gone to Brown the way she planned, where she would “write amazing papers on Dorothy Parker and Virginia Woolf” and fall in love with a “floppy-haired, sad-eyed poet boy.” Taissa, meanwhile, describes a litany of successes that actually came to pass: Howard University, “a bunch of beautiful women,” “first string on the soccer team,” Columbia Law. But achieving a dream can also become ash in the mouth. “Not a single one of those things felt real,” Taissa says. It was their time in the woods, when everything was terrible and vivid and somehow fundamental — and cheeks were stitched with twine — when feeling and reality were truly one.Or at least that’s what the show wants us to think at first. That’s certainly how the characters feel in the early episodes, quietly assenting to the fate suggested in their bad marriages, puzzling children and unfulfilling jobs. But then the gang gets back together, and their efforts to keep their shared trauma among them amount to a kind of quest. Their days become unpredictable and enlivened again. At some point, viewers sense that the women approach their present-day escapades with the same ferocity they brought to their exploits in the wilderness.From some angles, this vicarious pleasure might confirm our worst suspicions that for women, middle age signals the decline after the peak. But the notion of a miserable midlife turns out to be another bait and switch. “Yellowjackets,” then, becomes a deliciously macabre play on the midlife crisis. Certainly, healing and redemption appear to fall outside the boundaries of a “Yellowjackets” universe. So, like other women before them, these restless heroines begin to make the most of the diversions life finds for them, grim as their circumstances might be: sex, camaraderie, adventure and wild fun.Source images for opening artwork: Showtime, the New York Public Library, Russell Lee via the New York Public Library.Lydia Kiesling is the author of “The Golden State,” which was a 2018 National Book Foundation “Five Under 35” honoree. Her novel “Mobility” is set to be published in August. Sarah Palmer is an artist, photographer, and educator based in Brooklyn. Her solo exhibition, “The Delirious Sun,” at Mrs. gallery in Maspeth, is on display until May 6. More

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      in Movies

      Helen Mirren, Lucy Liu and the Joy of Playing Villainous Goddesses in ‘Shazam’

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      The “Shazam!” actresses say they signed on for their first superhero movie because the roles are a leap forward for women.If superheroes have one thing in common, it’s not so much capes or extraordinary abilities but memorable foes. As its spoilery title reveals, the new movie “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” (a sequel to 2019’s “Shazam!”) has supersized its antagonist factor by going for immortal divinities, plural.Which is how Billy Batson (Zachary Levi), whose nom de superhero is Shazam, and his pals find themselves battling the daughters of Atlas as they do the kind of things power-mad mythological beings are wont to do: unleash oversized beasties, flatten entire cities and point menacingly into the distance.“A good thing about being about magic and gods was that they didn’t have to be in a similar age or anything like that,” the director David F. Sandberg said by phone. “We could just cast the best people we could get.” That turned out to be Helen Mirren as the bossy eldest sister, Hespera, and Lucy Liu as the steely Kalypso. (Rachel Zegler, from “West Side Story,” plays younger sibling Anthea, whose relationship to humans is more ambiguous.)Sandberg quickly realized that Mirren, 77, had not come to play — or maybe she had. “We had to talk her out of doing certain stunts that she wanted to do,” he said.In a video interview, Liu, 54, and Mirren displayed an easygoing rapport, along with a few differences in temperament and approach. Calling from Los Angeles, Mirren dispensed lighthearted jokes and pretended to be a quasi-gadfly at this whole acting thing, while Liu, who was in New York, brought up the ins and outs of portraying an antagonist. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Hespera and Kalypso are introduced as gods rather than goddesses. Is it an important distinction?LUCY LIU We’ve been talking about this, trust me. It’s “Fury of the Gods,” and I was like, “Shouldn’t it be goddesses?” We thought, “We’re already in that realm, as long as it’s not human, we’re fine.”HELEN MIRREN See, I love being an actress. It feels very Belle Époque, very sort of 19th century. Certainly if I’m a god, I would think of myself as a goddess, I have to say.LIU During press, we generally say that we are goddesses. [They both laugh.] This will be the only time I could say that.“It’s ‘Fury of the Gods,’ and I was like, ‘Shouldn’t it be goddesses?’ We thought, ‘We’re already in that realm, as long as it’s not human, we’re fine,’” Lucy Liu said.Warner Bros. PicturesWhat drew you to sign on for your first superhero movie?MIRREN We’re above the superheroes. [Laughs] I don’t go see a lot of superhero films, quite honestly, but I had seen the first “Shazam” and been utterly charmed. So when “Shazam 2” came along, I thought, “Well, if I was going to do a superhero-type movie, that is the one I’d like to be involved in,” because of the wit.LIU To have that experience with one another — outside of working on the blue screen and not really knowing exactly what was going on — was really special. I don’t immediately think about the characters as much as the relationship that was built from that time. We were all learning what we were supposed to be doing, and isolated. We were luckily in the same Covid pod with one another.Were you surprised to see that your outfits would be so gladiator-like?MIRREN I now have a lot of sympathy and respect for any man playing a gladiator because they are carrying one hell of a load on their shoulders, as I found out. The costumes are heavier than they look. And we were wobbling around on enormous platform shoes — gladiators never had to contend with huge, great high heels.LIU And the cape! We would ask oftentimes if we could un-cape ourselves because it was so heavy. It would just pull everything down our shoulders and pull the armor back against our necks. I had them cut mine shorter. Helen’s was longer and heavier than mine.MIRREN With me it’s all about the look. If it looks good, I’m going to suffer it. Also it covered up my bum.Is playing a god different from playing a regular antagonist?MIRREN It’s a different psychology because you don’t have to deal with normal human psychology, which is great. We didn’t have to consider “Why is this villain doing this? Was she abandoned by her mother at a young age?” My stand-in did some of a scene when we walk through a marketplace and I was telling her how to do it like a goddess: “You have to walk as if you’re walking through honey or cream or butter or whatever. You have to absolutely own the space.”LIU I do think there is a delight in having a mission, and having that intention helps you have a straight line that you’re following regardless of what’s happening around you. We worked with the sibling rivalry, the level of experience that each of us had. In the beginning I’m guessing that everyone thought, “Kalypso is going to be so strong and powerful,” but then Hespera grabs her head and pulls her back. That’s the dynamic and those are the nuances that we have engaged in because, as Helen said, we own who we are — we’ve been given this, we were born into it, and so the struggle is the disagreements between each other and our opinions, essentially.For a long time female baddies used sexuality as a weapon, which is not the case here. Do you feel this reflects the ways we now conceive of women’s power onscreen?LIU Yes, it’s not a femme fatale. I think back in the day they would not have made “Wakanda Forever” with a female lead — they probably would have replaced Chadwick Boseman or had another male lead take over. I still think there’s a long way to go. And I do think that there’s sometimes a little bit of a stereotype or stigma where if a woman plays what the audience perceives as the antagonist, she automatically falls into a group or some sort of prescription of what was in the past, as opposed to creating something new and dynamic.MIRREN You did “Charlie’s Angels” and for someone of my generation, it was a huge sea change: full force, fearsome women action. But controlled by a man, so even though it was a massive step forward, there was still that anchor holding it back, in a way. Now that anchor has been let go, thank God. We move forward in a different way, hopefully.“The costumes are heavier than they look,” Helen Mirren said. “And we were wobbling around on enormous platform shoes — gladiators never had to contend with huge, great high heels.”Warner Bros. PicturesLIU If you can believe it, that movie was made 23 years ago. When it was first out on television, it was, “Here’s the sexy one and here’s the one that’s smart.” You always had to categorize it in order to make it sellable: Which audience member prefers which kind of girl? Now it’s very different. It’s moving in the right direction.Who are some of your favorite movie villains?LIU One that happens to be in a superhero movie is the Joker, somebody who has mental illness or is different and becomes ostracized, then assumes a position of power. Cinema doesn’t always portray them as people that are just born evil — that’s not as interesting as somebody who has become something to survive. That fight or flight becomes their way to journey through the world. Unfortunately, often it’s just with destruction or pain against others.MIRREN I would say, Ian McKellen playing Richard III is one of the greatest supervillains of all time. “Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this sun of York.” He declares his evil intentions in that very first monologue: “I hate you all and I’m going to [expletive] you up. You just watch me.”It feels that doing Shakespeare would be great prep for a supervillain’s grandstanding rhetorics. A lot of that style goes way back.MIRREN I was just thinking the other day that those great ancient verbal poems people learned by heart are superhero stories: They are about guys who have super strength and can go in and kill a whole army. There’s big descriptions of the way their swords cut through everybody. They’re totally superhero stories. I was wondering why superhero movies seem to be eternally successful and I thought, “Well, of course, for thousands of years these are the stories that human beings have been telling to entertain each other and excite each other and frighten each other.”Do Hespera and Kalypso have action figures?LIU We have these Funko Pops with our exact outfits.MIRREN We do? Oh, good, I want one.LIU Rachel sent a picture of the three of us and said, “It’s like we’re hanging out,” and I was like, “Yeah, during Covid because we’re all in boxes.” Somebody brought it up to me to sign, so now I know it’s real, the project has now been franchised.Lucy, has your son seen the film?LIU He’s 7, and I told him, “I think there’s too many scary things in the movie.” He said, “I’ll just wait until I’m 10.” He’s obsessed with Helen, and when he was 5 he said he was going to marry her. She’s magical for all ages. More

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      A Conductor’s Battle With a Classical Music Gender Barrier

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      Claire Gibault has spent a lifetime fighting sexism and forging a path in a male-dominated profession. Her next targets: pay gaps and age discrimination.This article is part of our Women and Leadership special report that profiles women leading the way on climate, politics, business and more.The baton-waving bully conductor played by Cate Blanchett in “Tár” has earned a series of Oscar nominations and captivated audiences worldwide. That may be, in part, because of her novelty: Until recently, conducting was almost exclusively a male profession.The French conductor Claire Gibault has spent a lifetime battling that gender barrier. In 2019, she co-founded La Maestra, a biennial international competition for female conductors in Paris that draws more than 200 contestants from some 50 countries.“Giving confidence and visibility to the talented women who are emerging as orchestral conductors is a cause La Maestra will continue to champion with commitment and passion,” said a news release inviting contestants for the next competition, in March 2024. The competition, founded with the Philharmonie de Paris, awards prizes of 5,000 to 20,000 euros ($5,300 to $21,400) to finalists who are provided numerous musical opportunities, too. Ms. Gibault also founded the Paris Mozart Orchestra in 2011, one of France’s few female-led orchestras.Born in 1945 and raised in Le Mans in northwestern France, where her father taught music theory at the conservatory, Ms. Gibault was studying violin when she discovered conducting and persuaded the conservatory to teach it.She went on to make classical music history by becoming the first woman to conduct a performance at La Scala in Milan (where she was an assistant to her mentor, the late conductor Claudio Abbado, who was then La Scala’s music director). She also was the first woman to conduct the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.The Run-Up to the 2023 OscarsThe 95th Academy Awards will be presented on March 12 in Los Angeles.Asian Actors: A record number of actors of Asian ancestry were recognized with Oscar nominations this year. But historically, Asian stars have rarely been part of the awards.Hong Chau Interview: In a conversation with The Times, the actress, who is nominated for her supporting role in “The Whale,” says she still feels like an underdog.Andrea Riseborough Controversy: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why the “To Leslie” star’s nod was controversial.The Making of ‘Naatu Naatu’: The composers and choreographer from the Indian blockbuster “RRR” explain how they created the propulsive sequence that is nominated for best song.Ms. Gibault, 77, has been busy and much in the news lately, especially with the Academy Awards on March 12. She discussed her career, her views on “Tár” and sexism in classical music in a phone interview from Paris. The conversation was translated from French, edited and condensed.Why did you decide to set up the La Maestra competition?In 2018, I was the only female jury member of a conducting competition in Mexico. There were such sexist attitudes on the part of certain jurors that I was shocked. One man on the jury even said that women were biologically incapable of being conductors, because their arms were naturally turned outward to hold babies. Whenever a female contestant came up in the competition, this man would cover his face with his jacket, close his eyes and plug his ears. One female finalist who was very musical and very talented received as many votes as a young man to whom the jury gave the first prize. I found that very unfair.The competition in Mexico was a trigger for me. I was furious. When I got back to Paris, I met with a patron, Dominique Senequier, [founder and] president of the private investment company Ardian. I told her that a lot of female talents were invisible, and that it would be interesting to do something for them. She encouraged me to set up a prestigious competition for female conductors and said she would finance it.The International Conductors Competition La Maestra, at the Philharmonie de Paris in 2022. The three finalists, with bouquets from left, are Beatriz Fernández Aucejo (3rd Prize, ARTE Prize), Joanna Natalia Ślusarczyk (2nd Prize, French Concert Halls and Orchestras Prize, ECHO Prize) and Anna Sułkowska-Migoń (1st Prize, Generation Opera Prize).Maria Mosconi/Hans LucasWhat impact has the competition had?The impact has been extraordinary. Female conductors are now viewed as a very modern phenomenon. Yet we have to be careful and very vigilant: make sure that it’s not just the young and attractive conductors who are being recruited. There is a flagrant degree of age discrimination in the world of classical music. For that to change, we need more women in management positions.What was your own experience as a young female conductor in a profession with almost no women?Audiences took it very well. The problem was the condescension of colleagues — of certain male conductors and of the male managers and directors of orchestras and cultural institutions. For them it was fine to hire women as long as they were assistant conductors, especially if they were very good assistants. I worked on pieces that the men didn’t want to work on, such as new compositions. I knew that this was a battle I had to wage with a smile, never complaining, never whining. That’s the way it worked.Why did you set up the Paris Mozart Orchestra?In my career, I experienced aggressive behavior on the part of musicians who made my job very hard, orchestras that didn’t want to play at my tempo. It was sometimes very difficult. I wanted to be able to choose the program. And I didn’t want to wait to be chosen.What did you think of the movie “Tár”?I found it disturbing, yet fascinating. What I like about the movie is that it’s a fable about power: how power can transform human beings, be they men or women. It’s like a Greek tragedy.Ms. Gibault co-founded La Maestra, a biennial international competition for female conductors in Paris that draws more than 200 contestants from some 50 countries.Maria Mosconi/Hans LucasDid you feel that it was about you?I don’t think we should be egocentric about it. It’s not because I’m a woman conductor that I felt directly concerned. It’s true that when you’re fighting for the cause of female conductors, it’s disturbing to see a woman who accumulates so many reasons to be hated: who takes advantage of her power, who takes drugs, who flirts with the young women in the orchestra. Of course, if a man behaved in that way, it would be a lot less shocking because we’re used to it.That kind of male behavior in classical music is now being called out. I think it’s high time for that behavior to stop. Not only is there abuse of power and sexual misconduct, but male conductors are also overpaid. That’s unacceptable given the economic crisis that the world of culture is going through.You mean the pay gap between male and female orchestra conductors?Yes, but also the pay gap with the musicians in the orchestra. And this incredible disdain that some male conductors have for the musicians that they’re conducting. We need to revolutionize this world from the inside. We need a different set of values.What do you need to revolutionize?The economics of culture. And the fact that careers are being built on notoriety, so the focus is on boosting people’s fame. There are people who are very famous and who are extraordinary artists, and others who are a little less so. I know extraordinary artists who are not famous at all.So there’s a cult of personality?Yes — for purely economic reasons. More