My nonprofit Look What SHE Did! has been very active this Women’s History Month and I’ve been profiled in a video on Maria Shriver’s platform Sunday Paper:
Celebrating Storytellers – mariashriversundaypaper.com
Here’s the episode of Accused I directed called “Brenda’s Story”, starring the brilliant Whitney Cummings, written by my dear friend Sonay Hoffman. Please watch but note it’s not for children. Concerns sexual assault and the legal system. It’s a powerful story with incredible performances — and I’m so grateful to the full team for bringing heart and soul to it.
Julie Hébert started directing in Hollywood through a paid internship program for women and people of color. She remembers rampant sexism when she was starting out in the early 2000s: snide comments by white men that the women should’ve “stuck to their dollhouses.” Even as an established director, she recalls working with a team of white men who refused to do her shot or changed it for “the better” during lunch without asking her.
It took two decades of working in the industry, Hébert says, to experience a sexism-free set. She was in Vancouver getting ready for her last day directing an episode of “Man in the High Castle” and thought something felt “weird” about the shoot.
“Then I realized what it was: there was no sexism for the entire thing. There was no misogyny,” she recalls. “It was wonderful and amazing. It was also kind of startling to me that I had never experienced that before. There’s always somebody who’s resentful that you’re the female in charge.”
