Alicia Van Couvering Is Changing the Ratio in Film

In 2013, women made up just a quarter of producers and a mere 15 percent of executive producers of Hollywood’s 250 top grossing films. These statistics are dismal, and the saddest part is that they’ve remained basically static since the late '90s—which is why it’s especially heartening to hear about a smart, successful, independent producer like Alicia Van Couvering, whose work is often female-focused and never dull.

She got her big break as a producer of Lena Dunham’s 2010 film Tiny Furniture. Her latest project is a documentary called Stephanie in the Water, about Australian pro surfer Stephanie Gilmore, which is available for download on August 5th via iTunes and the website Stephanieinthewater. ELLE.com spoke to Van Couvering about why the number of female producers remains so small, what drew a New York girl to a movie about a surfer, and why she tends to work with women filmmakers.

What drew you to 'Stephanie in the Water' in the first place? At what point in the documentary did you get involved?

I’d known Ava [Warbrick], the director, for a long, long time. We grew up in New York together. I hadn’t done documentaries very much. [Ava] had been filming for four years, and she was beginning the edit phase when I came on. I never meant to take it on, but then I got more and more obsessed with the story and ended up becoming a full producer. I didn’t know anything about surfing; what do I know about Stephanie Gilmore? But it’s really a movie about growing up, in the sense that when you’re young, especially as a woman, you don’t necessarily know who you are or what you are. And the transition into really being an adult is about asking yourself why you do what you do. With Stephanie, it’s writ large, because she’s a world champion.

How did you become a producer in the first place?

My parents are scientists, but because I grew up in New York, I started interning after school on movie sets and in offices. I have interns now and they’re in their 20s, so having the idea of this 14-year-old filing papers is so funny. When I went to film school at NYU, I didn’t know I wanted to be a producer. I thought producing was just about serving other people and that sounded really bad, like I was just going to get egg sandwiches and write e-mails my whole life. I graduated and became a freelance personal assistant for a variety of directors and producers, worked in development, and I started producing short films and commercials for my film school friends. I always had two or three jobs at once.

One of the things I did back then was start writing articles for 'Filmmaker' magazine. I started going to South by Southwest every year. That was where I met Lena and Joe Swanberg and a ton of people. A lot of people I ended up producing for or becoming friends with, I met as a journalist. Lena and I had become friends, and one day she said, 'Do you want to produce this weird movie in my house next month?' And I did, and it did great. Doing 'Tiny Furniture' as my first movie was really magical. It was something we had no expectation for that I was convinced was only funny to me and Lena and probably no one would see it. Its success really validated me as a producer instead of an assistant or a writer, and it taught me that I need to trust what I think is good; that the only thing I can rely on is my own taste.

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What should guide you through your career is not necessarily ambition or desire to be a mogul: it should be your curiosity. 'I want to make a movie that sells' is a bad reason to make a movie. That’s what I’m the most proud of and the most heartened by. Every time I made a decision that I thought was cool and was nominally a pretty bad idea but seemed like fun, those things turn out the best. [The Joe Swanberg film] 'Drinking Buddies' was nominally a really bad idea. It was an improvised movie with no script, for more money than Joe had ever worked with. But I loved Joe, and summer in Chicago at a brewery seemed like fun, and it all worked out so great.


 So what do producers actually do, if it’s not about just serving people or writing e-mails and getting egg sandwiches?

The kind of producing I do is from the very beginning to the very end. It starts with an 'I have this idea' conversation and runs through 'Can we reprint this poster for the Japanese release?' Four years later, I still deal with 'Tiny Furniture' all the time. What I didn’t know before I did it is that it’s so creative. Your essential job is to keep the flame alive of the originally inspiring thing. You start a project because you have this one, fragile little flame of an idea. As you go along, so many things try to put out that flame, like the impossibility of getting money, the influence of other people, the disparate goals of the cast, the distributors, the other crew, the practicalities. It’s all conspiring to put out your little flame. It’s about always working to identify the creative priorities—this is about failure, this is about love, this is about an amazing character—and then protect those priorities from the tornado of challenges.

Was it a conscious choice to work with a lot of female directors like Ry-Russo Young and Lena Dunham?

It’s usually important to me. I have a project with Alison Klayman who directed the Ai Weiwei documentary [Never Sorry]. It’s her first feature. It’s not necessarily a conscious choice: I never went out and said, 'I am going out to produce all these films by women.' It’s more like you are drawn to the things that are interesting to you, and I’m really interested in really vivid, new kinds of characters, and a lot of them are female, because they’ve been underrepresented for so long. There’s such an opening to tell and portray really new, challenging kinds of female characters. I’m also , in particular, drawn to unlikable lead characters. That’s what I go to almost immediately, because that usually means that they’re learning something.

Why do you think the stats on female producers are so dismal?

Anecdotally, the times I’ve felt it was hard to be a woman in the movie business is when I was growing up. In film school it looked easier for men to pretend they knew something when they didn’t. At 18 we would be asked, 'Who can run the camera?' And the guys would say, 'I’m all over it,' even if they didn’t know. I wasn’t comfortable with that. I didn’t want to touch something if I didn’t know what I was doing. And I didn’t want to lead the conference call if I didn’t know what to say. That’s my cultural observation. Men are more comfortable saying, 'I’m going to leap into the leadership position even if I don’t know what I’m doing.'

I had to teach myself to take a deep breath and pretend I knew what the fuck I was doing. I realized everyone’s just pretending they know, and if I pretend, I’ll eventually get the info I need to actually know. But if I don’t pretend to know, I’ll be relegated back to the helper position. It’s a vulnerable position to publicly fail. And it’s risky when your self-image is barely formed.

One of the most complicated things to learn for the female producers and female directors I know is that you have to be able to not care. My motto for directors is: 'You are the only person whose job it is to make it hard.' Everyone else is trying to make it simpler and easier, make the day shorter, make the stunt less complicated, but it’s the director’s job to make sure you get it. So you have to turn off the part of your brain that goes into red alert if people around you are hungry or tired or mad at you. You can still be kind and grateful, but you also have to make it harder sometimes. I think that’s a lonely feeling for a lot of women.

Finally, I find women—and I think the Sundance study backs this up—women don’t fight for credit. Which is only relevant on the producer side. Everyone from talent managers to financiers will demand credits and grab at decision-making positions. But women will slave away and wait around for that power and credit to be bestowed upon them. Self-deprecation is so comfortable, especially when you’re young: It’s like a warm, fuzzy blanket that makes it impossible to fail, because you already told everybody that you couldn’t do it. But it can really hold you back. I’ve found that most people are too busy or lazy to think anything about you other than what you tell them. So if you just walk around being the boss, eventually people will believe you.

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