Kit­ty Green on why The Assis­tant goes way beyond Weinstein

Kit­ty Green decid­ed not to go easy on her audi­ence with The Assis­tant. A claus­tro­pho­bic, slow­burn dra­ma about a young woman work­ing for a preda­to­ry Hol­ly­wood mogul, Green nev­er shows his face or imme­di­ate acts of mis­con­duct, but makes plain her mes­sages on pow­er and exploitation.

“I wasn’t in a place to cre­ate hope,” says Green, who drew on the expe­ri­ences of friends and women in the film indus­try for her screen­play. ​“I didn’t want peo­ple to think it would all be okay in the end, like when Mar­got Rob­bie throws her lan­yard in the trash in Bomb­shell.”

After her Net­flix prize-win­ning docu­d­ra­ma Cast­ing Jon­Benet, Green had intend­ed to explore insti­tu­tion­alised pow­er in US col­leges before the Wein­stein scan­dal broke in 2018, caus­ing the film­mak­er to shift her inves­ti­ga­tion to the film indus­try, which she’d worked with­in for the past 10 years.

“I was watch­ing all the #MeToo cov­er­age and think­ing about how the focus seemed to be on the preda­tors,” she remem­bers. ​“I want­ed to show how it’s not enough to get rid of Har­vey Wein­stein or Matt Lauer, that we need to look at the inher­ent­ly gen­dered sys­tems that are sidelin­ing women, and all that needs to change along with get­ting rid of these bad men.”

As Green spoke to more women she began to trace pat­terns in their sto­ries; women being made to do menial tasks over their male col­leagues from babysit­ting to fetch­ing cof­fee, and often forced to leave the indus­try after see­ing no room for pro­gres­sion. ​“I was upset by just the sheer rep­e­ti­tion of these sto­ries,” Green explains. ​“I didn’t know how to respond oth­er than put what I was hear­ing down on the page.”

The film fol­lows a long, emo­tion­al­ly fraught work­ing day for Jane (Julia Gar­ner), one full of manip­u­la­tion and dis­crim­i­na­tion rang­ing from small aggres­sions to full-blown ver­bal abuse. With the major­i­ty of the film con­fined to a stark, arti­fi­cial­ly-lit office, Green leans into the tropes of the genre to plump up its aes­thet­ic, watch­ing David Fincher’s Mind­hunter and a decent num­ber of hor­ror films to help dic­tate the light­ing and set design.

She also cites Chan­tal Ackerman’s Jeanne Diel­man, 23, quai du com­merce, 1080 Brux­elles as inspi­ra­tion. ​“My mum’s an art teacher and brought it home from school one day, and I remem­ber being absolute­ly blown away by it. My mum has a big influ­ence on my taste.”

Since com­plet­ing The Assis­tant, sig­nif­i­cant devel­op­ments have hap­pened in the film indus­try, most notably Weinstein’s 23-year prison sen­tence. Green admits that things are look­ing a lit­tle less bleak for women in the indus­try, but would still make the same film tomor­row that she did two years ago.

“It’s fun­ny, some men have watched the film and called it a peri­od piece,” she says. ​“Then a lot of male jour­nal­ists have said to me that they’ve seen their own behav­iour in this movie – even just try­ing to cor­rect some­one in a way that they didn’t realise was patro­n­is­ing or inap­pro­pri­ate. I think that a lot of the behav­iour in the film is still going on today and hasn’t changed.”

The Assis­tant is released dig­i­tal­ly on 1 May.