In October 2017, when the New York Times first published allegations against Harvey Weinstein, Australian director Kitty Green was on campus at Stanford University interviewing students for a film about sexual assault. “I had friends at the Weinstein Company so I immediately started texting them.” Within months she was shooting The Assistant, a drama about working for a movie mogul. It followed a day in the life of Jane, played by Julia Garner, whose boss is a sexual predator with a volcanic temper. He was never seen, only ever referred to as “him”, but was without a doubt modelled on Weinstein.
The Assistant became the definitive film of the #MeToo era: a horribly realistic portrait and a forensic examination of how a culture of complicity in some companies enabled men to abuse for years. Its release in early 2020 was a bit muffled. Because of Covid? Green nods. “Also, I think it was so raw. We shot it and released it quite quickly, so people were still almost afraid to speak about it.” Lately, she’s noticed its impact. On a recent trip to Japan, women told her it might have been set in an office there. In New York, where she lives, the city government uses The Assistant in its compulsory sexual harassment training.
Green’s latest, The Royal Hotel, is another #MeToo film, and another story throwing young female characters into a sexist, aggressive environment. “No agenda!” says Green. “But I always end up there somehow.” The Royal Hotel is the story of two American gap year backpackers, played by Garner and Jessica Henwick, who run out of money in Sydney. An agency finds them work in a remote mining town’s only pub. “You’re going to have to be OK with a little male attention,” warns the recruiter. When they arrive, someone has scrawled “Fresh meat” on the chalkboard outside the pub.
The Royal Hotel is inspired by a grim 2016 documentary directed by Pete Gleeson, about two Finnish backpackers who got jobs in an outback pub in Coolgardie – a town feminism never reached. The brazenness of the misogyny takes your breath away. What made Green want to adapt it? “It was the way the women handled the situation. They didn’t accept the men or their behaviour. They said no, stood up for themselves in little ways. That strength was interesting. Adapting it, I was thinking, ‘What do I want to pull out of it? For me it was really important that we said, ‘No, that’s not OK.’”
She goes on: “The Assistant was about acceptance of the system being rotten, about trying to speak up and realising you can’t. Approaching this one, I was like, ‘How can we make it a narrative about strength? How can we make it a film about women saying no?’”
Behind the bar at the Royal Hotel, the women endure endless microaggressions. The first time they meet the landlord, played by Hugo Weaving, he puts one of them in her place with the words: “You think you’re a smart cunt?” One regular sits at the bar night after night staring at one girl so creepily it makes the hairs prickle on the back of her neck. Another gets her name repeatedly wrong. The punters lock horns over who gets which girl first.
It’s a film about the corrosive effect of male entitlement. We see the environment through the eyes of Garner’s character. How safe does she feel? Is that guy staring creepily? Is she crazy for thinking he’s dodgy? “This is what we have to navigate as women,” says Green. “The decisions we make minute by minute, trying to figure out what’s a threat.”
The men don’t let up with the harassment but Green did not write in a full sexual assault. “I felt like this behaviour is enough. It was important that it never crossed the line. Otherwise male audience members could say, ‘Oh, that’s not us. We are not like that. Those men are villains and that’s not us.’ Instead, if it’s about behaviour that is very common, a joke here and a weird gaze there, then it’s harder to dismiss. We need to have a conversation about that behaviour. How we can stop it from escalating into sexual violence?”
The fact that no woman gets raped or murdered has baffled some audiences. When Green was raising finance, a few backers told her the film was missing something. “They wanted more violence, which is so crazy,” she says, wincing. She has been disturbed by some of the responses to the finished film, too. “We’ve gotten a lot of, ‘It simmers away but never reaches boiling point.’ I think there are a lot of reviewers, particularly male reviewers, who are waiting for that scene” – she mimics an explosion – “that really overt act of violence, be it rape or whatever. And I think that frustrates them. It’s awful, wondering what it could be that they not only expected, but desired. We’ve had enough of that in movies. We definitely don’t need that scene.” Green pauses. “That conversation has been interesting,” she says looking a bit pained. “And a little upsetting to be honest.”
I tell her that I can live without seeing another rape scene in a film. “Exactly. I don’t want to see it. We’ve seen it enough. The history of cinema is full of men making movies where they’ve included that. We don’t need to put up with it any more.”
Green decided to become a film-maker aged 11, and started making films in her back yard. “It’s just always what I wanted to do.” Both her parents are artists and teachers; it didn’t feel like an impossible goal. “No one told me I wasn’t allowed. My dad was always like, ‘If you want to do something, do it.’”
After graduating from film school, Green packed her camera and laptop and flew to Ukraine, where her mother was born. While living in Kyiv for two years, she shot her first documentary, Ukraine Is Not a Brothel. Later she moved to the US, directing the documentary Casting JonBenet, about the world’s obsession with the murder of the six-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey.
The Assistant was her first feature film. How difficult was it back in early 2018, I ask, getting funding to make a story inspired by Weinstein? “Impossible. It was still too fresh for people. Everyone was a little afraid to touch it. We’d have female executives read the script and say, ‘We’re going to make this! Trust me we’re going to make this movie!’ The next day I’d get an email saying, ‘I’m sorry, my boss used to work at X company and doesn’t feel it’s appropriate.’”
Have things have changed? Green nods. “I think it’s very different. We didn’t even have the language to talk about misconduct and harassment. I feel like it is definitely a safer world for everyone. But we still have a lot of work to do.”
• The Royal Hotel is released in the UK on 3 November, and in Australia on 23 November
