This is a guest post by Andrew Sayre.
The Song the Zombie Sang is going to be my second feature length film. It is also my second feature length film with a female lead character, which honestly is not something I’ve done intentionally. When I started writing my my first film, Whatever Makes You Happy, the idea was to make something that was more balanced, equal between two main characters, a man and a woman as they embarked on a tragic affair. But slowly, starting from the first time I scribbled notes on a piece of paper, through filming, and then editing it, the film started to lean far more toward her point of view than his. Watching it now, it is set up to be equal between the two of them, but it is still clearly more her story. I couldn’t even tell you when I noticed that I was doing it, or why, with any certainty. But there it is, and it felt right to me, so I didn’t think much of it.
Now, with The Song the Zombie Sang, I knew from the very start it was going to be a story centered around a female lead named Rhoda, a gifted musical prodigy. That was always the intent. The original story, as written by Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg, was more an equal perspective between her and the zombie of the story, Nils Bekh, an iconic dead musician who is reanimated nightly to perform. But what I always found most interesting about this story and wanted to expand on was Rhoda and what her life and her struggles were. That’s the aspect that I wanted to look into. Bekh is still prominent, still the person the ideas of the story are very deeply embedded in, but there isn’t much growth you can expect a character to have who is, well, dead. So he is more of an enigma, still a well-rounded character (I hope), but more of a thematic device than normal.
Anyone who has eyes, ears, and is able to notice even the most basic patterns in the world can tell you that films with a female lead are not common–not unheard of; they are out there and some of them rank among my favorites films ever. But it certainly isn’t what you could call standard. You can cut those numbers down even more if you negate the lame romantic comedies or other movies where it’s all about “finding your man” instead of some non-love centric goal, as I feel mine is. You can cut those down even further when you look at sci-fi stories with female leads.
Still, even knowing all that, I didn’t particularly worry about that with The Song the Zombie Sang or think it was any kind of hurdle I would have to get over. For me, good writing and good stories are what matters, and the gender of your lead shouldn’t be a factor. I’ve never cared when I watch something whether it’s a man’s voice or a woman’s voice, as long as it was a good voice. And on top of that, this indie film: it really shouldn’t be an issue here.
After I finished the script, I did as I always do, and started showing it around to people to get their take on what I had done. Standard operating procedure. A lot of people never got back to me, as usual, others did, and there were some good points and bad ones. One of the things I was noticing with a few people was that a lot of them were not connecting with Rhoda well, and thought her struggle was not interesting to them. Okay, that can happen, in of itself it doesn’t mean much. Sometimes when you create a somewhat abrasive lead character like Rhoda is, some people will balk and not empathize with them and gender isn’t much of a factor in that.
But instead of suggesting ways to work on her character to make her more likeable or what have you, people wanted to know more about Bekh, the dead guy. They wanted to learn more about his story, what made him tick, what his motivations were. That was who they thought the story should have been about. One person actually thought the better story would be all about him deciding to become the zombie in flashbacks, with no story about Rhoda at all apart from when she interacts with him in the present day.
This was perplexing to me. Were people actually more interested in the story of a dead man over a live woman?
I don’t want to make too much of this, for a few reasons. One, while yes, these kinds of comments were coming only from some of the men I had given the script to read, I know these guys, they’re not misogynistic jackasses. They’re good people. Just as thoughtful and intelligent as a person could be. If there was any kind of prejudice towards male orientated stories on their part, it certainly wasn’t something I think they were doing intentionally.
Secondly, and this probably a bigger reason I didn’t make a stink about it or call out any one of them, it could just very well be my script sucks. Maybe none of the characters are particularly well crafted, I missed my themes completely, the structure is totally unsound, and that the only thing I did well in the whole ninety pages of it was I used proper format and type font. I mean, I don’t think any of that is true, but of course I wouldn’t. The script could just be a total misfire, and they were just trying to latch on to ways they could think of to salvage it.
But why did their attempts to give me ideas on how to fix it all center around diminishing my female lead in favor of a dead man? Why is it that this was the way some people saw to fix what they saw was broken, instead of working on the female lead to make her more relatable, or likeable, etc? That is what I couldn’t understand. I’ve gotten countless critiques of things I’ve written, some crazier than these, but at least I could always see why a person was saying what they said, could see their point of view. This time around it has me a little stumped. I don’t want to say its a bias towards stories with a male perspective, but I’m not sure what else I can point to.
In the end, obviously, I’m not doing any of that to my script. It just wouldn’t be right, and it wouldn’t be a story I want to tell. Even if it could hamper my chances of getting this made, I’d rather fail at what I want to make than succeed with something I don’t.
This whole thing has opened my eyes a bit more towards the problem of the lack of stories with women as the lead character. And also made me wonder if its not just a problem with the filmmakers, but with the audience as well. Most of the people I get feedback from are film folks, true, but they are way down at the bottom of totem pole in this business just like I am, and are still more audience than creator. So perhaps the problem isn’t so much the makers of content being backwards as much as they are reflecting a still sadly true fact about the people they are trying to cater to.
Andrew Sayre is a filmmaker from New Hampshire, currently living in Brooklyn. He graduated from Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire with a degree in Film Production and a minor in Philosophy. He wrote and directed his first feature length film, Whatever Makes You Happy, in 2010, and is currently working on his second feature, The Song the Zombie Sang, based on the short story by Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg.