‘These voices cannot be wiped off the table any longer’

Time is supposed to fly. But it seems an age since revelations of sexual misconduct precipitated the demise of Harvey Weinstein. Survivors of abuse felt empowered to tell their stories. Other repeat offenders were shamed into semi-retirement. Weinstein is now in jail. Only a fool would be complacent, but the entertainment industry feels like a different place. Back then, everyone was scared to death of Weinstein. This month Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan appear in She Said, a fine, awards-friendly film revealing how two New York Times reporters helped break the story. Maria Schrader, the director, is cautious when I ask if they felt any outside pressure not to root through the dirty linen.

“Not that I would know of, but maybe this is a question you should ask the producers,” she says. “It’s possible they experienced something they wouldn’t share with me to protect me from it. But I never experienced anything like that.”

All changed? Yet it is just over five years since Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor published a story revealing repeated instances of Weinstein’s misconduct. Just five days later Ronan Farrow’s report in the New Yorker twisted the knife. I wonder if Schrader, German director of the recent I’m Your Man, saw changes in the industry for herself.

“I could not say there is an ultimate change, and this could not ever happen again,” she says. “But the most fundamental change, I think, is that we now speak about things. There is this breaking of the silence. These voices cannot be wiped off the table any longer – or be ignored or be neglected. I truly hope the movie propels that conversation again and inspires people to connect and to share and to step out of this place of isolation.”

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She Said manages the daunting task of injecting tension into a story whose conclusion most viewers will already know. Schrader smiles tolerantly when – how often has she heard this today? – I bring up comparisons with All the President’s Men. Like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose reporting on Watergate in the Washington Post helped bring down Richard Nixon, Twohey and Kantor – respectively Mulligan and Kazan – have doors closed in their faces up and down the country. Like their predecessors, they hear many revealing tales but struggle to get anyone on the record.

“With Woodward and Bernstein it was a terribly important story,” Schrader says. “It also caused political changes. The big one we all know. Ha, ha! But Woodward and Bernstein never had to question their role in society as men. Megan and Jodi heard the most intimate and private and traumatic and personal stories. For a film about their story, it’s necessary to include the rather personal and private side of two women. They are talking to other women about the most intimate thing you can talk about and they have a responsibility to do something with it.”

Schrader is correct about the film’s connection with the characters’ private lives. In All the President’s Men, Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman played the Washington Post reporters as gunslingers with no home life worth discussing. Based on the reporters’ own book of the same title, She Said touches upon post-partum depression as it economically sketches in domestic complications. A few clever asides – such as the scene in which they laugh at having worn similar dresses for an interview – establish further distance from male predecessors.

“It’s quite sensational to have a movie which is part of that genre – investigative journalism – and have two female journalists at the centre and being the heroes of it,” she says. “I’ve not seen that before. At the same time, there was general decision from the filmmakers to not paint this as an idealised picture of them.”

[ Harvey Weinstein’s Irish whistleblower: ‘I spent my life blaming myself. It was his fault’ ]

Watching She Said I was reminded of how the entire Washington Post newsroom was, for All the President’s Men, rebuilt in southern California. The office scenes in She Said look as if they were shot in Renzo Piano’s elegantly monolithic New York Times building on Eighth Avenue. Could that be possible? How would they shoot around the staff? Schrader patiently points out what I have somehow forgotten.

“I would call it probably the only silver lining of Covid – to be able to truly shoot in the venues,” she said. “It was the first time that the New York Times opened their doors for a feature film. We had to give them a presentation of what that would entail. How many people we would come with. What we would change.”

Of course. Shot in the summer of 2021, the film could profit from the still thinned-out office spaces.

“All the reporters were in ‘home office’,” she confirms. “So I encountered this incredibly vast empty stage. Every person you see in the movie is a background actor. Of course, you have a responsibility to depict that particular workplace with accuracy and detailed reality.”

There were sensitivities to be negotiated when casting and shooting She Said. Inevitably, many still active Hollywood professionals come into the story. Early on there are calls with someone playing actor Rose McGowan, among the first to accuse Weinstein of sexual impropriety. Gwyneth Paltrow is also at the other end of a phone. Ashley Judd makes a striking – and narratively significant – appearance as herself. One could be mistaken for thinking she was the only one.

“It’s Gwyneth Paltrow’s voice,” Schrader clarifies. “We tried to have multiple voices included. And that meant making sure the survivors were okay with the wording and the depiction of their account. The more prominent people that Jodi and Megan talked to were deciding about their contribution – or if they would contribute. So I had a long and truly intense and very interesting discussion with Rose McGowan. Unfortunately, it did not come together at the very end. We respected everyone’s decision on that.”

Schrader thinks it was a relatively easy decision for Judd to participate.

“She felt validated by doing this,” Schrader says. “We met in Berlin and, by the end of the meeting, she said: ‘Let’s do this together.’ I think it’s an incredible moment in the film. It’s like pulling down the fourth wall in the theatre. There are various layers. And it’s wonderful watching Ashley Judd and her choice how to portray Ashley Judd.”

Maria Schrader was a cunning pick for this project. Now in her mid-fifties, she has worked her way steadily forward as an actor and director over the last 30 years. She played one of the two eponymous heroes in Max Färberböck’s much-admired second World War drama Aimée & Jaguar in 1999. In 2007 she directed and starred in the drama Love Life. Her work on the much-admired spy series Deutschland 83 won her a gig on Netflix’s Yiddish hit Unorthodox. The raves for last year’s I’m Your Man – a cerebral science-fiction flick starring Dan Stevens – confirmed her place on the A-list. She Said demonstrates Schrader has the technical chops to handle big budgets. It also shows her gift for sketching character in just a few strokes. I wonder if Twohey and Kantor felt the same way. It must be enormously daunting to see a semifictional version of yourself on the big screen.

“I think it was incredibly exciting for them,” Schrader says. “For me, it was probably the most nerve-racking screening. It was in a post-production house in New York, probably two weeks before picture lock. I gave them space. I said: ‘Just call me when you’re done.’”

After it all was over the three of them went to lunch.

“They said: ‘We are happy with the depiction of our families and our kids. We are very happy with the depiction of our work.’ It was such an incredible relief for me. What was also very important to them and, also, of course, for us, was to treat the accounts of those women with integrity.”

Twohey and Kantor move through a very different world to that of Woodward and Bernstein. Back then, the notion of the crusading investigative journalist was an easier sell. Now with all the blather about “fake news” and all the demonisation of the “MSM” (mainstream media) professional journalists find themselves competing for attention with anonymous trolls on social media. The man in the pub has the ears of millions. It is surely harder to make a protagonist – not to mention a hero – of a contemporary reporter.

“We weren’t overdramatising. We weren’t overemphasising,” she says. “I find it particularly beautiful to see them, as good as they are at their work, as vulnerable human beings – taking the subway, being late, doubting. All of that. Assumptions and accusations are never enough for Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor. They have to work until they can come up with truths. And those truths have to stay as unnegotiable entities.”

Schrader is not giving up on the notion of the reporter as crusader.

“It feels like these people are modern-day heroines,” she says. “They don’t give up until they can f**king prove it. In a time where ‘hashtag, hashtag’ is just all about opinions.”

No argument there.

She Said is released on November 25th