Director Phyllis Nagy on Releasing Call Jane in a Post-Roe v. Wade World: “Women’s Rights Are Always Under Attack”
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The post Director Phyllis Nagy on Releasing Call Jane in a Post-Roe v. Wade World: “Women’s Rights Are Always Under Attack” appeared first on Consequence.
Phyllis Nagy knew it was coming. When the director was initially doing press for her new film Call Jane last January, during the Sundance Film Festival, she had a good sense that a looming Supreme Court decision would be bad news for American reproductive justice.
“If you were in a sort of political activist space at all regarding women’s rights, you did know that something not very good was coming of that decision,” she tells Consequence on the eve of the film’s release. “What we didn’t know — what I certainly didn’t know was the violence with which it would be dispatched and the number of states that moved to implement already draconian reproductive rights laws. So this did send me reeling, and probably a whole lot of other people who worked on this, too.”
Call Jane is a period piece that is depressingly of the moment, as it focuses on a somewhat fictionalized version of the Jane Collective, an underground organization that helped women get abortions in the Chicago area in the years when it was still illegal. Starring Elizabeth Banks, Wunmi Mosaku, and Sigourney Weaver, the drama ends just as the Roe v. Wade decision comes down — hope for the future.
Even though Nagy, a playwright whose previous credits include the screenplay for Carol was prepared for Roe’s repeal, it didn’t help the impact of the news, unfortunately. “You can expect something all you like, and then when it happens, it’s still a gut punch,” she says. “For a little while, for a day or two I was like, ‘What do we have to do? Not as a filmmaker, just as a woman.'”
Then, she says, “when that initial wave of futility passed, I thought, ‘Well, wait a minute. I have a film coming out that could help with this conversation.’ And so I think that’s what I hope [Call Jane] will do. Exactly that, open up this conversation in a non-judgmental way, about something that’s a perfectly normal part of women’s life and health care.”
Along those lines: One of the most noteworthy parts of Call Jane is a lengthy and detailed sequence in which Banks’s character receives an abortion, with the doctor (Cory Michael Smith) explaining the procedure as he goes. Nagy has observed that “we get some people who have to leave the theater because they find it graphic, which is interesting. Because it’s not, but it is something you’ve never seen on film before. And in that way, it is emotionally graphic. It’s from her point of view, you are experiencing what she is experiencing.”
So the walkouts don’t bother her — in fact, “it makes me happy, actually. It means it’s working, that people find this that emotionally draining… It speaks to something I haven’t quite fully worked out in my head yet. But there are others who think it’s galvanizing and important and groundbreaking. And we’ll take all of it.”
It also allowed Nagy to demystify the procedure to some degree. “Most abortion films that I have seen, whether they are excellent or good or not so good, they focus on the problematic, on the exceptional — on the things that are broken, the things that don’t work, the people who die. And here was a chance not to do that,” she says. “Because the vast majority of women who have abortions do not die, do not have complications, do not undergo trauma for the rest of their lives.”
The timing of Call Jane‘s production and release proves to be pretty unique, but if the timing were different — if, for example, she’d made the entire movie after the Dobbs decision, or if it’d been released before May 2022 — she doesn’t think the end product would be that different. “I think this one is pretty much a particular call to arms, and the end is particularly a warning that we are not done and we are sort of going up in flames as we speak.”
She does acknowledge that “I wouldn’t have gotten quite so many questions about, you know, the timeliness of the movie, and how I might have changed it to respond to the decision. But I would have gotten a different kind of question. Everything is about politics after all, and I think it wouldn’t have mattered. It would have been something that was of the moment whenever it was released that could have been talked about in a politically timely way. Because women’s rights are always under attack.”
And that’s part of why Nagy says that she changed nothing in the film between its Sundance premiere and today — not even the closing title card. “It had to do with, I think, the nature of the ending, where these women have done something great and they can go home and relax, but they don’t want to, they want to go and get us equal pay and the ERA and things that never happened,” she says about the final moments, which “then take on a different complexity, with or without Dobbs — but with Dobbs, it’s even scarier. So in that way, it just worked.”
Call Jane is in theaters now.
Director Phyllis Nagy on Releasing Call Jane in a Post-Roe v. Wade World: “Women’s Rights Are Always Under Attack”
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