NYWIFT Blog

By Linden Standish

Welcome to NYWIFT, Maria Giese!

Maria Giese is an American film director, screenwriter, and longtime advocate for equity for women directors in Hollywood. 

She wrote and directed the feature films When Saturday Comes (starring Sean Bean) and Hunger (based on the classic  Knut Hamsun novel). 

A member of the Directors Guild of America for over 25 years, Giese is widely recognized for her role in initiating the 2014 ACLU and 2015 EEOC investigations into systemic discrimination against women directors. 

Her work is featured in the documentaries This Changes Everything (2018 Netflix), Half the Picture (2018 Amazon), and the Sundance hit Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power (2022 Kino-Lorber).

Maria spoke to us about her career trajectory, her turn to advocacy, and what she sees for the industry moving forward. 

 

 

What brought you to NYWIFT?

I’ve been involved with NYWIFT for the past decade, collaborating with many members during the Provincetown Women in Media Summit in 2017 and 2018. We were also together at the 2019 Bloomberg Equality Summit and at the Disney Power of Inclusion in Auckland, New Zealand.

There, we worked with WIFTI and the New Zealand Film Commission brainstorming ways to advance women filmmakers globally, and I was able to address the New Zealand Parliament on our findings. I’m grateful to be a full member now. What has always stood out to me about NYWIFT is its seriousness about both craft and structural change. That combination matters.

 

Could you give our readers a brief introduction to yourself? Let’s start at the beginning. 

I’m a film director and screenwriter, and—somewhat unexpectedly—an advocate for equity for women directors in Hollywood. I studied film at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Wellesley College, and UCLA’s Graduate School of Film.

While at UCLA, I wrote, directed, and produced a short film called A Dry Heat, which won a Spotlight Award, a CINE Golden Eagle, and was a finalist for a Student Academy Award. That briefly convinced me that merit might be enough.

It wasn’t.

 

You had a directing career early on. What did that look like?

After graduating with my MFA in 1994, I wrote and directed the 1996 British feature film When Saturday Comes, starring Sean Bean, Pete Postlethwaite, and Emily Lloyd. It received global theatrical distribution, screened at Cannes, and I was signed at William Morris Agency.

I assumed I was going to rocket. I didn’t.

Later, I wrote and directed Hunger (2001), adapted from Nobel Prize–winner Knut Hamsun’s existential novel. It followed an out-of-work screenwriter wandering around Hollywood and became the first digital feature adapted from a classic literary work. It was praised at festivals, but never widely distributed.

I’ve always been drawn to stories about people wrestling with systems they don’t yet understand.

 

At what point did you realize something had gone seriously wrong for women directors?

After nearly a decade of not getting work, I looked around and noticed that my extraordinarily talented female classmates and colleagues had quietly vanished from directing—while the men became “boy wonders” and won Oscars.

By 2011, the internet made it possible to actually count hires. Once I did, the numbers were so bad they looked like a typo. Women directors were being employed at rates lower than any other industry in the United States. That’s not taste. It’s structural discrimination.

 

Why did you decide to count?

I used to joke, “We count because we want to count.” But it was true. Anecdotes are easy to dismiss; numbers are not. I wasn’t trying to become a statistician. I was trying to survive reality.

Counting is unglamorous, unpaid, and deeply unfashionable work—which is precisely why it’s effective. No one expects the person with the spreadsheet to be the problem.

 

 

You first took your findings to the EEOC—and were turned away.

After two years of research and writing within the DGA and the Los Angeles County Courthouse, on Valentine’s Day 2013 I walked into the downtown L.A. EEOC office with a legal brief and hiring data showing prima facie discrimination under Title VII.

 

The response was polite, but dismissive.

A few months later, I went to the ACLU of Southern California. Hollywood didn’t look like a civil-rights case to them—until it did. It took months of convincing and the gathering of a “class” of women directors willing to stand together.

 

That led to the investigations.

Yes—though “led” makes it sound orderly.

In 2014, the ACLU launched a year-long investigation into discrimination against women directors. In May 2015, it sent a 14-page letter to the EEOC calling for a federal probe. The New York Times published that letter in full.

Five months later, in October 2015, the EEOC opened the first industry-wide civil-rights investigation into Hollywood hiring practices.

That sequence matters. These were not parallel efforts. One caused the other.

 

At some point, this stopped being just about jobs, didn’t it?

Yes—because it had global civil-rights significance.

I realized that if roughly 80% of the world’s most culturally influential entertainment media is created in Hollywood, and women are systematically excluded from directing and shaping those stories, then this isn’t simply an employment issue. It’s cultural censorship.

Storytelling is how societies define power, leadership, morality, and possibility. If women are shut out of authorship at that scale, they’re shut out of the global narrative and economically marginalized. That’s not symbolic—it’s real.

Once that clicked, it was clear this wasn’t about a few careers. It was about how a two-class civilizational system quietly reproduces itself.

 

What changed after federal scrutiny began?

Everything.

Under federal pressure, from 2015 onwards studios suddenly discovered women directors. Female hiring nearly tripled. Hundreds of episodes of femme-themed series content were greenlit. Dozens of feature films—from Wonder Woman (2017), which started principle photography in 2015, to Barbie (2023) —appeared.

More women were nominated for and won Best Director Oscars during that period than in the previous 90 years combined. The progress was real—and also an indictment of how low the bar had been.

 

#MeToo was part of all that. How do you see that moment now?

#MeToo didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It emerged in 2017 a climate where accountability had already been forced open by civil-rights law through the largest federal investigation into sex discrimination in Hollywood history.

So when The New York Times published the Harvey Weinstein exposé in 2017, it did so after years of ACLU and federal investigation into the industry. That pressure made speaking safer. It changed the risk calculus—for journalists as much as for workers.

But then something curious happened: the legal origin story was quietly replaced by a cultural one.

 

You’re referring to Time’s Up, the Hollywood Commission, and the Inclusion Rider.

Exactly. Hollywood didn’t dismantle power—it rebranded it.

Instead of strengthening enforcement, between the industry created its own internal “solutions”: panels, pledges, riders, glossy initiatives that looked like reform but required no legal accountability. Law was replaced by optics through the lens of #MeToo.

It was a master class in narrative control. And now, in 2026, most of those organizations have collapsed, and some of them in scandal.

 

 

You point out that recent reporting on the Epstein case has further complicated the moral authority of that infrastructure.

Several individuals involved in the creation or early advising of Time’s Up have now been publicly linked to Jeffrey Epstein. This does not suggest equivalence of crimes.

But it raises an uncomfortable question: how did an industry so deeply enmeshed with elite patriarchal power structures position itself as the ethical arbiter of women’s voices and workplace safety while sidelining the only mechanism that actually produced change—federal civil-rights enforcement?

When symbolism replaces law, accountability becomes optional.

 

Do you regret taking this on?

No. I regret how hard Hollywood worked to erase the cause while celebrating the effect, and minted money doing it.

But history has a way of resurfacing inconvenient facts. Numbers don’t disappear. And neither does law.

 

What’s the lesson, 10 years later?

Women have to remain vigilant. We have to watch the numbers, protect one another, and fight for the next generation.

That only happens in community. That’s why NYWIFT matters so much to me. I’m grateful to be here—and I hope to give back fully.

 

 

Connect with Maria Giese on Facebook, LinkedIn, X, subscribe to her Substack, or reach out by email at mariagiese7@gmail.com.

(All photos courtesy of Maria Giese)