Five years ago, while she watched and rewatched 1970s and â80s crime genre classics, certain scenes lingered with filmmaker Julia Hart: the moment the study doors close on Diane Keatonâs Kay in âThe Godfather,â shutting her out of her husbandâs inner circle; how Tuesday Weldâs Jessie is abruptly shuffled into a car in the dead of night and sent away from the action, an infant in her arms, in âThief.â
Female characters in movies like these often exist in service to a male protagonistâs story â when they arenât pushed out of the narrative completely. (Or rendered mostly silent, as in Martin Scorseseâs more recent âThe Irishman.â) Devouring these films with her husband, co-writer and producer Jordan Horowitz, shortly after the birth of their first child, Hart wondered about the women left to the margins of the stories on-screen.