Director, actress and producer Olivia Wilde was in the spotlight today at the Red Sea Film Festival, taking a look back at her career and sharing insight into how she chooses projects, while warning against conflating art and acceptance, and advocating for women to be given more opportunities to step behind the camera.
Wilde, who started out as an assistant casting director and moved into acting on such series as The O.C. and House, and has now been acting in films for 20 years, made her feature directing debut with 2019’s Booksmart, following it up with 2022’s Don’t Worry Darling. She’s next attached to direct Avengelyne, a feature adaptation of the 1990s comic book character, and Universal’s Christmas comedy Naughty, both of which will be produced by Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap. She’ll also star in Gregg Araki’s thriller I Want Your Sex.
And yet, the hyphenate told Red Sea attendees, “I still don’t feel like I’ve made it. I think once you feel like you’ve made it, you’ve kind of lost. I think that you have to always be working towards some more authentic version of the art you want to create, and allow it to continue to be more ambitious, which doesn’t mean bigger, probably just means courageous.”
Wilde continued that as an actress she “naturally gravitated towards roles that had a little bit of risk involved,” which has led to people bringing her projects as an actor or director that “they know that I won’t be afraid of, and I think part of that is being willing to not be accepted, being willing to not be celebrated by everyone, being willing to not be loved by everyone. I think a huge problem with our business, around the world I imagine it’s the same, when you conflate filmmaking or acting with fame or with large scale acceptance, you immediately cut off every opportunity to do any risky work. And so I think that it was important to me to never become overly focused on being accepted or loved.”
Sometimes, she mused that the negative reaction is more interesting. “I’d rather be controversial than boring. You never want to make a movie as a director that people are like, ‘eh, I don’t know, I felt nothing.’ I’d rather people hate it than feel nothing.”
On moving into producing and directing, Wilde said she’s believes acting “is the only job where the more experience you have, the less valuable you become. Certainly for actresses… At a certain point, I realized I don’t want to have my value deplete at the point where my wisdom and experience is at its apex. I want to be celebrated for my experience, as opposed to some sort of value based on something that is inherently fleeting.”
As a producer and as a director, she mused, “The more you make, the longer you stick around, the more you survive a business that is incredibly cutthroat.”
In terms of choosing projects, Wilde said she selects things that are “more challenging than the last thing I’ve done, I feel bored otherwise. I think that my biggest fear is probably like flatlining as an artist and just becoming lazy.”
Wilde further noted that as a woman she feels, “If you’re given the opportunity to make a movie, that’s all you want is the chance to make the movie. You’re so excited to be there. There’s so little entitlement when you are a director from any sort of like a subcategory, marginalized part of the entertainment community, which is really everybody above white men. You are thrilled with the opportunity to be there. And I think that energy is limitless.”
Overall with regard to women in the industry, Wilde said, “There’s no shortage of talent, only shortage of opportunity. There aren’t less women studying film. There’s less women getting their movies made.”
She advocated for “the opportunity to help women not fit into the paradigm that has been created, but to shift the paradigm itself so that it allows for these new voices to actually get their movies made… I mean, movies directed by women don’t make less money. It’s not the audience’s problem. It’s the the financiers, it’s the studios. They need to take what they perceive as a risk.”
Another thing, she added, is the need to “raise women to believe that they are allowed to take up space. They are allowed to be leaders. It’s difficult to run a production, and it’s difficult for men, too, but as women, we’re sort of told that we should, in many ways, just constantly apologize for our existence. And as a director, you can’t do that… I think it’s about success being connected to creating something that is true to the idea that you have an authentic extension of you, not about whether people approve of it.”
