Complicity And #MeToo in The Assistant

On the day that Harvey Weinstein has been found guilty of rape, it's easy to imagine that the bogeyman has been sent to jail. But the harder questions about who turned a blind eye to decades of allegations - and why it took so long for them to be able or feel able to speak up.

In Kitty Green's The Assistant, her protagonist is not the one being harassed or assaulted. Jane (Julia Garner) has just started in a lowly administrative job at a New York film studio. She's worked hard to get there, and is already seen as suited for greater things, with hints that she could one day climb the ladder to become a producer. Yet as she engages in the day-to-day drudgery of office scutwork, she quickly realizes that this is a #MeToo nightmare, and even if she's not a direct victim she has a role to play. The question is, is it whistleblower or enabler? For Green the film is not simply about an act of sexual abuse in the workplace, but instead a larger, more holistic view of "how a woman's self-confidence can be destroyed by an abusive work environment."

While Green made an initial splash as a documentarian with Ukraine is Not a Brothel, The Assistant is her first pure narrative drama. It may seem like a switch in style but Green said she didn't see herself as a pure documentarian in the narrow sense that's often used, having studied narrative storytelling in film school, adding that she "fell into docs because I could get works in documentaries and couldn't find work in fiction film." Her 2017 film Casting JonBenet fused reenactments, interviews, and a metacommentary from those involved that fused the two seemingly contrary sides together. She described such films as "hybrid" work, adding, "I've been working with actors and sound stages and set and crews, so it wasn't new in any way."

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Austin Chronicle: So what was it about this particular story that made you go from your hybrid style to a purely narrative approach?

Kitty Green: With this film, it was about systems and structures against women, and I wanted to have concrete examples of what that meant. I was looking at microaggressions and tiny gestures and looks and details, and they're the kind of things that fiction films can capture in a way that documentaries can't because you're trying to get what's going on and as they happen, as opposed to homing in on details.

I also thought that if it was a pure documentary - which I would never create - it would just be people complaining. It would be stories of "This was bad and this was bad," and I feel like whenever I tell those stories to my friends they'd say, "Ignore it, forget it" and I'm like, no, it really did mess with my self-confidence and it really messed me around. Being able to show the emotional toll that those microaggressions can take on somebody was important to me.

AC: Those tiny moments are what's important here, and the quiet tone that's set by telling someone "don't rock the boat, don't make that complaint, because it will blow back on you." It's the mundanity of it.

KG: We were looking at the culture of silence at these companies, all these things that were left unsaid and all the times people didn't speak up or didn't speak up to each other about their concerns. The initial pitch was that it was about the banality of evil, and just how utterly ordinary abuse is. I've interviewed a lot of people in the research process, and a few people told me really crazy stories. Because they're working for very rich, powerful men, you kind of hear insane celebrity stories and helicopters. But that to me wasn't as interesting as the more ordinary, relatable tasks, the ones that are transferable to any workplace. They became the focus.

AC: When you have those wild stories, it removes it from what's more common which is something as simple as a closed office door. Telling those big stories could have just put it into, oh, that's just Hollywood.

KG: Exactly, and that's reductive to me because I feel like this is everywhere, and I wasn't trying to tell a story about Hollywood - or limited to Hollywood, anyway.

AC: There's also a real naturalism here in what Jane goes through. The way that you don't know who's in the c-suite or what they're doing, and they only exist through terse emails. It just feels like an average office.

KG: That's what I wanted. I didn't want to montage it. I wanted it to feel like a day, an authentic day in the life of the person with the least power in a very powerful company. I wanted to put people in her shoes and then force them to stay there through all the mundanity, from changing the coffee filter to changing the xerox machine copy paper, going through task by task. There are some lurid details but it's just one of the many things she's doing in a very boring day.

AC: It also plays into the idea in the film industry that you can go from the mail room to being a producer, and that's definitely something that's part of the story, and part of the bargain Julie feels she may have to strike.

KG: One of the initial drafts, a friend of mine said there's too much stick and not enough carrot. She needs reasons to want to stay, so a lot of those bits and pieces, like the email her boss sends that says she doing a great job, were added in after I heard that. In those terrible, shitty jobs you have to have these little things that keep you going and make you think perhaps you are in the right place and there's a path upwards and forwards for you.

AC: You premiered this at Telluride in September, but with Weinstein finally coming to trial the cultural landscape has shifted in those intervening months. Has there been a change in how the film has been received?

KG: I don't know. The news moves so fast that it's difficult to answer. I know that Telluride was all film executives, and there're not many people who aren't in the film industry watching it there, so there wasn't a heap of general public. So it's been really lovely to screen at Sundance and for a few women's organizations because I got a very different reaction out of them than I did out of the executives at Telluride - who quite frankly were probably quite uncomfortable watching it being depicted on the screen that way. And I'm not sure it was about the climate of the time. I think it was just about the audience.

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The Assistant is in theaters now. For review and listings, visit our Showtimes page.