Elizabeth Banks in ‘Call Jane’.
Screenwriter Phyllis Nagy is drawn to the off-center, whether it’s a murderous schoolteacher (“Mrs. Harris”) or a melancholic homosexual romance (oscar-nominated “Carol”). With “Call Jane,” she directed for the first time since the HBO film “Mrs. Harris” in 2006. An acquisition name that debuts in sundance’s premiere segment on January 21, “Call Jane” is a fictional story set in Chicago’s clandestine abortion network in 1968. (This global is also the subject of the Sundance documentary “The Janes. “
Flooded with writing after his nod to the Oscars, “I had to write sublime adaptations that weren’t too offensive or out there, but what interests me are the things that are safe,” Nagy said. “Not really. “
When producer Robbie Brenner (“Dallas Buyers Club,” “The Fighter”) brought Nagy the script for “Call Jane,” Elizabeth Banks was attached to the star and the script had had at least 4 administrators and two writing teams. desirable, but what you would expect,” Nagy said. [I feel] it was about the Janes. I wanted the story to be unpredictable and not public and I realized through the eyes of someone who was going through a procedure or going through a complicated time.
Brenner raised $8 million through user funding and protagonist’s overseas presale. none of this. I saw it as the coming-of-age story of a woman who, faced with the closure of her life and the lack of options, discovers herself. Phyllis is the best user to make this film. to raise everything about it, because everything he does is precise, specific and intransigent.
Nagy centered the script for “Call Jane” on the party of Banks’ Joy, a suburban housewife with a teenage daughter (Grace Edwards) whose life is threatened by her pregnancy and receives nothing from the medical institution. Her unforeseen odyssey leads her to the Janes.
In previous scripts (under WGA arbitration, Hayley Schore and Roshan Sethi received credit), “Joy was more secondary, she was more of a housewife,” Nagy said. She had no preference for being anything other than what she was, that is, a wife, a mother. that first act.
In Nagy’s film, Joy goes on a romantic date with her lawyer husband (Chris Messina), who expects dinner to be on the table when he returns from a hard day at the office, but also relies on his wife editing his arguments in the courtroom. Joy is alone as she tries to end her pregnancy safely. The Janes, for a significant sum.
After Joy’s harrowing abortion, which the film plays beat by beat for 10 minutes, she is recruited through leader Jane and radical feminist Sigourney Weaver. push the hotel doors to watch the 1968 riots on the streets of Chicago. Like many Americans that year, his consciousness was about to increase.
Filmed during the pandemic over 23 days in May and June 2021 in Hartford, Connecticut, Nagy filmed with a 16mm camera (“Who does that?” said Brenner). Nagy filled the set of “Call Jane” with local non-professionals to upload authenticity. While Nagy makes Weaver look like a remarkable 72, she’s surrounded by “real women who are glamorous,” Nagy said, “who are in the background. It was local attorneys and Hartford doctors who sought to participate.
Contrary to authenticity, the writers added a woman of key color (Wunmi Mosaku) to what was “essentially a white organization,” Nagy said. The character of Mosaku opens the debate among the Janes about how to abort women who cannot do it. Genuine Janes performed thousands of loose abortions; before that, the mafia controlled the black market for harmful operations.
“Call Jane” is not a radical call to arms. “It’s a conventional art movie,” Nagy said. It’s a movie about what it’s all about. He did not need to pontificate only the converted. I selectively showed it to other people I knew were healers in Los Angeles. I knew we were on to something when those other people said, “This is not what I expected. “This movie allows you to choose .
While Nagy’s film has a clear message, it “allows the viewer to have another point of view, something that awareness-raising or politically motivated films don’t do,” he said. “My private challenge was to allow other people to have fun. Because I think it’s vital to have a sense of humor about it. And make other people guess one way or another. Like, I didn’t need it to be predecible. no there’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s not a movie that insists that you have to share the feeling, necessarily.
Nagy had no idea the film would be so timely. “We’re not done and we never will be,” he said. “And here we are, in the flames. We’re all going up. And I’m glad it happened like this. Because if the Supreme Court had gotten up now, it might have said, ‘I don’t know if I can do this because it’s too close to it. what’s going on. ” But that’s also why I like era movies, because you can play with the things of an era without being bothered.
Next step: If all goes well, Brenner will place the investment for Nagy’s biopic about the last years of Welsh actress Rachel Roberts’ life, in his diary “No Bells on Sunday. “
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