Joyce at 34 runs just 27 minutes. But this 1972 documentary offers more insight and emotional resonance than most films triple its size. In it, the filmmaker Joyce Chopra, co-directing with Claudia Weill, turns the camera on herself to capture the immediate effects of her daughter’s birth — itself shown in full at the beginning of the film — on her life, then decade-ish-long directing career, and conception of herself. Its scope is intermittently broadened with ruminations from women friends and family members on their own relationships to motherhood. Now widely considered a masterpiece, it might come as a surprise to those familiar with the project that when first pitched the idea for this landmark in personal documentary filmmaking, Chopra was actually hesitant, wary the then-prospective project would be an exercise in self-centeredness.
That’s one of many details found in Chopra’s upcoming memoir, Lady Director: Adventures in Hollywood, Television, and Beyond, a book that, when initially suggested by a loved one to Chopra, sparked a similar reaction from the filmmaker. But as it was with Joyce at 34, Lady Director reveals itself an essential document. This time, Chopra offers invaluable personal insight into the evolution of movie and television directing and its still-fraught relationship with women filmmakers, with its frankness around industry challenges and outright cruelties also found in Chopra’s reflections on her life off camera. Across six decades, Chopra — whose career began in the early 1960s making documentaries with D.A. Pennebaker — has proven herself a nimble and reflexive artist, not just an indispensable voice in documentary filmmaking but also in feature-length fiction, television movies, miniseries, and episodic TV. With Lady Director, she introduces herself as a skillful memoirist, too.
Ahead of the book’s Nov. 22 release, 425 called Chopra — who also will be speaking to Seattle audiences about Lady Director during an Elliott Bay Books event in January — to talk her writing process, the perks of documentary filmmaking, remaining resilient in a difficult industry, her relationship to the term “pioneer,” what she thinks of the new adaptation of Blonde, and more.
Read the full interview on 425.
Peterson Reviews 