Foxfire Director Annette Haywood-Carter on the Film's Legacy

The path to becoming a cult classic is never an easy one. Most films that hold the revered title struggle through being lost and forgotten, plagued by technical or financial difficulties, inexperienced stars, or some combination of all of the above. Foxfire by Anette Haywood-Carter holds that coveted title and all that comes with it for many reasons. Thanks to its distribution company’s sudden bankruptcy, the film suffered a rocky box office run of just five days in 1996 on barely two hundred screens. Despite being relatively unseen after its release, the film has experienced a contemporary rediscovery thanks to its nostalgic grunge-tinged celebration of teenage girlhood and rebellion in the 90s and an early otherworldly performance by a young Angelina Jolie. 

In honor of the film’s screening as part of Austin Film Society’s Girls To the Front series, which Hyperreal Film Club partnered on, we sat down with director Annette Haywood-Carter to discuss the film’s journey from forgotten gem to feminist cult classic.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Being a female director in the early 90s, opportunities were quite scarce for women behind the camera. What was it like trying to work in Hollywood as a woman?

In the '90s, I was trying to get directing work, but women directors, or women who aspired to be directors, were flying solo. There was no community of women directors because they didn't exist. There wasn't a generation ahead of us, or even five years ahead of us, that we could pick up the phone and call to ask for advice. So, you’re just out there alone and trying to figure it out. 

Back then, I was working mostly as a script supervisor, which was the only position by the camera that hired women. It was literally the only one. There were no women behind the camera. I tried briefly to work as an assistant director, but I discovered very quickly that wasn't the job for me. So script supervising was really the only way I could get myself on sets.

You have to look at the context of the industry at the time, which is that there just weren’t feature films being made about women. In the early ‘90s, it ticked up to maybe 3% and by the time we’re rolling into the next century, it was up to 9%, but pretty quickly plummeted back to 3%.

So how did you make the jump from script supervising to directing?

I was able to get an agent because I made a short film called The Foot Shooting Party which starred Leonard DiCaprio. He was nominated for an Academy Award for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape while I was making that short, so his star rose and that made people interested in what he was doing. So I rode on his coattails and eventually Spielberg saw The Foot Shooting Party and offered me an episode of Seaquest to direct, which was an NBC series. That led to getting my first feature, Foxfire. And I think the reason I was even able to get in front of the producers was that Spielberg had validated me. That was the only reason that people were even talking to me. Interestingly, through the process of making The Foot Shooting Party and Foxfire, I discovered that I had a talent for recognizing talent, particularly with actors. 

I think it’s reasonable to credit you with “discovering” two of the biggest movie stars of our time, Leonardo DiCaprio and Angelina Jolie. Do you think your ability to pick out such great talent is a skill that can be practiced?

Fortunately for me, people say I discovered Angelina Jolie. I didn't discover her. She had done two movies prior, Hackers and one other. She was brought to me by my casting director and I auditioned her, but I had no idea who she was or who her father was. I offered her the lead, and then fortunately for me, she became a big star, and that, of course, kept Foxfire from completely disappearing after its box-office release.

What was it about her that felt so right for the character of Legs? 

Well, I was actually ready to cast Hilary Swank when the casting director brought Angelina in, and unfortunately for Hilary, Angelina just took the character to a whole different level. At first, she was auditioning for Goldie, the character Jenny Shimizu plays, and her first audition was actually pretty bad. And I asked her to come back and audition for the lead, which she did, and again it just wasn’t very good, but as soon as she had some direction it became brilliant. She was a young actress who just needed a director. She was so early in her career and I could tell she had an incredible performance just sitting inside of her that needed to be guided out. 

I think Legs is really under-appreciated as a pioneer of the ‘90s bad girl archetype we saw so much of later in the decade. I’m thinking of Faith from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Graham in But I’m a Cheerleader, and many of Faruiza Balk’s roles. What was your creative relationship like with Angelina in forming that character?

I saw Legs as an icon. She’s James Dean, right? When the movie was being made, the role of Maddie was considered the lead, but I didn't see it that way. For me, Maddie is the lead in the sense that she represents all the girls coming into the theater. But Legs is the disruptor. She just blows through town, disrupts the system, and blows out of town, and everything's different because of her. 

Angelina, as a human being, was otherworldly, even at the age of 19. There was something about her. She had so much personal power as a human being that she could just come through that space and effortlessly be that James Dean-like icon.

The script for Foxfire was adapted from a Joyce Carol Oates novel, which I think is a really interesting challenge, especially for your first feature. How did that affect your creative vision for the project? 

When I was brought on, I was the second director to have been attached to the project. The first one was Mike Figgis, but he had just had a huge success with Leaving Las Vegas, so he left the project. When I was brought on, the adaptation from the novel to the screenplay had already occurred. They had the screenplay they wanted to go into production with, but they allowed me to make changes to it, so I had the writer do another draft to my specifications. The original draft was much truer to the novel and was set in the 1950s, and this writer had a very 1970s sensibility.

It was 1994 when we were working on the script and I just felt like you couldn’t do a ‘70s version of a ‘50s story. It would just totally miss the target audience. It had to speak to young women of the ‘90s. By then, we were two decades into sexual freedom. Women could do whatever they wanted, but women were completely alone, abandoned even. There was no safety, no protection. If something went wrong, there was nobody to report an abusive teacher to. Society had basically said, “Yeah, do whatever you want, but if something happens to you, don't come crying to us, because you probably shouldn't have been doing that anyway.” My stepdaughter was 15 at the time, and I just felt like we had to make this movie for girls that age. 

It sounds like everything was in place for this film to be a creative and financial success, but Foxfire had a notoriously rocky release which led to it being basically unseen for many years. In your view, what went wrong?

A couple of things, I think. One, we had bad luck in terms of distribution. MGM was the distributor, but they were faced with bankruptcy and were unable to distribute it properly. And, of course, back then you had to wait for months for the video to come out, but once it was released on VHS I would see it on the “employee picks” shelf at rental stores. 

I was also just destroyed by the press. A writer for Variety wrote a review that was so personal and nasty that someone called my agent and asked her if that critic was an ex-boyfriend or something. She had never seen this critic write a review that was so scathing. 

It feels like the movie was really misunderstood. What’s up with it having an R rating? That seems really harsh. And a little nefarious.

It’s because of the number of times they said the word “fuck.” It is literally because you could only say the word “fuck” back then so many times before you've got an R rating.

So the target audience, young women, couldn’t even go see this film during its brief release because of the R rating. Foxfire was up against the wall in so many aspects. 

Yeah, we could have taken those words out, but we didn’t know what the rating would be until release. I could have done it in post-production. It’s a ridiculous reason for the film to not have reached its audience.

What was that like for you, seeing it get trampled by these critics and having a poor box office performance?

It was tough because I did fail. In terms of the industry, I had failed, right? And there’s a common saying in the industry that the only thing harder than getting the first movie is getting the second movie. So, I did not get that second feature. Not for many years after. I also had my kids at the time, one in ‘96 and one in ‘99, which was not something you talked about as a female director. One time my agent saw the carseat in the back of my car one day, and he said, “Do not pull up to a meeting with a car seat in your car. Pull over a block away, and put it in the trunk. And when you get in a meeting, never mention that you have children, because they will not hire you if they know you have children.” So, many of my female peers at the time just didn’t have children. And the ones that did were able to continue working because they had support, either financially or they had a spouse who was willing to be a stay-at-home parent so that they could have a career. And I didn't have those things. So I got caught not just in the lack of opportunities for women filmmakers but also the industry standards. At the time, if you didn’t have box office success and you're a woman, you weren’t going to get another movie.

Well, box office release aside, the film itself is just gorgeous and it’s obvious that there’s a pretty sophisticated visual language within the film. The color is so lush. I'd love to hear what your approach is to image-making and storytelling. 

I actually wanted to be a cinematographer when I was growing up. I love images and I fell in love with photography when I was in college. I was always drawn to images that were emotionally descriptive, not just describing the content in the sense of what was happening, but the emotion of a scene. The process is kind of invisible to me because it's how I think, it's how my brain works. It starts with hiring a director of photography who can do what you’re asking. 

For Foxfire, I was able to get [cinematographer] Newton Thomas Sigel. I looked at probably a hundred reels before I picked him because I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to do. He aesthetically aligned with me and had the technical skills to give me the composition and the quality of lighting I wanted. It's truly a collaboration between the director and the DP because I come in with a vision of what I want, and I'm looking for someone who will collaborate with me in realizing that vision.

So, what was life like for you after Foxfire?

After Foxfire, there was a little stretch of about three or four years where some really good independent films directed by women came out. They had all kinds of crazy terms for it, like “chick flicks,” , but I wasn't part of that wave, because Foxfire had happened a couple of years before. I'm not good at pushing myself or tooting my own horn and Foxfire was not a festival release, so there was no place to talk to other filmmakers about it or share it. There was the Women’s Steering Committee with the Director’s Guild, but I didn’t know about it, so I just wasn’t a part of that wave.

And, at the time, it wasn’t acceptable to say, “Oh, my career is not working because I’m a woman, or I’m marginalized in some way.” So you were just on the same playing field with all the guys who had so many advantages. I had to call myself a director, not a female director. You just didn't attach a label to yourself like that. 

How long did it take for you to get your next project? 

Well, in ‘99, I did a television movie called Love Is Strange. I didn't work in television, and back in the ‘90s, there was a firewall between the two. After Foxfire, I was invited to come back to Seaquest, but that would have killed my feature career and I wasn't willing to go that route. I didn’t feel like I could survive in television. I'm a leader, and television is about jumping into somebody else's pool and doing their thing, and that just wasn't going to work for me. So I had this script that I'd written and it was set up with a production company, and then that company folded their feature film division. It was a big company, and they took everything that they owned and sold it. And Love Is Strange got sold to Lifetime. And that killed me because it meant I would have to rewrite the script for television. For Lifetime, specifically. It felt like every time I’d get an opportunity, I would lose it. I would get something, and then lose it. 

Do you think that was a common occurrence for women filmmakers at the time? 

Yeah, you wind up with not enough work over the course of years and you don’t get the opportunity to define yourself as a filmmaker. You wind up with credits and work that you're proud of, but they don't represent who you are as a human being, right? They're just jobs. 

If women are restricted to making movies of a certain budget, they'll never make that great masterpiece. It just takes money to make a masterpiece. And so no matter how talented they are, they can’t do it without the opportunities. 

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