Lucrecia Martel's “Zama” has been crowned the best film of 2018 by over 100+ critics as part of the annual Film Comment Critics poll. The film is a peculiar oddity, a tackling of Spanish history with deliberate inaccuracies. It’s an adaptation of Antonio di Benedetto’s 1956 classic novel but with layers of splattered fiction woven into its story. It's a an achievement of epic proportions for the filmmaker, but don't expect her to go the major studio route anytime soon, especially where Marvel is concerned.
During an interview with Daily Pioneer, the director discussed Marvel and Disney approaching her to direct "Black Widow."
“I received an e-mail from Marvel for a meeting. Because they were looking for directors for ‘Black Widow’. So I went to the reunion. I actually signed this thing where I can’t talk about that reunion. Marvel and other such production houses are trying to involve more female filmmakers,” Martel said.
She continued on, “I do believe another female director is making the movie (now). What they told me in the meeting was ‘we need a female director because we need someone who is mostly concerned with the development of Scarlett Johansson’s character.’”
However, as expected, Martel had hesitations with the project, “They also told me ‘don’t worry about the action scenes, we will take care of that.’ I was thinking, well I would love to meet Scarlett Johansson but also I would love to make the action sequences,” Martel said.
Can you believe that Marvel would actually tell Martel she need not worry about the action scenes? However, that wasn't even the deal-breaker for her, despite her accusations of sexism, because, unsurprisingly, Martel isn't a big Marvel fan to begin with:
“Companies are interested in female filmmakers but they still think action scenes are for male directors. The first thing I asked them was maybe if they could change the special effects because there’s so many laser lights… I find them horrible. Also the soundtrack of Marvel films is quite horrendous. Maybe we disagree on this but it’s really hard to watch a Marvel film. It’s painful to the ears to watch Marvel films,” she said.