Lizzie Borden

I had the honor of interviewing the iconic feminist filmmaker Lizzie Borden. Lizzie is most well known for the groundbreaking films Working Girls (1986)(now streaming on HBO MAX) and Born in Flames (1983), centering on challenging socio-economic norms and highlighting sex work as legitimate labor. As someone connected to the sex work industry, I was eager to ask her everything about her process of showing sex on screen and her connection to the sex work world. Our interview took place on April 29th, 2024. That morning as I sat in my cluttered apartment with my filming gear strewn about, I felt an immediate sense of connection when we began speaking, as this was a woman with a career I hoped to emulate.  This interview felt immensely personal to me, as I wanted to absorb every word she said and put it into practice. After spending some time getting to know each other, we began to connect over the correlations between my film school journey and her career.

Isabel

Right now while I’m in film school, I have to learn everything myself and it’s so exhausting. I consider myself a good editor, but it gets overwhelming when it’s not just the cutting—it’s the sound mixing, color grading, VFX. There are so many times when I just want someone who is better than me in these aspects to help. But it also teaches me how to learn, and it's more skills that I can provide to other people. And, of course, try to get a job, which is looming over my head right now.

Lizzie

But that's all fabulous that you're learning all that, that you're able to do all that, that you'll be able to branch off into one or the other and your school will allow you to make an entire movie. 

Isabel

Do you ever wish that you could go back to school and kind of do everything over again?

Lizzie

I do. I never went to film school. I taught myself film because I'd gone to art school but after I finished Born In Flames and Working Girls, I wish I had gone to NYU. 

But I would never have made Born in Flames if I had gone to film school because teachers would have told me I couldn’t make the film because I started out with only the premise - that it would take place after a social-cultural democratic revolution in the United States. I wanted to see what would happen from there. It wasn’t a documentary where I would follow characters. And it wasn’t science fiction even though it took place in the future -  it looked just like New York looked back then. It was two years before I found a narrative. They would have told me I was crazy and I might not have done it.

Born in Flames took five years to make and I was editing sometimes eight hours a day. I learned how to make films through editing; editing was a form of writing for me. I loved it—it was my favorite part of all of filmmaking. But I do wish I had gone to film school because the people who have gone to film school learned how to look at films a different way, and at so many more. 

Since then, I’ve put myself through a kind of “film school.” First I studied screenwriting. Now I sometimes work as a script consultant. When I made my films I didn’t know what a three-act structure was.  Now I listen to a great podcast by Roger Deakins, the cinematographer, and his wife, James,  called Team Deakins. Every week they interview somebody in the film business - a costume designer, a casting director,  a cinematographer, a director. And they ask such good questions.  I also watch a lot of YouTube videos  - what lenses to use and why,  why we emotionally connect to colors. You can never stop studying.  Right now, the only thing I would feel prepared to teach would be screenwriting.

Isabel

That was actually my next question, would you ever think about teaching? Or do you teach?

Lizzie

I’ve been amazed at how much I’ve learned from writing because it all starts there. When you're writing, you have to have in mind how the shots are going to go together. What do characters want? What is the conflict? What are the beats? That’s how you know how you are going to stage it and shoot it. In editing and writing, you learn that you start at the last possible minute and cut at the first possible minute unless you're making a durational film. That’s not my thing but some of them are incredible. But I think it's screenwriting that’s most important because if you don't work it out in the script, you're going to have trouble later on.  

Some scenes in Born In Flames had to be set up carefully, like “faux” Hollywood shots. For example,  the scenes of stealing U-Haul trucks or the bicycle bicycle brigades were storyboarded because they were DIY, low-budget and we didn’t have permits to shoot on the street and were using more where cameras were going to be. For those, I got help from people who had more experience than I had.

Isabel

I wanted to ask, do you feel more productive as a writer when you work by yourself? Or when you work with other people? Do you ever ask, is this good? Sometimes when I'm writing, I'm constantly giving my pages to other people and trying to get them to say it's bad so that I can write something better. What's your process in writing with other people? Or do you just like to write alone? 

Lizzie

I mostly work by myself and love working alone but sometimes have screenwriting partners. There's one project where I knew I wasn't going to understand the male character deeply enough so I was working with this guy who knew the time period. 

If you give your script to people for notes, they have to be productive. It's never whether a script is bad or good. That’s not helpful. Neither are tiny notes like people suggesting changing the names of characters. I want structural help - help with a character’s emotional arc. When I’m done, I might give it to somebody just to look at the dialogue. 

The advice I would give to other people is to be careful who you give your scripts to. If you have a trusted person who will give you notes, who doesn't just say it's good or bad, but gives you a sense of where it can go, where it's working or not working, that can be helpful. 

Isabel

To be more selective of who you show your work to–not just anyone.

Lizzie

A lot of people I know are in writers' groups, where they show each other their work. I'm not good in groups. But that helps them because they all give notes to each other.  If you can find a group like that, that's good.

Isabel

Fortunately, I have a lot of fellow film students surrounding me. But sometimes I worry that when I'm outside of school, I’ll lose some of that creative steam. What keeps you motivated? Filmmaking is so hard—what keeps the fire inside of you to keep making films?

Lizzie

Either you know you have to or you know you don't have to. If you stop, it means you don't have that fire. If there's anything you would rather do, then do it. If you feel you want to do it, you will keep doing it. If it's something that you have to compel yourself to do, then that's not the thing for you. If there are stories you feel only you can tell, that you can tell better than anybody else, you need to tell them. And it doesn't necessarily always have to be in film. You can try to write books. If I could write prose,  I would have turned some ideas into novels. But I don't write prose. 

Isabel

The feeling of you have to do this or nothing else will satisfy your soul.

Lizzie

This leads to how you make a living, often piecing together a life for years, which is problematic especially if you don't have a teaching job. 

Isabel

A lot of my teachers have come from, “Oh, I was in Hollywood for 10 years. And I just couldn't make it work. So now I'm a teacher.” So that's why I'm always interested in creatives who do teach, because I feel like sometimes, that's one of the only ways to really, truly make a living. Everyone always says, “Oh, what are you going to do with an art major? How are you going to make money?” I know money makes the world go around. But it's so hard to be an artist or a filmmaker. And to have that money, because we live in a capitalist society. 

Lizzie

I didn't realize that when I first started.  I thought it was either teach or make films. I didn't realize that you could do both. By the time I wanted to teach screenwriting, a lot of jobs had been taken by people who have a lot more credits than I have.

Isabel

I wanted to ask you, since this is a feminist filmmaking class, what are some core principles that you think make a film feminist for you? 

Lizzie 

It starts with the script. For me, it's about stories about women. For me, it's kind of extreme. I'm interested in women on the edge—women doing things that push them to a point where they are misjudged by the rest of the world. Or they’re fighting for rights. For me, feminism is political.  Being a feminist filmmaker means making films with mostly women in them, where women are the subjects and not the objects, where they have agency. 

Isabel 

I see everything that you just said in Working Girls.  I saw it on HBO Max before, and it’s so amazing that you have a film on such a huge streaming platform. I wanted to ask about how complicated it is when it comes to being a feminist and showing sex on film.  How do you navigate showing sex on film and feminism? I think sometimes people think that feminism is not showing female naked bodies, because for so long they've been the object. But, you turn it on its head. What were some reactions that people had to that? Or why do you think that showing sex on film is so “anti-feminist”?  

Lizzie

Working Girls is a film about labor, not sex and men are naked more than the women are. They’re were just doing their job, they’re not “getting off.” The men may be but it also pokes fun at their sometimes weird and hilarious fantasies. I tri

I tried to always shoot from angles where they would see themselves - no up-the-crotch shots, no boob shots. I worked with Judy Irola, the Director of Photography, to create angles that wouldn’t be exploitative.  It was a backstage movie about what it was like to work in a brothel.  And it was all choreographed, so, hopefully, there was no way that a man could get turned on by watching the film. And if they were, there was something wrong with them.  When it first came out, some people thought it treated men unfairly, ridiculing them, but the men were based on real characters. But some men understood the film. The best compliment I ever got was from a man who said, “I had a boss just like that.” He was talking about the madam, Lucy, and he wasn't talking about being in a brothel. So he could see that the film was about labor.

The film was also about the emotional labor the women performed with the men, the way Lucy exploited them all,  and the camaraderie among the women in the daytime that made being there fun. But during the night shift, when Lucy forced Molly to work a double shift, she was pushed into an emotional overload. 

But going back to your question, the nudity was very choreographed—every scene that required it was filmed like a dance, totally pre-planned.

Isabel

I was going to ask if there was an intimacy coordinator on the day sex scenes were filmed, because I've been learning a lot about intimacy coordination and how things can go wrong so quickly.  So I was wondering how you protected against that.

Lizzie

Back then, there were no intimacy coordinators. That wasn’t even a concept.  As I said, the scenes were rehearsed, and we made sure that everyone knew every move beforehand and we rehearsed with them, but we made it fun, well before the day of shooting.  If you wait for the day, it can turn out badly because actors can freeze up.  These days, I think intimacy coordinators are valuable because sometimes actors don't want to talk to the director.  But that was what was good about having Judy because actors could talk to her if they didn't feel like talking to me.

Also, nudity wasn’t such a big thing back then, in the downtown scene because there were so many nude performances in theater and performance art. Louise, who played Molly, was used to performing nude in downtown theater, as were some of the other actors. As long as they were comfortable, everything was okay. 

Isabel

I'm very interested in the topic of nudity and sex on film and sex work because I come from a background. I've been exotic dancing for a long time, and a lot of my friends are sex workers.  Before I started exotic dancing,  I think I had a misconstrued knowledge about sex work. But when I saw it through real women's eyes and saw how it’s a true 9-to-5 job,  it is so similar to what was happening in Working Girls,  and it hasn't changed that much.  And that's why Working Girls almost felt like a documentary rather than a narrative.

Lizzie

Some people think it's a documentary,  but many of the shots were ritualized,  like the cameras dollying down the hallway for every new client. The filming is naturalistic downstairs but stylized upstairs. The only time there's weird music is when the guys are doing their sessions upstairs. Although there really is no upstairs. I built the brothel set in my loft. The stairs lead to nowhere.  The bedrooms were built in a different place in the loft. The bedrooms were one room, redressed each time to be a different one - the Kleenex Room turned into the Jungle Room, and so on. 

Sound was also stylized,  like the use of the clock to convey the idea of time passing. We changed the lighting from the light in the day to the light at night, then broke the film in the middle when Molly went out to buy contraception for everybody. That’s shot in a more documentary style, by a different DP.  

In both Born In Flames and Working Girls, the most important thing was to maximize having time because both were made for little money. Rehearsing and setting up a plan is so important because the shooting days go by so fast. With Working Girls,  it took a while for the set in my loft to be built but since it was in my loft,  I was able to rehearse in it. Being able to block the actors in the space we were going to shoot saved a lot of time. 

Isabel

How was the financing process behind Working Girls?

Lizzie

With Working Girls, I had some money, which I had put into escrow because I was fighting to keep my loft. I also had a small grant. But I ran out of money after shooting.  Then, luckily,  two producers came on who helped me raise finishing funds. We met with potential financiers. One of them was a madam.  She looked at the film and said, “Oh my God, the way this madam runs her place is terrible! I would fire the girl who puts her feet on the wall.” She wasn't the one who gave us money,  but the producers found several people to put up enough for us to finish.  Then somebody from Cannes saw it before the film was done and invited us to the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes, which was so lucky and an amazing experience.   

But it took time, not as much as Born In Flames, which I worked on for five years. So again, time—if you have time,  you're really in a good place with your project. If you have time with the person who's shooting it, that's also a great thing.