The history-making director who owes everything to Robert Redford: “Changed my life”
Gone but certainly not forgotten this year was, of course, Robert Redford, someone who was, if anything, somehow under-appreciated until he passed away, despite a career that stood up against any film actor or director, let alone the fact that he excelled at both. And his death led to many artists paying tribute to the influence he had on their own paths to success.
One of those was Euzhan Palcy, the screenwriter and director from the West Indies who broke ground as the first female Black director to have a movie produced by a major studio in Hollywood. She has won awards in four different decades, and her film A Dry White Season, released in 1989, featured not only Marlon Brando but Donald Sutherland and Susan Sarandon, too.
Palcy was in fact the only woman to ever direct Brando, who signed up to be in her movie due to her commitment to social justice and change, with A Dry White Season being a film about the realities of life under apartheid in South Africa, and Palcy risking her life several times, travelling undercover to the country.
Four years previously, Redford had hand-picked Palcy and nine other French directors to take part in the Sundance Directors Lab program, an offshoot of the film festival that Redford had founded in 1978 in order to showcase independent film and help directors who were starting out in the industry.
Pacy wrote in The Hollywood Reporter this year: “At Sundance, I was surrounded by giants – Paul Newman, Mike Nichols, Karl Malden, Waldo Salt and Bob himself – who watched me direct, offered notes and treated me as a peer. I was inspired, supported and free to create.”
It was while she was at Sundance that Palcy worked on A Dry White Season, a movie she had always felt she was destined to make, and among the mountains of Utah, she told of finding a community of creatives who were able to do nothing but focus on the movies they had dreamed of making, and she also got know Redford very well, thinking of him as a godfather, and once the ‘lab’ was over, rather than heading back to France, Redford encouraged her to meet with executives at Warner Brothers, who pitched several projects for her to direct.
Rather than take on any of the films, which included the future Spike Lee classic Malcom X however, she pushed to do A Dry White Season, which was that first major movie helmed by a Black female director. She added, “Robert Redford changed my life, and he helped plant a seed for change in Hollywood. For that, I will always carry him in my heart – with love, gratitude and reverence. Without him, I would never have gone to Hollywood, and who knows if that film would have ever been made.”
Palcy would go on to have a long and awarded career throughout the ‘90s and 2000s, and in 2022, she was awarded an honorary Oscar as a “pioneering filmmaker of groundbreaking significance”.
Her last work was a TV mini-series, which she also wrote, called The Brides of Bourbon Island in 2007. It was about 17th-century Madagascan women who were sent off to French colonies in order to be married off to rich aristocrats.
