“Broke my heart a little bit”: the movie Samantha Morton will always regret not making
Despite her brilliance and the recognition that she has gained from the industry, Samantha Morton is not your average Hollywood star, and you’re more likely to see her in some gritty indie drama rather than a major blockbuster.
Of course, she’s been in a handful, as most actors of her calibre have, but she thrives best when she’s given something challenging, something raw. One of her first roles was in the 1997 film Under the Skin by Carine Adler, in which she played a young woman who uses sex as a coping mechanism for her depression and grief, demonstrating a perfect understanding of characters with such rich internal worlds.
A few years later, she brought a similar sensibility to Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar, easily her most astounding performance, as a lonely woman who discovers her boyfriend has committed suicide on Christmas, leaving her with his manuscript. While Morton would appear in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report that same year, it would be Morvern Callar that truly proved her magnificence.
Following in the footsteps of Adler and Ramsay, then, Morton eventually made her own directorial debut with the 2009 television film The Unloved. The moving drama was inspired by her own experiences as a child in and out of foster care, having been made a ward of court at a young age. With the film, Morton aimed to show a realistic portrayal of a young girl’s experience living in a care home, and it received praise, even winning Robert Carlyle a Scottish Bafta.
Yet, Morton has never been able to get another film funded, and she puts it down to the fact that female filmmakers are taken much less seriously. It’s a sad fact of the film industry, even now, decades on from the first ever narrative film, which was directed by a woman, Alice Guy-Blaché, that women still have a considerably harder time trying to get their foot in the door. It doesn’t even seem to matter if you’re an established star like Morton.
She had a sequel of sorts in mind called Starlings, but she was practically forced to give up her dream when no one expressed any interest in making it, telling The Guardian, “Film4 didn’t want to make the film with me, which broke my heart a little bit because they’d made The Unloved. They didn’t even want to read my script.”
“The BBC didn’t want to read my script either. I don’t know that if I was Michael Winterbottom, they might want to, but I found all that really tough,” Morton said, questioning whether it would’ve been easier for her to get another directorial opportunity if she were a man.
She added of the disparaging unfairness of it all, “I think a lot of the people that make the decisions about films are men, and for some reason, they trust male filmmakers; even if they’ve only done a commercial or a music video, they seem to trust them.”
So, Morton has never made another film as a director, despite the brilliance of The Unloved, and if that’s not indicative of the film industry’s sway towards male filmmakers rather than women, then I don’t know what is.
