“We Never Wanted to Shy Away From the Fact That You’re Seeing a Story About a Very Active Now 85 Year Old.” Interview With RBG Directors Julie Cohen & Betsy West

It’s always a daunting task for a filmmaker to encapsulate the life and achievements of any one person, let alone someone whose work has been both in the public eye and effecting public life for decades. Given the limited running time of a feature film, how is one to navigate an entire individual history for what to highlight, what to leave out, and how to present it all?

That was the task filmmakers Julie Cohen and Betsy West chose for themselves when they decided to make a documentary on perhaps the most iconic Supreme Court justice in the institutions history, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I got to sit down with West and Cohen a couple of weeks ago when they were in town for their screening at the San Francisco International Film Fest.

Arlin Golden for Film Inquiry: So how’s your festival going?

Betsy West: Well, I just got here almost this afternoon. Um, I was just in Minneapolis showing it at the Minneapolis St Paul International Film Festival, so we’ve been going around.

Julie Cohen: And I did do a San Francisco Film Festival screening with the children’s screening. The have a program at the Children’s Creativity Museum.

I love that venue, it’s so cute.

Julie Cohen: So  our big screening event is tomorrow.

Right.

Betsy West: We’re excited.

So you guys, I mean probably since Sundance, have just been all over.

Betsy West: Yeah, there was a little bit of a lull…

Julie Cohen: Yeah, we sort of had a travel wise because we have our theatrical release coming up in just a few weeks on May 4th. So there was like a lot of planning and strategizing related to that and then basically just like a five week craze of festivals that we’re both trying to get to.

Betsy West: Some of us together, some apart. They wanted to release it in early May, which is a pretty fast turnaround.

Yeah, no kidding!

Julie Cohen: Which is great because, I mean, I could keep doing this for months! And also just like, the momentum is good and the timing was good. From the very time that Magnolia and Participant picked it up, they had it in mind that they wanted to make the release kind of centered around Mother’s Day and that seemed like a good idea. And they just stuck to it. They were like, oh, people can bring their mothers. And we were like, “yeah, also and bring their sons and daughters because kids are really, really into RBG”, so…

Yeah, so let’s talk about that. The film kind of really seemed interested in the sort of meme-ification of Ginsburg. Why was that such a compelling aspect of her story for you guys?

Betsy West: Well,  in a way, it’s a way into her story because after she issued several very scathing descends that were picked up by some enthusiastic law students who were just admiring of her sharp writing and her speaking truth to power, suddenly she was the “Notorious RBG”.

There was a blog and all kinds of memes and you know, we had both interviewed Justice Ginsburg before that. I had done it in 2011 and Julie a couple of years after that. And we knew the full story, her history as a women’s rights litigator in the 1970s and how she changed the law for American women. So when we saw all of this interest in her, we thought “well a lot of her fans who love her don’t know the full story.” So that just seemed like an incredible opportunity to tell that deeper story. And I think we feel that that’s the heart of the film; the unpacking of the legal strategy that she employed in the 1970s to challenge laws that were discriminatory, but everybody else just took for granted and thought were perfectly fine. So that to us was the reason for doing it.

The “Notorious RBG” is a lot of fun and it’s crazy! You know, her son says, “well, it’s so much not like mom, but it’s funny.” So that was kind of our way in, right.

Julie Cohen: Right. That part of things was really just an entry point to tell the story. I mean, it’s what has sparked  all the great public interest in her. But there’s a lot more to her, obviously both her personal and professional life and in the law that she helped develop and we wanted to sell the story. But also, you know, there is the danger if you’re gonna tell a story about constitutional law, which ultimately were doing, that it feels a little bit egg headed and boring. And we were trying not to be egg headed and boring. Like we want it to be fun. We don’t want it to be super serious.

We think we did that in a number of ways by, you know, getting into sort of her own biographical story, by introducing you to some of the amazing human beings behind the cases that she argued early in her career. But then, you know, by adding in the planking and the weightlifting. But also with all the fun memes. And truthfully, our associate editor and associate producer had a lot of fun who like sort of scouring the internet to find the actual absolute best memes, including actually one of our favorite images, which is RBG as Wonder Woman, which our associate editor…

Betsy West: created it! She made that…

Julie Cohen: I don’t know if she did, she didn’t do it for the film. She had just done it for fun and  at some points we were searching for an image to be the final image in a sequence….honestly. We’ll give you the behind the scenes story. There is an image of her that’s very popular on the Internet of her, like, flipping the double bird and we had that at the end of the sequence. It was funny, but like we are kind of like, “ehhhh”. It kind of felt like maybe that’s too far –

Betsy West: It felt disrespectful.

Julie Cohen: But also, you know, yes, the young people who view this are going to get that that’s photoshopped. But you know, for many generations there are going to be people are like, “oh my God. Justice Ginsburg is flipping the bird?!” You know, that’s how my parents might take it and we, you know, there are going to be people, you know, elderly people watching this film. So anyway, yeah, we were looking for another image and we were like, “right, what about that cool Wonder Woman meme that you created?

Yeah no, that definitely stood out. And also I love the scene where she’s watching the SNL impression of herself; it was just so satisfying to see – both how much she enjoyed it, but also how little she really seemed to care about it.

Betsy West: Right, well, she’s got a great sense of humor about herself. When her son and daughter said they didn’t think she’d seen it, you know, that was like, “well okayyyyy, we’re going to show it to herrr!” (laughs) But we didn’t tell her, of course, and we didn’t tell the supreme court public affairs people who were in the room when we did this. We just kind of, we said we’re going to show her a few scenes, we didn’t quite say what.

Julie Cohen: And then we’re in this very austere setting,

Betsy West: High ceilings…

Julie Cohen: Really high ceilings, and all these mahogany things…

Betsy West: Portraits…

Julie Cohen: Portraits of all the former justices staring down… And here this crazy thing is happening. And she was just like…

Betsy West: Cackling.

Julie Cohen: Enjoying it, like, she was cackling.

Betsy West: She loved it. It was so cute. And she has a great sense of humor herself. She really does. She loves to laugh.

I’d imagine you’d have to just to stay sane.

Julie Cohen: Yeah.

Betsy West: Well, maybe. I don’t know. She’s funny.

Well, how did you guys meet as collaborators? And also what would you say, related to that, are the challenges and the benefits of co-directing?

Julie Cohen: Yeah. We both have backgrounds in network TV news, which is, you know, like a lot of worlds, the “New York Network TV News World” is a relatively small world. Although we didn’t really know each other. We had a bunch of friends, including some close friends, in common. And then maybe seven years ago or something like that, when Betsy was the executive producer of the project for which…our title’s executive producer which, but you were also, I mean, you were doing the interviews and very substantively producing and directing parts of it. For the project for which he interviewed with Bader Ginsburg she had hired me to do…they were doing 100 profiles of great women, and to do 20 of those profiles. Not the RBG one, but a bunch of others. So we knew we knew each other.

Betsy West:  We worked together for a bit on this project about the women’s movement. And then Julie subsequently interviewed Justice Ginsburg for her film The Sturgeon Queens, which is a fish store and lower Manhattan.

Russ & Daughters.

Julie Cohen: Russ & Daughters, exactly.

Betsy West: Yes, Russ & Daughters, you know. And Justice Ginsburg is a great fan. And so we kind of talked about her.

Julie Cohen: Right, yeah, she was the topic of conversation.

Betsy West: She was, Julie asked what was it like to interview her and it in fact can be challenging. And it’s both intimidating and a little challenging just because of the way she speaks and some things. So we talked about that. And then really in 2015 when we saw what was happening with “the Notorious RBG”, one day just seemed like, well, there needs to be a documentary about this woman! And we should do it. But we had never worked together that closely. And from my point of view, I mean, Julie’s made a bunch of documentaries on her own. This is really the first theatrical documentary that I have directed and produced. I loved doing it with a partner, especially Julie as the partner. We had a great time!

Julie Cohen: We did have a lot of fun. You know, the benefits, especially for this project, was that there was like so much work to do. We’re dealing with so many people, and so many very high level people who you’re not just going to send them an email saying like, “heyyy Judge Edwards, we’re going to show up at the Federal Court of Appeals and turn on our camera.” Once you engage with someone, there was going to be a fair amount of back and forth, including some people that we didn’t end up interviewing or including in the film. There were about 30 people. So like, having all those dealings, we just split them down the middle so that all that back and forth could be with one or the other of us.

And then for the part that substantively could I guess be a challenge where you might be arguing over the substance and putting this story together, it seemed to help that there were both of us, because just in the same way that you would show something that you might’ve done… like Betsy’s the kind of person that I might…like if I did something I might show it to her. If she did something she might show it to me. So it’s like that sort of formalizing that relationship, you know, adding another level. As you know, our editor, by the time you’re putting it all together, our editor Carla Gutierrez was also kind of a substantive partner with us on this. So that’s…I was actually worried about that only because like three is a weird number. If you ended up in a situation where two people always agreed and the one was always the odd man out, that would be horrible. It didn’t seem to happen that way. Not like we all agreed on everything but we sort of would…it would just switch like on a case by case basis. And Betsy and I had like really high venn diagram agreement on like what was working and what wasn’t. And the question was just like if something isn’t working, how do we fix it? Or even like the smallest things like graphics. We always were like, “oh I love that or hate it” or whatever.

Betsy West: Yeah.

Julie Cohen: I remember you calling me once on something where new music had been put in and you were like, “what do you think of that?” And I’m like, “oh, I hate it!” and you were like “I know, it’s terrible!” (laughs)

Betsy West: I know. We have pretty similar tastes, I think, And we had a pretty similar to what we wanted the movie to be, you know. That we wanted it to be both informative, and moving and poignant and entertaining. I think we have similar sensibility.

Julie Cohen: Character driven. We’re not very into the like, very artsy, high  kind of documentaries that like, you might say like, “oh, that’s brilliant” and yet it’s unbearable to watch. That’s like, I mean you’re a film guy. If you’re going to festivals, you’re seeing some of those, you know?

Betsy West: We have very similar tastes, so that was great! And also I think the other reason to have a collaborator, is you’re doing a documentary about a Supreme Court justice and you have to proceed very carefully because there are real restrictions on her time and her availability and on the rules in the Supreme Court. We wanted to do this film respectfully and carefully and that was also great to have each other to strategize…

Julie Cohen: the strategy about how we were going to get… if we got a sort of not enthusiastic response, how to go from there, I can’t even remember. And I wish I could. There was one situation that was when you were at the airport and we had carefully, carefully spent like a half a day…

Betsy West: Oh yeah…

Julie Cohen: Working on some certain email, that the plan was because you were going out the country…

Betsy West: It was 7 in the morning.

Julie Cohen: I was going to send the email to Justice Ginsburg’s office in the morning. And it’s like 6:30 in the morning and I called Betsy at the airport, and I’m like, “I’m really sorry, you’re going to kill me because we spent so long. I just don’t feel like it’s…I don’t think I… I’m having second thoughts!” And you’re like “I don’t want to send it either!”

 

Betsy West: I remember!

Julie Cohen: That was a key moment.

Betsy West: That was.

Julie Cohen: like (faux crying) “I don’t knowwww, we can’t send it!”

Oh no, that must be nerve-wracking.

Betsy West: It was nerve-wracking! People were saying it must have been so much fun to do this. And in retrospect it was fun. But I have to say I did not relax until we had filmed her at home, filmed in the office, filmed her in the gym, and done the sit down interview. That was at the end of July. We were editing. It all felt like a huge leap of faith. We’re editing, we were doing this thing, we’re structuring, we’re, you know, we’re doing all this stuff and we don’t have the most important stuff in the can. When that finally happened at the end of July, then I would say that August and September were a ton of fun. I actually had so much fun putting it together. It was great because all right, we have wonderful material, and if we don’t screw it up, we’re going to have something good here.

Julie Cohen: Right.

Betsy West: And that’s a good feeling.

Julie Cohen: And that’s another place where it does help to have another person just to be, to sort of like push you forward and whatever. There was periods where I feel like I was reassuring and she was like, “I don’t knowww!” and I was like, “It’ll be fine, it’ll be fine, it’s going to be good!” And that had succeeded with her through conversation. And one time you said, do you really think that? I’m like, “no, I’m just saying that to make you feel better!” (laughs) “I’m just bluffin!”

Betsy West: Yeah.

Since you mentioned sort of all these…it’s true. I see a lot of films at these festivals and one type of film I see a lot also in my professional work is kind of a straight up biographical, chronological kind of documentary. And I really appreciated about your guys’, the non-linear structure of it. And I’m wondering sort of how you guys arrived at that.

Betsy West: That totally deliberate. We said it from the (in unison) very beginning. From the very beginning we said we do not want this to feel like a traditional biopic. We just don’t want that. We have to be able to do enough verité. We have a living woman! We have a fabulous, fascinating person who we ought to be able to get enough verité to mix with the story. But the trick of that is to find the transition,

Julie Cohen: The transition points.

Betsy West: And you know, I mean, one of the transition points that happened early that I think really worked and made me so happy was the amazing home movie stuff that we managed to get, that we were very lucky to get, there’s the home movies, and there’s the young Ruth Bader Ginsburg graduating from Cornell, and then it dissolves to the shot of her looking at her granddaughter Carla’s graduation from Harvard law school. So you’re seeing the cap and gown and the cap and gown and just visually…

Julie Cohen: And then we went back to the young RBG (in unison) at Harvard.

Betsy West: But that to me was the most effective. There were a few that

Julie Cohen: We really struggled.

Betsy West: Where we had to really work hard to make the transition. But you know when I look at the film now, I think that the transitions work pretty much and I’m so happy that we didn’t do it straight through chronological. I mean, I think it brings who she is now, an octogenarian supreme court justice, to life.

Julie Cohen: Right. And there was almost a political point to that too. Like we never wanted to shy away from the fact that you’re seeing a story about a very active now 85 year old. We love 2018 RBG and we want to be seeing her throughout.

Betsy West: That was your point at the beginning and you were so right. So that even when she was talking about, you know, when we go into the love story — we love the love story of course, because it’s an extraordinary relationship. But, you know, the tendency might be to go totally in the past. We have beautiful photos and archive of her from the past showing what a beautiful woman she was. But I love the moment when Nina Totenberg asks her, what was it about Marty? And there she is, she’s smiling. She has that beautiful smile, that wistfully smile…

Julie Cohen: Like almost like a teenage smile on her…

Betsy West: Thinking back to her young romance, I think it’s really beautiful, and that was important.

Julie Cohen: Yeah, I mean, you know, Carla, our editor is particularly skilled at just like drawing the emotion out of an unspoken moment. And that was probably the strongest example of that, but there’s a number of them throughout the film where I was like, not even a word, but it’s just like the look on her face is so great. She doesn’t even have to say anything. And that brings us back to…

Betsy West: Back to the stuff. So yeah, I’m glad you liked that because that was important to us.

Great, yeah. I felt like  the confirmation hearing too also provide for such a really good backbone…

Betsy West: Another Carla thing. I mean Carla looked at every…you know, we’re out there doing these interviews and gathering all the material, and Carla came on board, so a year ago, I guess, in March ’16. And the first thing she did was look at everything, and she looked at the four days of confirmation hearings, much of which is kind of boring. She watched the whole thing. And I remember when she said to us, it’s really got great material. Because there she is defending her life. There she is presenting her life to the committee considering her for the Supreme Court. And she’s on. So those were some great moments and it was Carla who recognized that this potentially was a narrative spine that we could go back and forth to, and it worked. And the end. We couldn’t figure out how to do the end and we had a rough cut screening of the ending and it was a brilliant idea of one of our screeners who…

Julie Cohen: happens to be my brother.

Betsy West: Happens to be Julie’s brother, who said “where’s the senate confirmation hearings?!?”

Julie Cohen: Where we found that a final soundbite

Betsy West: The final soundbite! It was not in the film before, but it was when Bruce said that, you know, it was like, yeah,you’re right! we need to do that.”

You talk about how, you know, you really want to present the modern day Justice Ginsburg, and when I see her doing her personal training, it’s, it’s almost a relief, you know? “Oh good! She’s…active”

Betsy West: I think you’re not the only person who has that reaction!

Well so did you guys feel compelled to address her health in that sort of way?

Betsy West: Well, we showed what we saw. You know? I mean, she’s talked about her workout routine. A lot of people didn’t believe it. We were a little skeptical, but then (laughing) we went inside the gym. And we’re just like, “whoa! This is impressive.” And literally, she paid no attention to us, pay no attention to the cameras. Yeah, she, she just went in there and did her routine. It was not like a pretend routine or  little bits and pieces. She did it and it was very impressive.

Julie Cohen: My favorite part about that is just the look on her face. There’s something that’ll just like, you know, I mean the work that she’s doing is Amazing for an 85 year old. Obviously she’s not a professional athlete, but like, the intensity with which she’s doing it…There’s one scene, I don’t even know what to call the exercise that she’s doing, but where she’s doing some kind of bending down thing. And there’s just like, her hair’s kind of coming down and she just like, her face looking straight ahead, like, “tell me what to do, put me in coach.”

Betsy West: Yeah, no, it’s, it was priceless. So you could read that for whatever it is. I mean, also, you know, her memory is extraordinary. She remembers the names and the dates and corrected us on about something involving a case from 40 years ago.

Julie Cohen: Right.

Betsy West: A little detail. I mean, she has great recall. Her brain is pretty prodigious, still.

I would hope so. I mean she definitely shows it in her dissents.

Betsy West: Yeah. Yeah, and in the court in general, she’s known to be very well prepared and to ask very incisive questions.

I’d read that, as you were saying, you’d interviewed Justice Ginsburg years prior and you had brought up this idea of a documentary to her before and it maybe  took some persistence on your guys’ end. What do you think was it about the moment that she said yes?

Julie Cohen: Well, you know, there was no moment. It wasn’t, it was sort of a gradual process. Our original ask to her was in January of 2015, and she kind of agreed in increments. Her initial answer was not yet. We kept coming back to her. We came back a few months later when she said like, “I won’t sit down to do an interview with you for two more years.” I think there were a number of reasons for that, but I think part of it was that it was a test of our seriousness. Like, we proceeded, like “nevertheless we persisted” (laughs)

Julie Cohen: Showing that we really wanted to tell a full story of her life and legal career and starting to engage with all of these different people that had been part of her early litigation history. And she had never said no. So it was just the fact that like, months kept passing and we kept moving ahead.

Betsy West: She just sort of accepted it. (laughs) Yeah, “they’re doing this” and we just started to get more and more access.

Julie Cohen: She said that she talked to her friends and family about it. I don’t know how that all unfolded, but you know, she understands that this whole “Notorious RBG” thing is an opportunity and helps bring out, sort of her legacy of what she’s done for the law, and we were going to put that all together into a film, and I think she did understand that.

And it seemed like she was pretty forthcoming with the home movies and the photographs.

Julie Cohen: Well the home movies…

Betsy West: The home movies came from her biographer.

Oh!

Julie Cohen: These two law professors at Georgetown University who have been writing a biography of her for more than 15 years now. They’re the ones that collaborated with her on her writing, is that “My Own Words” book that came out a few years ago, but they’re writing a full dress biography and they’ve been gathering and interviewing like forever. And she pointed us to them. We had been talking to them on quite an ongoing basis about what material they had. And one lunch we were having in New York, like one of them says, “oh, and by the way, you know, yeah, we’ve done a bunch of home movies of Marty and Ruth together.” And we’re like “home movies?! What now?!”

So we said, could you ask her if it’s okay to send them to us and the next thing you know, you know, we’re getting a DVD in the mail.

Betsy West: In the mail, it was great. And when we showed her an excerpt…really the only thing we showed her ahead of the actual screening, she never saw the film until she went to Sundance and watched it at Sundance with an audience of 500 people. But we showed her a very short excerpt that included the home movies about her relationship with Marty. Just like two minutes. And, you know, obviously she was very interested in and really liked that. But she also just said, “where did you get those movies?” (laughs)

Julie Cohen: When we were then filming her on vacation she was saying “they have these amazing home movies!”

Betsy West: “Home movies!”

Julie Cohen: “I don’t know where they got them!”

Betsy West: “Where did they get them?!”

Julie Cohen: “Where did they come from?!” They’d been in Marty’s family for awhile,

Betsy West: She forgot about them!

Julie Cohen: Actually most of the footage that we got was from his side of the family from before they has been together.

Betsy West: Anyway.

Julie Cohen: It was crazy.

Wow. So I just want to close by asking what Justice Ginsburg means to you guys personally?

Julie Cohen: I think that she’s a really important figure in American history. And one that has been…in a sense has gotten a lot of recognition recently, but has never gotten the full recognition that someone that’s accomplished what she accomplished should be getting. Overcoming discrimination, then setting about creating a whole constitutional legal landscape in which the genders would be treated equally under law. It’s really actually a really important thing that happened and it’s something to respect and that should be part of our history and that’s a good counter balance to like all the crazy meme stuff.  I think we’re in a mode now of looking at kind of unspoken history that’s not told. And I think her story is a great example of that. Even for someone who’s like, oddly, both simultaneously famous and yet with a story that’s not widely enough known.

Betsy West: Yeah, I mean, I admire Justice Ginsburg and the way she’s approached challenges throughout her life. I think she’s a tremendous role model, many levels. And as Julie just explained for what she did for American women, for how she handled the setbacks, the many setbacks that she had in her life. And I feel that her approach to work through anger, just get beyond your anger and figure out strategically how you’re going to deal with whatever challenge you’re facing. To me that’s a really important lesson, and I feel I’ve learned that a little bit from her. And look, it’s an honor to have done a documentary about someone who is such an important figure.

Film Inquiry would like to thank Betsy West and Julie Cohen for taking the time to speak with us.

 

RBG comes to theaters today, May 4th. To find screenings near you, check here.