Only stories matter

No one wants to hear women's stories. If you want to make a film, you've got to write about a man." That's just one of many sexist lines that a frustrated Heather Graham said she heard in real life and used as fodder for her new film, Half Magic, her first as a writer-director, in which she also stars. A romantic comedy, it's about a development assistant named Honey who is fed up with sexism in Hollywood. Her misogynist boyfriend and boss, an action star, is played by Chris D'Elia.

He is given "all the lines people said to me," said Graham, 48, one of the first actors to share her #MeToo story in the wake of the revelations about Harvey Weinstein. D'Elia's character is based on no one in particular, though, she said. "He's a composite of a guy I dated who's a director and a director I worked with who I didn't date, and just entitled male Hollywood action stars I've met," said Graham.

"We get a lot of mixed messages from the culture," she said. "One message is all that matters is your looks, and you're judged on that - you're supposed to be sexy. On the other hand, your sexuality is judged in a negative way."

Breaking out of boxes

Graham knows this double bind intimately, having been cited on increasingly antique-seeming lists like People's '50 Most Beautiful People' and FHM's '100 Sexiest Women in the World'. Her best-known roles, including Rollergirl in Boogie Nights, Felicity Shagwell in Austin Powers  and Jade in The Hangover, are all highly sexualised women.

"I think when you start to play those kind of roles, you get offered more like that," she said. "Maybe it's just your destiny to get those jobs." But, she added, "I feel like those roles could be better written. Most are written by men, and men sometimes limit women. They want to put her into a box: the prostitute, the stripper, the porn star. They don't show her as a complicated, interesting, fully rounded person."

Like Honey, Graham had to learn to "break out of her sexist world to make her women's movie," she said. In search of meatier roles, she hired a producing partner to help develop female-driven material. "One was about the Triangle Factory Fire of 1911, something I felt incredibly passionate about," Graham said. However, she said, "People kept telling me nobody cares about women's stories."

On her own

Fed up, she wrote a humorous fictional script, incorporating witchcraft into its plot. The title is a nod to a book of the same name by Edward Eager. "These kids find a magical coin, and whenever they make a wish, they get only half of what they wished for," Graham said of its plot. "I think that's like life. There's an element we can control and an element we can't, and we have to surrender to that."  

Graham, who has been practising meditation since David Lynch introduced her to it on the set of Twin Peaks  when she was 21, had to take some deep breaths when her first backer fell through and she had to fold the film, which was then in pre-production. "It was incredibly traumatic," she said of the experience of having to tell the cast and crew that the movie "just fell apart."

About a year later, she found a champion in Bill Sheinberg, a producer who stepped in to rescue the project. "He liked the message of the movie," said Graham, who added that without the support of men like Sheinberg and Michael Nickels, a close friend who served as a producer on the film and encouraged her to direct it, Half Magic  would never have been made.

"There are men who really want to empower women," she said. "All the men getting fired over the past several months, there's a lot of men making those decisions. The idea that that kind of domineering, sexist guy that used to be so celebrated is now becoming outdated and uncool, I think that's amazing culturally, because that's more powerful than telling someone, 'Don't act like a jerk.'"

And when all else fails, a few amulets and runes? "As a woman, sometimes I feel disempowered in this society," Graham said, explaining her interest in the occult. "

To be a witch seems to me to be the opposite of that. Witches are powerful and wise and misunderstood. I think of femininity that way, because femininity is very powerful, but sometimes it's misunderstood and seen as weak. I think we, as women, are much more powerful than we give ourselves credit for. Look how we took down all those powerful men with our voices. Think about what we can do next."