Could ‘Call Jane’ Be the Abortion Drama Made for the Mainstream Arthouse Audience?

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When writer-director Phyllis Nagy showed the film to Trump voters, “I knew we were onto something when those people would say, ‘That’s not what I was expecting.’”

Screenwriter Phyllis Nagy is always attracted to the off center, whether it’s a murderous schoolmarm (“Mrs. Harris”) or a wistful gay romance (the Oscar-nominated “Carol”). With “Call Jane,” she’s directing for the first time since HBO movie “Mrs. Harris” in 2006. An acquisition title that debuts in Sundance’s Premiere section on January 21, “Call Jane” is a fictionalized story set in the real-life Chicago underground abortion network of 1968. (That world is also the subject of the Sundance documentary “The Janes.”)

Deluged with writing offers after her Oscar nod, “I was to write classy adaptations that wouldn’t be too offensive or out there, yet what I’m interested in are things that are not safe,” Nagy said. “Not really.”

When producer Robbie Brenner (“Dallas Buyers Club,” “The Fighter”) brought Nagy the “Call Jane” script, Elizabeth Banks was attached to star and the screenplay had seen at least four writers. “It was a compelling tale, but what one might expect,” said Nagy. “[I felt] it really was about the Janes. I needed the story to be unpredictable and personal and seen through the eyes of someone who’s actually going through a procedure, or a hard time.”

Brenner raised $8 million via private financing and Protagonist foreign presales. “She had a strong point of view, at the same time it wasn’t preachy or medicine,” said Brenner on the phone. “God knows, none of us want any of that. I saw it as a coming-of-age story of a woman who, in the face of being closed off in her life and not having many options, finds herself. Phyllis was the perfect person to direct this movie. I knew she was going to elevate everything about it, because everything she does is precise, specific, and non-compromising.”

Nagy centered the “Call Jane” script on the experience of Banks’ Joy, a suburban housewife with a teenage daughter (Grace Edwards) whose life is threatened by her pregnancy and gets no support from the medical establishment. Her unexpected odyssey leads her to the Janes.

Wilson Webb

In the original scripts, “Joy was more secondary, she was more of a housewife,” said Nagy. “In other words, she had no interesting skills that she wasn’t using. She had no desire to be anything other than what she was, which was a wife, a mom. The husband was more traditional in that way. And so the family was something that I really worked on to get key in that first act.”

In Nagy’s film, Joy has a loving relationship with her lawyer husband (Chris Messina), who expects dinner on the table when he gets home from a tough day at the office but also leans on his wife to edit his courtroom arguments. Joy is on her own as she tries to safely end her pregnancy. The Janes help — for a hefty fee.

After Joy’s harrowing abortion, which the film plays out beat by beat for 10 minutes, she is recruited by head Jane and radical feminist Sigourney Weaver. Nagy’s bravura opening long take follows Joy from behind at a fancy hotel dinner, looking like an elegantly coiffed Hitchcock blonde, as she pushes open the hotel doors to watch the 1968 riots on the streets of Chicago. Like many Americans that year, her consciousness is about to be raised.

Wilson Webb

Filmed during the pandemic over 23 days in May and June, 2021 in Hartford, Connecticut, Nagy shot with one 35mm camera. (“Who does that?” said Brenner.) Nagy packed the “Call Jane” ensemble with local non-pros to add authenticity. While Nagy allows Weaver to look a remarkable 72, she’s surrounded by “real women who aren’t glammed up,” said Nagy, “who are in the background. They were local lawyers and doctors from Hartford who wanted to participate.”

Another change: Nagy added a key woman of color (Wunmi Mosaku) to what was “basically a white organization,” she said. Mosaku’s character opens the debate among the Janes about how to deliver abortions to women who cannot afford them. The real Janes performed thousands of free abortions; before that, the mafia had a grip on the black market for unsafe operations.

“Call Jane” is hardly a radical call to arms. “It’s a mainstream arthouse movie,” Nagy said. “This is a movie about what it’s about. I didn’t want to preach to the converted solely. When we were editing, I would show it selectively to people I knew to be conservatives in L.A. Yeah, they voted for Trump. And I knew we were onto something when those people would say, ‘That’s not what I was expecting.’ This movie allows you to focus on choice.”

While Nagy’s film has a pointed message, “it is allowing for the viewer to have another point of view, which a lot of times, consciousness-raising or politically motivated films don’t,” she said. “My personal challenge was to allow people to be entertained. Because I do believe that’s important, to have a sense of humor about it. And to keep people guessing in some way. Like, I didn’t want this to be predictable. It certainly does have a message. There is nothing wrong with that. But it is not a movie that insist you share the sentiment, necessarily.”

Nagy had no idea that the movie would be so timely. “We’re not done and we never will be,” she said. “And here we are, looking at the flames. We’re all going up. And I’m glad it happened that way. Because if the Supreme Court had come up right now, I might have said, ‘I don’t know if I can do this because it’s just too close to what’s going on.’ But it is also why I like period [films], because you can play with things in a period without being hectoring about it.”

Next up: If all goes well, Brenner will find financing for Nagy’s biopic about the last years of Welsh actress Rachel Roberts’ life, based on her journal “No Bells on Sunday.”

At Sundance, Two Films Look at Abortion and the Jane Collective

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The makers of “The Janes” hope those with differing views will allow themselves a look at life before Roe v. Wade. “This is a glimpse at history; I don’t think it’s an advocacy film,” said Tia Lessin, who directed with Emma Pildes, whose father used to be married to Arcana. Arcana’s son, Daniel, and Pildes are producers on the film. Lessin added, “It’s a real life story about what happened and the lengths that women went to to have abortions and to enable other women to have abortions.”

“Do I hope that people’s takeaway will be ‘let’s not go back there’? Sure. But I really hope it moves people to engage in conversation. Love the film, hate the film,” she said before Pildes jumped in: “Talk about the issue.”

And there is plenty to discuss.

The Jane Collective was formed when a college student, Heather Booth, now 76, received a desperate call from a friend looking for an abortion. Booth, active in the civil rights movement, found a doctor willing to help and passed along the information. “I made what I thought was a one-time arrangement,” she said in an interview. Soon another woman called. Then another. Booth found herself negotiating fees and learning the intricacies of the procedure so she could counsel women. After a few years, Booth, by then a mother working on her graduate degree at the University of Chicago, recruited others to fulfill the growing need.

“I was working full time. The number of calls were increasing. It was certainly too much for one person,” she added.

Phyllis Nagy’s ‘Call Jane’ headed to Sundance and Berlin film festivals

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UCLA screenwriting professor Phyllis Nagy’s feature film directorial debut, “Call Jane,” will be appearing two film festivals in the coming weeks.

“Call Jane,” has its world premiere in an online format at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday, Jan. 21. And it will in competition at the 72nd edition of the Berlin Film Festival, which takes place Feb. 10–20.

The film stars Elizabeth Banks, Kate Mara and Sigourney Weaver and tells the story of a Chicago housewife in 1968 whose pregnancy leads to a life-threatening condition. In need of an abortion but facing a medical establishment unwilling to help, she seeks another way and discovers the “Janes,” a clandestine organization of women who provide her with the assistance she needs.

Nagy, who has been teaching at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television since 2017, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2016 for “Carol,” her screenplay adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel “The Price of Salt.”

“Consideration of Our Own Mortality Provides Our Work With Urgency and Focus”

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Elizabeth Banks, Chris Messina, Grace Edwards, and Bianca D’Ambrosio in Call Jane by Phyllis Nagy. (Photo: Wilson Webb)

The last two years have prompted much contemplation and reconsideration of the reasons why we make our films as well as the ways in which we make them. What aspect of your filmmaking—whether in your creative process, the way you finance your films, your production methodology or the way you relate to your audience—did you have to reinvent in order to make and complete the film you are bringing to the festival this year?

The pandemic served as a potent reminder that a consideration of our own mortality provides our work with urgency and focus—and with a decidedly necessary dark sense of humor. This was always in the forefront of my thinking while I lived in Europe, where there is generally a different attitude culturally about these things, but which was oddly pushed to one side when I returned to the U.S., and particularly when I settled in Los Angeles. It’s a city in which human beings want to do anything they can to forestall a reckoning with one’s own fragility, physically and emotionally. So I am strangely grateful that making Call Jane in the midst of the pandemic allowed me to channel that emotional reckoning with my own mortality into our film’s DNA.

See all responses to our annual Sundance Question here.

“Restrictions Sometimes Bring to Life Really Great Shots”: DP Greta Zozula on Call Jane

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Elizabeth Banks and Cory Michael Smith in Call Jane.(Photo: Wilson Webb)

In Phyllis Nagy’s directorial debut Call Jane, Joy’s pregnancy leads to a life-threatening condition. When the medical establishment refuses to help, Joy turns to a clandestine organization called the “Janes” that is based on the real-life Jane Collective. The period piece is heavy on sequence shots, which both posed challenges and enabled the creativity of DP Greta Zozula, who discusses the film below.

Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film?

Zozula: I was introduced to Phyllis in the early part of last year. The subject matter was important and I was drawn to the script, but it was also important to me who was telling the story. Phyllis is amazing and I felt honored that she wanted me to be a part of the journey.

Filmmaker: What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job?

Zozula: Probably my enthusiasm, understanding and confidence with shooting on 16mm film! But in all seriousness, I think from the beginning Phyllis had a very clear idea of how she wanted to approach this film and we were very much on the same page from our first meeting.

Filmmaker: What were your artistic goals on this film, and how did you realize them?

Zozula: I wanted the visuals to be as honest as possible when telling this story but also reflect the emotion of the characters in the moment. We found this balance through visuals and lighting. Joy goes through a large character arc, and in specific moments we use the camera to really get inside of her head. There are many examples of this throughout the film. We also wanted to create a contrast between Joy’s world at home and the world of the Janes. The camera is more calculated in Joy’s world, and when we introduce the Janes the camera becomes more playful and unpredictable.

Filmmaker: How did you want your cinematography to enhance the film’s storytelling and treatment of its characters?

Zozula: There are three main environments in the film. Joy’s home, the Janes, and the operating room. Each environment goes through a transformation, but its reflected through Joy’s transformation, which ultimately comes to be fully realized at the end of the film. This was fun to explore and we achieved it through composition, camera movement, lighting and color. Each were very important to the overall arch and Joy’s journey.

Filmmaker: Were there any specific influences on your cinematography, whether they be other films, or visual art, of photography, or something else?

Zozula: Yes, I think in the beginning we spoke of Claire Denis and John Cassavetes a lot, specifically A Woman Under the Influence. These references were mostly for composition. We also pulled a couple stills from Vivian Maier’s collection, specifically for color and texture and how she captured Chicago in the ’60 and ’70s. I would say most references were pretty loose and spoken as more of a general respect for the artist’s approach to filmmaking.

Filmmaker: What were the biggest challenges posed by production to those goals?

Zozula: On a movie of this size, attempting a period film where there are more then a few exteriors was one of the harder challenges. We chose to do our driving shots practical, and that led to us having to do them all in one day. Five scenes total, three during the day and two at night. Not an easy feat, but it pays off in the final look.

Locations in general were difficult to find and replicate. It took a lot of creative camera work to shoot around modern structures but also keep the shot dynamic. A great example of this, is a shot where we find Joy on the sidewalk and follow her across the street as it starts raining. We decided to shoot it as a oner and we start by pulling her and then let her pass and we follow and end in a tight profile close-up at the end. The shot looks incredibly complex and seemingly shows the whole world, but in reality we did that to frame out a modern restaurant and parking lots full of modern cars and other modern elements we could not get rid of. I believe that it is those restrictions that sometimes bring to life really great shots. I love finding inspiration that way.

Filmmaker: What camera did you shoot on? Why did you choose the camera that you did?

Zozula: Arri 416. We wanted to shoot on super 16 as a creative choice for the film. The 416 is the most modern of the Arriflex cameras with some more modern friendly accessories. Also the quietest of the series as well.

Filmmaker: What lenses did you use?

Zozula: The majority were Master Primes. We did have an Ultra 16 9.5mm lens and a Canon 30-300 zoom.

Filmmaker: Describe your approach to lighting.

Zozula: Natural and motivated. I really don’t like to beautify light. I think there are times and places for it, but when a film lives in reality it has to be lit that way. Quite a few scenes were oners where we see the 360-degree space. None of these scenes were on a stage, and some were tiny spaces. The movement of the camera was important for the story, so we would have to be pretty creative in finding ways to hide lights. My gaffer, Noah Chamis, was the master in doing so.

Filmmaker: What was the most difficult scene to realize and why? And how did you do it?

Zozula: The opening sequence for sure. I mentioned before we did a lot of oners in this film. The opening is no exception to the rule. It starts inside following our main character and ends outside, and everything in between is a complex challenges of mirrors and other reflective surfaces and just a giant empty space that needed to be dressed as a hotel, and lit like one too. By far our biggest day for all departments.

It was near the end of the schedule, so it was built up over time and became the big day we were all waiting for. Lighting had to be 360 proof; it rained that day, so the weather gave us a limited window to pull it all off before wind became an issue. It was one of those days where everything had to go perfectly to plan, and we pulled it off. Six takes, just in time before the condors had to come down. In some ways, when you know you’re building a scene that takes place in a single shot it takes some pressures off because you know the task and you can commit to it and just go for it. One of my favorite things about Phyllis is when we said we were going to do something in one shot or two shots we did. We always stuck to our shotlist, and it’s honestly my favorite way to work. No doubts, no hesitations and never playing it safe.

Filmmaker: Finally, describe the finishing of the film. How much of your look was “baked in” versus realized in the DI?

Zozula: We did mostly everything up front by picking film and our film stocks. We shot on Kodak 250D and 500T. I worked with Nat Jencks Colorist at Postworks, who also scanned all the film. We created a LUT that was applied to dailies that worked really well and later in the DI we did very little to the finish look. Some polishing but no big changes.

TECH BOX

Film Title: Call Jane

Camera: Arri 416

Lenses: Zeiss Master Primes, Ultra 16, canon 30-300mm zoom

Lighting: Combination of LED and HMIs and Tungsten units.

Processing: Kodak film lab in NY

Color grading: Post Works NY/Davinic Resolve