Filmmaker and storyteller, Amy Marquis, told Girls Who Click about maneuvering her way through the film industry and the different career paths she took to find herself there. Marquis also introduces us to her new project ARA, UNTAMED. In her new magical realism style documentary, Marquis follows her eight-year-old daughter, Ara, as she finds new wild and magical places in her manicured suburb, processing her ever-changing world during the current COVID-19 pandemic and BLM protests. Marquis documents Ara’s understanding of her community and the communities around her. The production of ARA, UNTAMED is happening right now. For more information on Marquis’ project, and Ara’s personal and relatable adventures, you can visit ARA, UNTAMED’s original Kickstarter page here.
Want to hear what Marquis had to say about her life journey leading her to her filmmaking career? Continue reading!
Where did it all start? What drew you into becoming a director?
When I was 8 or 9, I had this little flatbed cassette recorder in my room that was just everything to me. I would write scripts, read them, record them, make all the sound effects — and those were basically my very early expressions as a filmmaker — having no awareness at the time, of course, that I actually wanted to be a filmmaker. It’s not that my parents didn’t encourage my art — I had great support and inspiration as a kid. My dad was a well-known professor at the University of Kentucky. I grew up in Lexington, and my mom was a second-language English tutor. We traveled all over the world because of my dad’s work, and I was exposed to a lot of really great things. But film wasn’t really their world, so I had to take a lot of baby steps to get there and figure that out for myself. If there had been something like [Girls Who Click] for me to engage in, and if I had actually been able to get a camera in my hands earlier and been encouraged to go out and tell stories, the path would’ve been a lot faster.
I went to Indiana University in Bloomington and started out in biology because I had this dream of swimming with the dolphins someday. I found out about halfway through that my brain just didn’t work that way. So I switched majors to journalism, because I thought it would be cool to be a reporter. That was a really good shift. I ended up getting a grant my senior year, and after graduation I spent two months in Malaysia and photographed and wrote about the endangered sea turtles. That’s when I started realizing that conservation isn’t black and white. You can’t just separate the wildlife and the environment from the people. You can’t just assign “good” and “bad.” That’s when I realized how powerful it is to witness the human struggle, and how it relates to these other things in the world that I cared about. I loved being “on set” — although that’s not how I referred to it at the time — but really, being on the ground, meeting people, finding the story, experiencing it for myself. That’s when I fell totally in love with that process.
After that summer, I moved to Washington, D.C., and kicked off thirteen years of magazine editing. I started off at the National Wildlife Federation as an assistant photo editor working for John Nuhn, who’s kind of a legendary dude in the wildlife photography world. We’d go to NANPA (North American Nature Photography Association) and I had met all these amazing photographers, so that was a very starry-eyed four years for me. But I needed more than photography alone, so I took an editing job at National Parks Magazine (part of the National Parks Conservation Association), and that position allowed me to write and edit writers and multimedia too. I had a really tough but kind editor who I credit almost exclusively for teaching me to tell a good story. It was a safe and rational career path to start, and I don’t regret that. It was a safe place to try things and fail, to learn how and when to push boundaries. And I developed a lot of great team and leadership skills along the way.
How do you get through that growth period of getting a lot of feedback (both good and bad)?
My understanding of the feedback process has matured so much in the last year alone. There’s constructive feedback, and then there’s just the useless and damaging kind that can sink you for days. If it’s constructive, take it seriously. Be tough, get your ego out of the way, and listen, because it’s going to make you better. But there is such a thing as really unconstructive feedback, and I think the sooner you can recognize which is which, the easier it is psychologically and emotionally.
In a perfect world everybody would understand the basic rules of giving feedback: Start with three compliments, then go into the problem solving. If everybody took that approach, that stage would just be so much more nurturing. Here is where that feminine energy comes. Here’s where we get to be leaders, and remind the men how to get it right.
Women make up a minority of professional photographers and directors. Why? Did you face any obstacles in your early path or as a child because you were a woman and how did you overcome it?
I spent years at these nonprofits observing how disproportionately white and male the conservation movement is. I couldn’t always articulate why or how that bothered me, but it was clear, even in my 20s, how easy it is for a workplace culture to ignore or not take seriously a young woman’s instinct and intuition about what’s out of balance in the big picture — and the radical shifts necessary to make change.
I could only keep hitting that glass ceiling for so long — and having made my first films on-set in Yosemite in 2011, I was HOOKED. I ended up leaving the magazine in 2013. First thing I did was create an independent film series, “National Park Experience,” that amplified stories of non-white residents and visitors forging incredibly powerful connections to the national parks. That series ran for five years and weirdly, I got lumped into the “adventure filmmaker” tribe.. Women are vastly outnumbered there, and while the BIPOC community has grown within it, it just became another white male-dominated space I needed to find a way to break out of. I’m still in the process of doing that.
You know I think there was a point, maybe five or six years ago, where female filmmakers started getting more support. I remember going to the Mountainfilm festival in Telluride, and there was a coffee talk on women in film, and I remember rolling my eyes and thinking, “I don’t want to be a woman filmmaker, I just want to be a really good filmmaker.” But I showed up anyway, and I started to understand the systemic inequality that was so, so normal it’d become invisible to me. I swung way over in the other direction and started making conscious choices to work with and support my sisters in the industry. Because the truth is, we have to work a lot harder to find that support than our male peers. Not to say that these men aren’t also super talented and hardworking. But the systems are rigged in their favor.
For those girls out there who want to become pros: How did you become a professional videographer?
It was so organic. A calling so embedded in me I didn’t even see it at first. When I wrote articles, I’d pick music that matched the tone of the story and made me feel something. I’d do the same editing photos. When I did phone interviews, I’d hear the emotion in someone’s voice and feel so frustrated when that didn’t come across in print. Even though I couldn’t see at the time that I was thinking like a filmmaker, I started falling in love with the filmmaking process.
NPCA was amazing in supporting this transition. When I hit my 7th year, I got to take a six-week paid sabbatical, and decided to go to Yosemite and make a couple short films. I found two young, talented cinematographers to join me, and we made two short films. It was the most incredible process — the hardest thing I’d ever done, but also the most exhilarating and rewarding. I knew at that point that it was just a matter of trying to figure out how to leave print and move into filmmaking full-time.
What is it like to run your own production company and control a project from start to finish?
Ha, I’m not sure you can call this a “production company,” especially when I compare it to legitimately staffed production co.’s some of my colleagues are running. I’m still very small and scrappy, and everyone I hire is a contractor — but we’re still doing very, very big things.
Having control over my projects is really huge and incredibly empowering. I’m producing, pre-producing, directing, shooting, sometimes running my own audio, and then I’m coming home and editing. I have to fundraise and figure out distribution all at the same time. It’s overwhelming sometimes, and that’s okay. I’m still in the process of learning what I can delegate, not only to make my life easier but to make my films better, too. ARA, UNTAMED has been a brilliant manifestation of this. It is the most beautiful and balanced collaboration I’ve ever experienced on a film project. Just because I’m the director doesn’t mean every idea needs to originate from me, or that I can’t let others’ opinions influence my decisions in big ways. This film is absolutely a result of the right ideas coming through the right person at exactly the right moment. I’m so proud of that.
You’re a mom. Many people think that it is impossible to do this career and be a mother mainly because women have different social expectations put on them as mothers. How do you shut out that pressure? How do you do it, and what encouragement can you offer to other women who would like to have both?
I’m generalizing here, but moms are the nurturers. In most families, there’s way more of a demand on moms than dads, especially during the pandemic. But I hate the notion that choosing motherhood is a handicap to a woman’s career. I’m in a special situation though, because I’m divorced, so I have Ara three to four nights a week, and when she isn’t with me, I have that time to recalibrate and catch up on work. So even through divorce, I was able to find support for my career.
I can also get really neurotic about my filmmaking. Any artist can relate to this. But every time my daughter comes home, she grounds me. She’s a total diversion from work that I choose to drop in with as deeply as possible, every time. That’s such a blessing. I can’t imagine doing it any other way. I’m a better filmmaker because of her.
Do you have anything you would like to add for young women who are looking to join this field?
It is so important for women and girls to come together and lift each other up. Emotionally, spiritually. Surrounding myself with more women in my work has been therapeutic. I’ve made leaps and bounds by dropping my walls with my sisters in this space, and I’m so grateful for the women in my life who understand what it takes to be a filmmaker and what I’m trying to do.
But it’s about business, too. It’s learning the system, knowing what you’re up against, and where you have to fight and break through. If you want to be in this space, awesome. Now let’s figure out ways to make sure your art sustains you and the life you want to live. There’s the feel-good emotional pep rally of “you’re enough,” but there are real-world considerations too.
And it can’t just be white women. It’s BIPOC women’s turn. Because trust me — being a white, cisgender woman is a cake walk compared to what our BIPOC sisters go through. I’m multiracial. I’ve blended in enough to benefit from the system, and it’s been a huge wake-up call to realize that, and actively begin to disrupt what’s felt easy and comfortable for so long. It’s time for all of us to be disrupters. As visual storytellers, and as women, we have a tremendous power to do so. Don’t ever forget that.
Edited by: Amy Marquis- amymarquis.com, Margot Moore- margotmoore.net