Fresh from a year of attending the prestigious Sundance labs and armed with a script that would become her first feature, the director Victoria Mahoney thought her life as a filmmaker was about to begin. It was 2006 and she was attending a party at the Sundance Film Festival for industry professionals to meet the new crop of lab graduates. Agents, producers and others were there to mine new talent for future collaborations.
Mahoney and her pal, the documentary filmmaker Kirsten Johnson, stood in that room and waited to be approached. Crickets. Finally, an agent came over and asked about their involvement in the labs. They responded effusively. But instead of inquiring about their work, he asked if they could introduce him to one of their male colleagues. That agent signed that colleague in the room. Mahoney? Nothing. Not on the mountain. Not after the festival ended.
It would take Mahoney 11 years to land an agent and 20 more to make her first studio film. That movie, “The Old Guard 2,” debuted this week on Netflix.
“We all believe the fables of what happens when you’re at Sundance and you’ve come through the labs; we’ve seen it,” Mahoney said in a recent interview. “We weren’t viable. We weren’t anything. It’s indicative of a thousand things.”
Mahoney’s story is not unfamiliar. So many toil in the film industry and are not rewarded with sustainable careers even when they receive accolades early on. What makes Victoria Mahoney distinct is that there never was a Plan B. She lived without a safety net for a decade, couch surfing at friends’ homes, even experiencing true moments of homelessness — nights when she didn’t know where she would be resting her head. But her belief in herself that she was destined to be a filmmaker? That never ebbed, regardless of her setbacks.
“This is a story about how I take my healthy fury and turn it, like an alchemist, into petrol,” she said. The joyous, fast-talking filmmaker moves at a pace akin to her action sequences. When I met the self-described adrenaline junkie for lunch in West Hollywood, it was easy to understand that she was never going to be anything other than a director, her enthusiasm for her work is that contagious. “I’m going to just do the thing that’s in front of me, and I am going to love every inch of it because I waited too long, I worked too hard, and no one and nothing is stealing my love of the game.”
Mahoney, who grew up on Long Island, was hired to direct the sequel to “The Old Guard” in 2021, replacing Gina Prince-Bythewood, who decided not to return even though the original became one of Netflix’s most popular original films. (Prince-Bythewood was supposed to be a producer on the sequel but took her name off it. She didn’t say why.) Starring Charlize Theron as an immortal warrior tasked with saving humanity, “Old Guard 2” reteams the actress with Chiwetel Ejiofor, KiKi Layne, Matthias Schoenaerts and others and was shot at Italy’s Cinecittà Studios. Yet making movies is never easy and this one was plagued with challenges and delays.
Mahoney had her first location scout in December 2021. She finished the movie only a few months ago. In between the set caught fire; an executive shuffle, when the film’s original champion left Netflix, prompted further delays, including a five-week postproduction shutdown. Then there were the actors and writers strikes, which prevented the director from finishing additional photography.
But now, five years after the original was released, the sequel is landing ahead of the Fourth of July holiday. And on Netflix, which to Mahoney, an avid lover of movie theaters, is the perfect place for her big-budget debut. The film carries a built-in audience, so she doesn’t have to rely on the risky proposition of opening-weekend box office, which can kill a fledgling director’s career.
“If someone like me has a movie that didn’t perform, or underperformed, I’d never work again,” she said. “That’s not true for other people, but I know what I’m up against.”
One of the people Mahoney met at that Sundance screenwriting lab was Christopher McQuarrie, the director of the last four “Mission: Impossible” movies. The two stayed in touch over the years, especially about their shared filmmaking travails.
“This business, which is very hard on everybody, especially hard on women and especially hard on people of color, has done nothing to diminish her spirit,” McQuarrie said. “She is still very much the same Victoria I met then, in terms of her spirit, her gumption and her will.”
He has been particularly impressed with how she stayed positive during the extended difficulties on “Old Guard 2.” Mahoney chalks them up to the regular challenges of a big-budget film but McQuarrie said they would have cowed him on “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” had he been forced to meet them without a producing partner there to protect him.
“As big as the movie that I was directing was, and as huge and sometimes insurmountable as the problems were, I had a partner in Tom Cruise, who can create a lot of cover for me ,” he said. “I was hearing Victoria’s stories, and there were times when she was absolutely alone, and I don’t know how she didn’t throw up her hands and quit. I would have quit many times over.”
But Mahoney has a level of resilience many others don’t. She recalls a time in New York City back in 2009 when she was casting her first film, “Yelling to the Sky.” It was late, wintertime, she didn’t have a home. Instead, she would go to the Bowery Hotel and sit in the lobby through the night working on her laptop; then at sunrise, she’d go to different friends’ apartments to sleep, shower and work.
One night, she was on the corner, unsure where she would be that night, yet she was happy. Anybody who passed by “would have seen me sitting there with my bag in the middle of the night, like 1:15 a.m., with a smile from ear to ear,” she recalled. She had just learned that the “Precious” actress Gabourey Sidibe had said yes to playing a part in her movie.
“I’m the only earner in my life,” she said. Mahoney is one of six children, born to two artists, a black mother and a white father who were together at a time when interracial marriage was still illegal. “There’s nothing’s coming from an aunt or grandmother at any point in time. Whatever I earn, that’s whatever I have.”
When Sundance didn’t prove to be the launchpad she expected, she returned to Los Angeles, waitressed, worked in a bookstore, hawked watches, all the while pouring any extra money into making short films.
She benefited from Ava DuVernay’s unique mandate for the series “Queen Sugar”: the writer-director vowed to hire only women to film each episode, particularly those new to television. Mahoney was one of them. From there, she created a steady career directing different genres of television for different studios: the crime drama “I Am the Night” for TNT (2019), “Lovecraft Country” for HBO (2020), “The Morning Show” for Apple TV+ (2021), to name a few.
“I did that on purpose so no one could ever say, ‘She can’t do sci-fi, she can’t do comedy,’” Mahoney said.
DuVernay’s patronage continued when J.J. Abrams asked for help finding a second-unit director for “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.” She only gave him one name: Mahoney. That decision not only earned Mahoney the honor of being called the first woman to direct a “Star Wars” movie, it also opened her eyes to the world of big-budget filmmaking. Abrams and the Lucasfilm chief, Kathleen Kennedy, let Mahoney spend a year in Britain assisting with preproduction and absorbing all she could. From then on, she would forever think of her life as pre-“Star Wars” and post-“Star Wars.”
Abrams, for one, is eager to see what Mahoney does next. “I hope that she can take her specific life experience and translate that into something for the screen,” he said. “Vic is a wildly unique mind and soul. She’s a dreamer, a believer, someone who is a student of the craft, but also very much sees things outside the margins.” That’s why, he said, he was excited to see something “distinctly her own. That’s when I think she will shine the brightest.”
Mahoney intends to follow “Old Guard” with a romantic comedy set in the world of NASCAR for Amazon. There are a couple of others percolating. She does seem to be in a hurry and will no longer attach herself to projects that seem years away from becoming a reality. Through it all, her optimism continues unabated.
“I don’t know how anyone goes from Point A to Point B to Point Zed in any endeavor, without absolute, certain, unwavering belief this is happening,” she said. “For me, I didn’t have a bedroom to go home to. I had nowhere. There was no return. It was advantageous that I could only go forward.”
Nicole Sperling covers Hollywood and the streaming industry. She has been a reporter for more than two decades.
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