Uta Briesewitz delivered a Munich International Film Festival Masterclass on her new movie American Sweatshop and also shared tales of her time on The Wire and the resistance she met as a woman coming up in Hollywood.
Briesewitz was joined by Anita Elsani, who produced American Sweatshop, and she brought the film’s DOP Jörg Widmer onto the stage during the session, which was organized by the Kirch Foundation and hosted by Deadline.
American Sweatshop stars Lili Reinhart as Daisy, a young woman whose job is to evaluate harmful and offensive content on social media. She is desensitized, but one violent video shakes up her world. The movie bowed at SXSW and had its European premiere at Munich.
“It’s a film that has a very clear attitude and it is just take it or leave it,” Elsani said. “All of us can surf on the internet because there are people behind the scenes who clean it for us so we don’t stumble upon disturbing images. I think [the film] really it catches you, it gets into you.”
Germany double for the U.S. in the film, which is shot in Cologne and set in Florida. Cinematographer turned director Briesewitz is German but built her career in Hollywood. She was asked what it was like coming off the mega-bucks U.S. TV series she has been working on to direct a modestly-budgeted European indie movie.
“It’s a different machine,” she said. “In these bigger budgets, what they pay for is time so you can shoot it and you can shoot it safely, but, [whether] it’s Severance or American Sweatshop, two people talking in a room is still just two cameras and the lighting. The difference is, when you step outside of that small room on the big budget show everything is bigger. I appreciate it on a smaller movie when you can say: ‘Let’s improvise a little bit here…. let’s just do this quickly so you can stay in the moment and use the momentum of the story.”
Briesewitz went to film school in the U.S. and trained as a cinematographer and her early work included Brad Anderson’s Sundance movie Next Stop Wonderland and David Simon’s seminal HBO series The Wire.
She spoke warmly of her time on the Baltimore-set series, but said it was a steep learning curve. “Sometimes I would have the camera on my shoulders for 14 hours straight, I still have an indent on my right shoulder,” she said. “My right shoulder is lower.” Long days on the HBO series were routine, she explained to a packed room for the Masterclass. “A normal workday on The Wire was 14 hours, because Baltimore, where we shot, had a different contract, but usually it was 16, sometimes 18 hours. I even worked a 20 hour day.”
The long hours paid off. Briesewitz, ultimately moved into directing, working on many of the biggest U.S. series of recent years. The success did not come easy, she explained. There were lean years and a brutal early rebuff from an unnamed Hollywood agency that asked her in after Next Stop Wonderland had gained attention.
“I think they were not familiar with the name Uta, that it’s a woman’s name, and I think they must have thought I was a guy, so that the atmosphere was very awkward from the beginning,” she remembered. “There was silence in the room, so I just perked up and said: ‘So, what’s next?’ And she just said: ‘Well, you know, we just wanted you to know that nobody wants to work with a female DP.’”
Rather than crush her ambition, it hardened her resolve. “I always said to myself, just keep working and that the work will speak for itself. That was always my motto for over a decade.”
It panned out, Briesewitz’s recent credits include the aforementioned American Sweatshop as well as episodes of series including: The Wheel of Time; Severance; Black Mirror; Stranger Things; Westworld; and Altered Carbon.
The post Uta Briesewitz Talks ‘American Sweatshop’, Early Days On ‘The Wire’ & The Hollywood Agent Who Told Her: “No-One Wants To Work With A Female DP” appeared first on Deadline.
