Elizabeth Banks made box office history with “Pitch Perfect 2,” and now she’s prepping another high-profile women-centric story. The multi-hyphenate is co-writing, co-starring, exec producing, and directing “Charlie’s Angels,” set to bow November 15. The “Hunger Games” star spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about why she was drawn to the franchise and misconceptions about how she “got” the gig.
“As a filmmaker I wanted to tell a story about women working together and expand upon the idea of sisterhood and sorority that was meaningful to me when I was making ‘Pitch Perfect,'” the three-time Emmy nominee told THR. “I’m not old enough to have watched the first run of the television show, but my two sisters and I did watch reruns. The three of us getting to pretend we were Charlie’s Angels was so inspirational,” she emphasized. “It’s a show about women doing a job that very few women had ever done before, which was detective work, whether on television or in real life. They were running around with guns, they were going undercover, they were getting to do something different every day and fighting bad guys. I mean, don’t we all want to do that?”
When asked what studios can do better to increase the number of female directors, Banks said, “We have to have leadership who trust women to do the job. People ask me how I ‘got’ ‘Charlie’s Angels’; I didn’t ‘get’ ‘Charlie’s Angels,'” she explained. “No filmmakers were trying to do anything with it, probably because most filmmakers are men. I wanted to make a movie about women working together, and if I can do it with the property that Hollywood already knows and loves, that’s going to be a faster green light than me coming up with some random story about girls working together. It totally aligned with what I wanted to do as a filmmaker.”
“Pitch Perfect 2” debuted to $69.2 million, marking the biggest domestic opening for a first-time feature director at that time.
Banks has received Emmy nods for her guest spots on “30 Rock” and “Modern Family.” “Brightburn,” “The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part,” and “The Happytime Murders” are among her recent acting credits. She’ll co-star alongside Cate Blanchett in “Mrs. America,” an upcoming limited series from FX about conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, best known for her opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment.
