Magdalena Zyzak’s first feature film was “Redland,” a wilderness drama which was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. In 2013, she produced a second feature film directed by Asiel Norton, “Orion,” a post-apocalyptic fable shot in the ruins of Detroit starring David Arquette, Lily Cole, and Goran Kostic.

“A Critically Endangered Species” will premiere at the 2017 SXSW Film Festival on March 12. The film is co-directed by Zachary Cotler.

W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.

MZ: A famous female writer announces on public radio she’s going to kill herself. As she’s childless, she seeks an heir and an executor. Young men drive up to her isolated property to compete for the position, becoming unwitting victims of her moods and manipulations.

W&H: What drew you to this story?

MZ: I wanted to make a film about a writer who, in the vein of Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag, and Oscar Wilde, has spent her life authoring not only books but a complex, literary selfhood — a persona. When you’re a writer, you start to think of yourself as a character.

Creating Maya meant entering a mise-en-abyme: I, a writer (along with my co-director, also a writer), conceived Maya, who is a writer, writing herself.

Maya’s impending suicide, whether a fact or a fib, provides her with a dramatic tool to display her self-creation in all its problematic glory. Her own impending extinction gives her freedom she couldn’t afford before. She is fickle, moody, and sometimes impossible.

I’m interested in misbehavior by intelligent, self-aware women, who transcend the few remaining social boundaries for the sake of biographical living.

W&H: What do you want people to think about when they are leaving the theater?

MZ: I want them to have had a complex experience. Perhaps they can either admire or despise Maya, or both. I’m interested in evoking ambivalent, strong emotions in my audience, in offering a sliver of intensified life.

W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?

MZ: Time. Both in life and film, I find time to be a notoriously lacking resource.

W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made.

MZ: It’s an independently funded film by some private people who thought it was a good idea.

W&H: What does it mean for you to have your film play at SXSW?

MZ: It’s a film about writers in America today and the precarious state of American literary culture. It seems appropriate to be premiering it at a quintessential American festival, not to mention a place that provides a platform for expansion in new fields and technologies.

W&H: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received?

MZ: I don’t take advice very well. I’m sure I’ve both suffered and benefited from my recalcitrance.

W&H: What advice do you have for other female directors?

MZ: To be careful with advice people give them. Also, to carefully assemble a committed group of people who understand their vision and to continue working with them.

Being a director is in a way like being a curator. Directors should learn to recognize other people’s talents and incorporate them in their films.

W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.

MZ: I appear to be lately liking some French directors others aren’t liking half enough. Recently, I’ve seen two excellent films: “Mon Roi” by Maïwenn and “Confession of a Child of the Century” by Sylvie Verheyde. From what I’ve read, they were both equally despised by critics.

“Mon Roi” presents an unusual, bold portrait of a male/female relationship.

“Confession” does what so many period pieces lack: gives you a feeling of genuine strangeness. I think more historical films should go in that direction.

In the absence of real knowledge about the past, we should avoid saccharine generalizations and clichés, often informed by nothing else but other period pieces. The best we can do when making historical films is to arrive at bizarre textures, unknown behaviors. I loved how “Confession” is full of dark, negative spaces, and the characters appear unwashed and feverish with ideas. The past was a dimly-lit, unhygienic place, unknowable to a contemporary viewer.

W&H: There have been significant conversations over the last couple of years about increasing the amount of opportunities for women directors yet the numbers have not increased. Are you optimistic about the possibilities for change? Share any thoughts you might have on this topic.

MZ: I have reservations about a lot of methods employed to give women more power. I don’t want to be invited to the party because I’m a woman, but because I, I suppose, I can make a decent film with multi-dimensional characters. I don’t want to be given anything, I guess, especially not by virtue of being a woman, first of all because it’s not a virtue but a fluke, and second of all because it feels infantilizing to be given something due to one’s sex.

I’d like to see more good films made by women and men. I’m equally uninterested in bad films by men and women alike. It’s subtly and counter-intuitively dis-empowering to be celebrated for being a female artist. That said, there are so many good and bad films about men: I’d like to see more films about multi-dimensional women, simply because they’ll have a higher chance to break new ground.