In 1993, after taking a summer off to attend film school at NYU, Daryl Hannah wrote, directed, and produced the short film The Last Supper, which won a Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival. But it took until now for her to make her full-length feature directorial debut: Paradox, a low-fi, sci-fi western musical starring her boyfriend, Neil Young; Promise of the Real; and Willie Nelson, which premiered Thursday night South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.
“I can’t even tell you how many years I told my manager I wanted [direct],” Hannah tells Yahoo Entertainment. “I have been working on actual, real scripts and stuff for years, and have things that I’ve developed over the years that I wanted to make as narrative features, and I never even could get a meeting. I even had production deals, but they were always kind of like vanity production deals, ultimately.”
Hannah, who has spoken before about being sexually harassed by Harvey Weinstein (including one disturbing encounter when he burst into her hotel room), pauses when asked about her struggles in Hollywood. “There’s so many stories, but I actually never got a meeting on a movie after Kill Bill, not one — not an offer, not a meeting, not an anything. The next thing I got was Sense8, and that was accidental. They called me for a phone number for somebody else, and they were like, ‘Why don’t you come in?’ I have no idea why. [Kill Bill] was a big, successful movie, but I never got even a meeting, nothing. I think it was … maybe tied slightly to the Harvey thing, because that was part of it. He was telling people I was ‘difficult,’ because I kicked him out of my room!”
Interestingly, in Paradox, Hannah envisions a utopian future “when the womenfolk had rightfully just about given up” on men, in which a band of male outlaw prospectors — led by Young’s grizzled character, “the Man in the Black Hat” — work for a tribe of frontierswomen. “Every once in a while, I think probably almost every woman has fantasized about just living in a commune or something with their girlfriends and making art and raising babies and growing food, and just letting the guys come visit once in a while,” Hannah chuckles. “[Paradox] was just sort of a little exploration of that fantasy, that in the future women have just said, ‘You know what? We’re done with the mining, the plundering, the pillaging, the fighting. We’re just going to go over here. We’ll take care of the land. We’ll take care of the kids. You guys try to stay alive. We’ll come and visit you once in a while.’ The women [in the film] still have a good feeling about the men, though — it’s not like they’ve written them off completely!”
(Excerpt) Read More in: Yahoo Entertainment