Before we get to the unique story that found Daniel Stiepleman writing a movie about a close family member who is both a political and judicial icon, let’s cover the most pressing news first. Stiepleman’s aunt, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, fell in her home on Thursday morning breaking three ribs. Stiepleman says “she’s good” and “From what I hear she’s shooing her doctors out of her room so she can get back to work.” So breathe easy. And, honestly, we’d expect no less from the Notorious RBG.
READ MORE: Watch the trailer for “On the Basis of Sex” with Felicity Jones and Armie Hammer
Stiepleman’s first produced screenplay is “On the Basis of Sex,” a biopic which starts with his aunt (Felicity Jones) as one of the few female students at Harvard Law School in the early ’50s. That’s where she met her husband Martin (Armie Hammer), however, and the film follows her career sacrifices until she has the opportunity to represent a sexual discrimination case before the U.S. Court of Appeals. Mimi Leder’s direction is perhaps significantly broader than it needs to be, but the movie pushes the right buttons and Jones performance is quite impressive.
During our interview the day of the film’s world premiere at AFI Fest 2019, Stiepleman went into incredible detail of just how involved Justice Ginsburg was in helping him fashion the script and her reaction to the movie. If you’re a fan of the celebrated Ginsburg you’ll want to read this Q&A just for the insight of how she viewed her own life story. There might even be a few…Ginsburns.
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The Playlist: How did this happen? How did even taking this story sort of even come together for you?
Daniel Stiepleman: I first heard the story in 2010 at my Uncle Martin’s funeral. A friend of his got up and gave a beautiful eulogy in which he mentioned, just briefly, the only case that Ruth and Marty ever argued together. And just for a sense of context, I was pretty newly married. My wife and I had really looked to Ruth and Marty as sort of our role model on how our marriage was supposed to work because they were incredible. They cherished each other, they worked together, they helped each other. They’re obviously both incredibly ambitious and successful. But also they shared the load at home. They both took care of the kids and got food on the table. And they never treated it like that was a burden. It was just part of the joy of living together. That’s how we wanted to be. And so when I heard the story, my first reaction was, “Oh, my goodness. That would be an incredible movie.” And then my second reaction was, “What kind of asshole am I that I’m sitting here at my uncle’s funeral mining his life for material? You can’t do that.” And so I sat on it for over a year and I finally stopped thinking about it. I called Aunt Ruth, must have been August of 2011, and I said, “Listen, I have this idea. I’d like your permission and I would love your help.” And she said, “Well if that’s how you think you’d like to spend your time.” Clearly, it was.
Obviously she could only be involved in so much but how did you know the beats of the story? And how did you decide that this is how she would speak or this is how your uncle would speak so many years ago?
Well, I know them as adults obviously. And so for me, it became, “Wait a minute, they weren’t always fully formed professional successes. How did they become the people who accomplished what they did? How did they go from being my age to being their age, basically?” And so for me it was sort of a deep dive research process. The first thing I did is I went to the Library of Congress, and Aunt Ruth was nice enough to give me access to her files from the 70s. And I started digging through her files and reading her lecture notes and drafts of speeches and drafts of the brief and drafts of other briefs and her letters to and from other lawyers talking about how to tackle this. That was my day. And then by night we would sit and have dinner together and talk about what I found and talk about Uncle Martin and talk about raising kids and how did you find out, how did you do this together and how did you figure it out? How did you kind of build the life that you built together? And then for me, the most challenging one wasn’t Ruth, it was Jane, Ruth’s teenage daughter [portrayed by Cailee Spaeny]. I was talking to my mom and I was like, “I’m just having trouble figuring out how to write Jane.” My mom goes, “Oh, Jane’s easy. Just right Clara.” Clara is Jane’s daughter. And I’m like, “Oh, I know how to do that.” Super smart, very strong-willed. When we had a friends and family screening Clara was there, Jane was there and afterward, Jane said Clara said to Jane, “Is that really what you were like when you were a kid?” And Jane sort of hesitated as she was about to answer and Ruth just goes, “Yes.”
So you write the screenplay. You have a first draft, second draft, etc. At what point did you feel like you needed to get sign off from the family before you really tried to get it made? Was that important to you?
It wasn’t signed off. I mean Ruth understood that I wanted Ruth to see it. Not because I needed her permission but because I know how she has such an attention to detail and she would want it to be right. And so to her credit, there was no ego [in her notes] at all. It was always, “The law isn’t quite right here. You have the equal protection clause but what you really mean is equal protection principle.” Or, “By the way, I didn’t wear high heels to college in those days because I walked to school.” Stuff like that. As we’re reading we’d be coming up on a moment where Ruth says the character kind of stumbled. And I’d be waiting for her to say something about it and she’d say “Okay!” and I’d be like “Wait, wait, are you sure? ‘Cause you kind of stumbled there.” And she’d go like “Oh, yeah it has to be that way. It’s more dramatic.” She wanted the law to be right, she really wanted Uncle Martin to be right. For example, I think this is her great credit, something she said right from the start was “I just don’t want people to think that I created this area of the law as if it had never occurred to anyone else before that men and women should be considered equal in the U.S. Constitution. I built my career on the shoulders of women who came before me, like Dorothy Kenyon [portrayed by Kathy Bates], like Pauli Murray and it’s important to me that anyone who sees this film really walk away understanding that.” I thought that was incredible to her credit.
You wrote the screenplay on spec. How did you find a production company to get it off the ground?
I started writing probably after three months of research. So, it was probably February 2012 [when I had a final draft]. I sent the script to a woman named Karen Luke, who is the executive producer on the film. And Karen had been my supervisor [at] Columbia College in Chicago [when I taught] film production and cinema studies. And she had a reputation of giving really good notes. When she called she didn’t say “I have notes,” she said, “This is going to be a great movie.” And she brought it to Robert Cort, our fantastic and incredibly passionate producer. I went out and met Robert and we hit it off, he clearly loved the script for all the same reasons I did. He believed in the project and what was important about it. And we had the same priority of what the film was really about on a deep level. And together he and I went through a re-writing process and then that was the script, after that re-write, that second draft was the script that ended up on the Black List, but it was, of course, an organic thing, are constantly growing and changing.
What year were you on The Black List?
It was the 2014 Black List. When I found out, I was living in rural Nepal. Someone gave me a heads up saying, “Hey, you should pay attention to the internet tonight.” And so I had to find someplace with the internet, and I’m sitting in this room by myself at two in the morning, watching The Black List upload because they do them one at a time. And then all of a sudden all the power in the entire city went out, and it took me another three days to find out that I made the Black List [Laughs].
What were you doing in Nepal?
My wife is a doctor and we were living on the ground of a public hospital on far western Nepal where she was volunteering, she and I and our son.
Amazing. When did you finally think it was actually happening?
This morning. [Laughs. ] Once Felicity came on, things moved really fast. She was gung-ho and she was like “Let’s go make a movie,” and by that point we had our financing from Participant, Mimi Leader was attached and they all wanted Felicity. We got Felicity on a Friday afternoon and first thing Monday morning it was like “Yep! Let’s go make a movie.” And I think something like thirteen weeks later they were on location.
Did she say yes without even talking to you? It was just like a ‘Yep. I’ll do it’?
She read the script and she loved it. And she had tiny notes, really pinpoint notes that were all very smart. And then in those thirteen weeks, she came to D.C., she met Ruth. I sent her footage from our family’s archive of Marty and Ruth graduating from college and on their honeymoon and things like that which she studied. I guess she also listened to the recording of Ruth during arguments in the 70s in front of the U.S. Supreme Court to get the cadence. And she must have been working really hard because, I gotta tell you, I’ve obviously known Ruth for a long time and Felicity’s portrayal is just uncanny.
I want to ask about that. What was your aunt’s reaction to the finished film?
She loved it. She’s seen it a couple of times now and the last time she gave me a big hug and she said, “I just love it more and more every time I see it.”
That had to be a relief.
Yeah, it’s really wonderful. It was just terrifying to show it to her the first time because what if she didn’t like it and where would I spend Thanksgiving for the rest of my life? [Laughs.]. She praised the performances and she appreciated the attention to detail that went into recreating her office and her apartment and all those things from the 70s. It’s a very small audience of people who are gonna know that the photos around Ruth’s desk are all recreations of the photos that are really around her desk, made with the cast instead of the real people. And then there’s the production designer who got blueprints to an apartment from the building where they actually lived so he could recreate[it]. That attention to detail, that so many people put so much passion and she really appreciated that. What she said she loved most of all was just that the film was joyous. She said, “So often these films [about] feminism and the 70s, they’re despondent or angry. But my experience of it was that we were optimistic because the world was getting better and we were at the forefront of that change.” And she was so pleased that the film had captured that feeling.
Are they going to have a screening for her fellow justices?
We’re doing an event screening in Washington, D.C. in December. I think December 11th. And they are certainly all invited and urged to come. And I hope they all make it.
“On the Basis of Sex” opens on Dec. 25.