Hollywood Stopped Making Movies About Women. Susanna Fogel Flipped the Script

The writer and director behind ‘Ponies’ tells me why the spy genre is the next best thing

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Susanna Fogel has navigated Hollywood in more interesting ways than I can count. Born in Rhode Island (both her parents were on faculty at Brown University), Fogel has been one of the comedy world’s go-to writers and directors for years, ever since her breakthrough 2014 indie feature Life Partner (based on a one-act play she wrote with Joni Lefkowitz).

She’s flourished since then — especially in the spy genre — with credits that include Booksmart (as one of the credited co-writers) and The Spy Who Dumped Me (which she also directed), and television shows such as The Flight Attendant and the new acclaimed Peacock spy series Ponies. (She’s also a novelist and playwright, not bad.)

“When I first started writing and wanting to direct, it was a world where Bridget Jones was a big theatrical movie, and The Proposal was a big hit,” says Fogel, who first worked as a researcher for James Schamus in 2002 as he was writing the screenplay for Hulk (and she was preparing for her final year at Columbia University in New York).

But as those movies — comedies pitched at women — have since retreated from theatrical, Fogel pivoted to using the spy genre to tell the stories she wanted on a bigger canvas.

“I love those movies, and I think if I were able to tell women’s stories in a theatrical way, and if that market still existed, I don’t know that I would have pivoted is the truth,” she says. “But it became this thing where suddenly movies about women were tiny indie movies that were very low-budget and siloed…. What I found [is that] spy stories are about identity and relationships and how much intimacy you have with people and what’s real and what’s emotional versus trying not to have emotions about things.”

Set in 1977, Ponies, now streaming on Peacock, stars Emilia Clarke and Haley Lu Richardson as secretaries at the American Embassy in Moscow who become nascent CIA operatives after their husbands are killed under mysterious circumstances. The Cold War thriller, which Fogel co-created with her frequent collaborator, David Iserson (Mr. Robot), takes its name from the derogatory intelligence acronym “PONI,” or “Person of No Interest.” Female directors might feel the term applies to them as well, as I’ve covered here before.

As Fogel tells me in this week’s Rushfield Lunch, the idea of fixing the severe gender imbalance between male and female directors — and the stories they’re able to tell — often feels like an abstract goal.

“Do I think that getting the men of the globe to watch movies about women is a thing that we can necessarily achieve? Will I live to see it? Probably not,” she says. “But maybe if more women can get more opportunities to make stories… Men direct movies about women all the time. They’ve directed wonderful ones. I don’t think that they can’t do that or shouldn’t do that. But I think we should also be able to tell their stories sometimes, too.”

We touch on all of that during our sprawling conversation, including the unexpected resonance of Ponies, her path through this ever-changing industry and what she sees about the state of things at this moment.