Awards Daily’s Megan McLachlan speaks with Academy Award-winning director Freida Lee Mock (Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision) about her most recent documentary project on the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
In recent years, Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been covered a lot in film and television, including the Academy Award-nominated doc RBG (2018) and Mimi Leder’s On the Basis of Sex (2018) starring Felicity Jones. But when documentarian Freida Lee Mock first started her own Ruth project, RUTH: Justice Ginsburg In Her Own Words (airing on STARZ March 1), it was right after Trump’s inauguration in 2017.
“I realized it was time to get the story out sooner than later,” said Mock. “What she stood for, what she did, was something I felt we needed now. Little did we know it would become more important than ever.”
Unlike the other projects, this one relies mostly on Ginsburg’s work in her field, what led her to rise before she became the adorable mug on T-shirts and Tumblr accounts.
“I felt that very much like the other films I’d done, like Maya Lin [for which Mock won the Academy Award] and Anita [about Anita Hill], there’s some defining moment in their public lives, their work. Otherwise, you’re simply a lawyer. In her case, I knew what she had done in the ’70s, as not a judge, but as a litigator and an advocate, overturning hundreds of laws. That was important to understand, that body of work.”
How does a person get to the Supreme Court when she has three strikes against her? That question became the driving force behind Mock’s depiction of Ginsburg’s journey.
Shades of Ruth
One of the visual techniques that Mock uses throughout the film is graphic novel-like illustrations of Ginsburg in court in these landmark cases, something that leaps off the screen with colors that chart Ruth’s career.
“Unconsciously maybe, when you’re red, you’re hot,” laughed Mock, referring to the shades of red used to depict Ginsburg in the early stages of her profession. “Then later on it gets blue and cooler. We didn’t articulate it, but it shows that 2010 onward was a time of dissenting, she was no longer in the majority.”
Mock utilized the talents of an animation team that included animation director Jason Carpenter, whose work she was drawn to after seeing He Named Me Malala (2015). The animation would become really important to the direction of the film, because Mock had to ask herself how to make complex legal issues reach a broad audience, specifically younger groups like high school and junior high school students that they showed the film to in early screenings. But surprisingly, another group was won over by the graphics.
“In the screenings, three out of five attorneys will come up to me to point out the animation,” said Mock. “They love that animation when talking about law cases. When arguing a case before a jury, they wish they had an animator there.”
Not Your Typical Talking Heads
In a lot of documentaries, the people who are interviewed about a figure or topic are studied scholars in specific areas, whether they are biographers or legal experts. With this film, Mock did something a little bit different.
“There are no experts, so to speak,” said Mock, regarding the talking heads. “They all had a relationship with her.
The people Mock interviewed include clerks, friends from her ACLU days, plaintiffs like Lilly Ledbetter, and those affected by her work like Delegate Jennifer Carroll Foy, who gained the opportunity to go to the Virginia Military Institute because of Ginsburg’s ruling that struck down the all-male admissions policy.
“Part of the research for this story was to do visual research. Once you decide from an intellectual level what the film will be, then you decide, visually how am I going to tell that story? I knew that she must have a lot of footage taken of her, so we started looking for earlier footage to see what is there and to shape those ideas visually. There are hundreds and hundreds of hours, and out of those hundreds of hours, I found certain people.”
A Bittersweet Epilogue
Throughout the film, Ginsburg is shown talking to different groups of students. One student at the end of the film asks her if we’ll ever see a female President.
When Mock finished the film in 2019, Ginsburg was still very much with us. But unfortunately, the release of this film comes after she passed away in the fall of 2020, with the director adding an in memoriam at the end and a special dedication of the film, related to Ginsburg’s influence on young people.
“We dedicated the film to the Parkland students. I was personally inspired by who they are and what they had been doing. It somehow speaks to the hope Justice Ginsburg felt with the next generation.”
In many ways, Ginsburg was her own kind of quiet activist, coming along in the ’70s with the Women’s Rights Movement and using the opportunity to do her own kind of marching that continues to influence generations.
“She used her law and her mind as her activism.”
RUTH: Justice Ginsburg In Her Own Words is out now in virtual cinemas and airs on STARZ at 9 p.m. ET/PT on March 1.
