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Julie Cohen

Julie Cohen
Julie Cohen is an Oscar nominated and Emmy award winning director. Julie is best known for co-directing RBG, a film about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

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‎Media Tribe: Julie Cohen | A New York smoked fish shop, the Notorious RBG and refusing to buy a guitar for a jailbird on Apple Podcasts
Julie Cohen is an Oscar nominated and Emmy award-winning director. Julie is best known for a feature film she co-directed with Betsy West called RBG about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg which premiered at Sundance in 2018 and had an all-female crew. Julie also directed ‘The Sturgeon Queens’, a feature…
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Media Tribe - Julie Cohen | A New York smoked fish shop, the Notorious RBG and refusing to buy a guitar for a jailbird
Julie Cohen is an Oscar nominated and Emmy award-winning director. Julie is best known for a feature film she co-directed with Betsy West called RBG about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg which premiered at Sundance in 2018 and had an all-female crew. Julie also directed ‘The Sturgeon Queens’, a feature …
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Shaunagh talks to Julie Cohen

Julie Cohen is an Oscar nominated and Emmy award winning director. Julie is best known for a feature film she co-directed with Betsy West called RBG about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg which premiered at Sundance in 2018 and had an all female crew.

Julie also directed 'The Sturgeon Queens', a feature film about a famous smoked fish shop called 'Russ & Daughters' in New York. Prior to this Julie was a producer at NBC Dateline.

For more on Julie

Follow Julie on Twitter and watch the trailer for RBG here.

Episode credits

Hosted and produced by Shaunagh Connaire and edited by Ryan Ferguson.

Shaunagh Connaire:

This week’s guest is Oscar nominated and Emmy award winning director Julie Cohen. Julie is best known for a feature film she co-directed with Betsy West called RBG about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg which premiered at Sundance in 2018 and had an all female crew.

Shaunagh Connaire:

Julie, thank you so much for coming on Media Tribe.

Julie Cohen:

Thank you. I'm glad to be here.

Shaunagh Connaire:

Where are you at the moment, Julie?

Julie Cohen:

I'm in Brooklyn, New York in New York City.

Shaunagh Connaire:

Very good. Well, Julie, as you know, our audience will be very, very keen to learn how you came to be multi Emmy winning, Oscar nominated director in your field. Can you take us through that journey?

Julie Cohen:

Absolutely. I came to documentary filmmaking by being a journalist. I went to graduate school in journalism a long, long time ago, about 30 years ago. Coming out of that, I worked in a number of areas of journalism from newspapers, radio, and television. I ultimately settled on TV because I thought that was just the most fun and enjoyable. I worked in television news as a producer-writer, off-air correspondent. When I was in radio, I was actually on the air, but in television, I was a behind-the-scenes person for a number of years in TV.

Julie Cohen:

I guess when you add it all up, it was about 15 years I'd say both at something called Court Television, Court TV, which no longer exists but was quite a popular way to watch trials and legal coverage in the nineties and aughts. Then for NBC news, where I was a producer writer for Dateline NBC, where I was a producer and writer of that extremely popular for many years, still on the air today, primetime show that focuses on some hard news and breaking news stories, but really the bread and butter of Dateline NBC is true crime stories. I produced and wrote many of them and long form. So mostly hour and two hour long stories about fascinating criminal cases with a focus on murder.

Julie Cohen:

After having done that for a number of years, I really enjoyed that job. I thought it was an engaging and interesting and challenging job putting together murder stories, and that was really where I feel like I gathered the storytelling skills necessary for making documentaries because the stories that I worked on for that program were long form. They were an hour long or two hours long. But at a certain point, focusing on murder kind of can be a downer, and I was quite eager to take the skills that I had developed and put them into kind of telling more of the stories that I wanted to tell.

Julie Cohen:

That's what led me to leave the network in 2007 to start making documentaries. I've made a whole bunch of them mostly for television for many years and then moving on. At a certain point, some of the films that I was making for public television, I started submitting to film festivals as festivals were becoming sort of more a popular thing to do. Starting between 10 years ago or so it became an important sort of mark that your documentaries were worth watching to have them go to festivals. So I started submitting things to festivals, and I started doing some documentaries that I gave a try in 2013, working on it 2012 and 2013 to do a film that actually wasn't a pre funded for PBS because I thought it had some commercial potential. It was a story about a four generations of a Jewish family that run a smoked fish store in New York on the lower east side.

Shaunagh Connaire:

I know it well. Russ and Daughters?

Julie Cohen:

Yes, Russ and Daughters [crosstalk 00:03:25] . And the film is called The Sturgeon Queens. I felt rather than getting distribution on the front end and having someone who was going to be sitting over my shoulder saying ultimately what they wanted, I just wanted to do it completely independently and then take it out there into the market. I just had a sense that I would be able to recoup the money that I spent on it. That's pretty much exactly what happened. It's not like it's something that I made a fortune on. I didn't, but I was able to pay myself back for the money that my production company had spent to make the film. I really enjoyed that whole experience and did have that in a number of festivals.

Shaunagh Connaire:

I'm going to jump in because, Julie, I believe that particular film, The Sturgeon Queens, everybody should go and check it out. That was in 60 film festivals all in all. I mean that's [inaudible 00:04:15] .

Julie Cohen:

It was, and it actually, also, even though it wasn't quite a full-length film, it was about a 53 minutes. It was set to make a public television film hour, and, in fact, it did air on public television in the US. But actually a number of theatrical venues got in touch with me saying that they wanted to run it in their theaters. In some case, they were able to find similar themed short that they would run it with. It actually had week-long theatrical runs in a number of theatres, both in the US and Canada, which I hadn't really even thought of as a possibility.

Shaunagh Connaire:

With The Sturgeon Queens, it's actually a question I really was keen to ask you. As you say, it's about a smoked fish shop called Russ and Daughters, which has been around for years and years and years. It struck me that there is a kind of feminist slant in this film as well because back then, nobody was calling their shop Russ and Daughters. It was absolutely and sons. What does draw you towards making films where there is that message in it?

Julie Cohen:

What draws me to films is not about the message, and it's not about the issue. It's really all about the characters. In the case of The Sturgeon Queens, the central characters and the stars of that film are two amazing sisters who, at the time that the film came out, were like 101 years old and 94 years old. They have since passed away. These two really incredible sisters who were the daughters of Russ and Daughters, they had worked in their father's smoked fish shop going back to around the late 1920s. They were just these like [inaudible 00:06:00] incredible ladies. I actually had interviewed them initially for ... I was commissioned by public television to create a hour-long show called the Jews of New York, and they just sort of ... the executives there just said you can do whatever you want. We just need an hour on the Jews of New York. Do it very quickly. We had, I think, about eight weeks to do it. One of the stories I told was about the daughters of Russ and Daughters.

Shaunagh Connaire:

That's extraordinary. I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, Julie, that one of Russ and Daughters chief customers is a very, very, very, very famous lady who you went on to make a film about you as well, Justice Ginsburg. Is that true?

Julie Cohen:

In a sense, yes. As you note, I did interview RBG as she's known in the States for The Sturgeon Queens because she is a customer of the fish store. I had asked the fish store purveyors to give me a list. Because it's such a well-known store, they've got a lot of interesting, famous customers. They had given me a list, and I reached out to Justice Ginsburg and was actually quite shocked to receive a letter back from her saying that she would be willing to give me a brief interview about her love of smoked fish.

Julie Cohen:

I interviewed her in the summer of 2013 for that project. That was just before she really, as the phrase goes, blew up on the internet as sort of like very unlikely rockstar, and she's an extraordinary person. I was aware of everything that she had done in the 1970s, particularly as a lawyer, to push forward women's equal rights under the Constitution and a series of cases that she took to the Supreme Court representing plaintiffs long before she was a justice. In late 2013 and 2014, she was becoming quite famous in America for a series of stinging dissents that she wrote. When the Supreme Court issues an opinion, justices who aren't in the majority, but disagree with the opinion, can issue their own non-controlling opinion which is a dissenting opinion. She wrote some dissents that were pretty strongly saying like, look, the court is legally and in all ways, going in the wrong direction on this case, and those dissents were really clung to, I would say, by a lot of people in America who didn't like the conservative direction that the court was going in.

Julie Cohen:

So she's becoming a superstar. She has this amazing backstory, which was not at the time, very well known even among her fans. I had interviewed her for The Sturgeon Queens. A friend of mine, also in the documentary world, Betsy West, had also interviewed her for a global project about the history of the women's rights movement called the Makers Project. In light of all of the interest, all of the surprising growing interest in this diminutive, quiet intellectual, 80 something, Jewish grandmother, we knew her whole incredible backstory that a lot of her fans weren't familiar with. I just said to my friends someone really ought to make a documentary about RBG. Why shouldn't it be us?

Shaunagh Connaire:

Betsy West is your co-director on what is now a cultural phenomenon, I would say, about, as you say, this kind of steely and determined little woman, and for anybody outside of America who doesn't know her, she's a crusader against gender discrimination, but she's also become this pop culture icon. On paper, when I say that, she sounds extraordinary, but as you mentioned, Julie, she is actually, or seems to be, quite a shy and reserved woman. Did you ever have any concerns that your main protagonist had this type of personality?

Julie Cohen:

Yes, that was certainly a major concern is how are you going to build an energetic, watchable film around a woman who is reticent, introverted, can be quite quiet, speaks slowly and thoughtfully and deliberately? This is not a fire brand. This is not like the rabble-rousing character that you think of as being the star of a documentary.

Julie Cohen:

Yet because Betsy and I had each interviewed her, we actually knew how much magnetism she had. We knew that even though she's quiet and that she leaves you waiting for her answer, that there's something very charismatic about her and that when she pauses before answering a question, everybody sort of leans in wanting to know. I mean, I've now been in a number of situations where there's people sitting around the table talking to her at a dinner or something, and when someone is talking to Justice Ginsburg, everyone else is quiet. You just want to know what she has to say.

Julie Cohen:

We knew it was going to be challenging, but we thought often the things that seem like the biggest potential problems and challenges are actually what's going to make your movie special.

Shaunagh Connaire:

Well said. Julie, you've had an illustrious career, to say the least, is there a moment that you could pinpoint and say you're very proud of that, what you've achieved in that moment?

Julie Cohen:

Each film, when you finish an interview that feels like it's really meaningful, and you know you've gotten somebody to really open up and tell their story to. I guess it's the moments of openness in the case of The Sturgeon Queens. Those two amazing elderly sisters, I asked them to sing a song for me, and they sang just a beautiful, beautiful rendition of Sunrise, Sunset from the musical Fiddler on the Roof. I did not know when I asked them to sing that, that they were going to be beautiful singers, but they were. They couldn't quite remember the words, but it was so moving. I cried listening to them sing. I knew oh, this is the end of the film.

Julie Cohen:

That's a moment where you just feel ... It's mostly, I would say, in a situation where you're filming something and you feel like it's really beautiful and you can't wait to share it with the world and the audiences of the film. In the case of RBG, I would say it was the moment of capturing her exercising, which was just like such a delightful and also kind of moving thing to see.

Shaunagh Connaire:

Wasn't it really?

Julie Cohen:

Yeah.

Shaunagh Connaire:

Again, for anybody who hasn't watched it, we see Justice Ginsburg was 84 at the time?

Julie Cohen:

Yeah.

Shaunagh Connaire:

[crosstalk 00:12:27] doing proper press ups, not girl press ups.

Julie Cohen:

Right.

Shaunagh Connaire:

Wearing a jumper saying "super diva".

Julie Cohen:

Right.

Shaunagh Connaire:

I mean, it was iconic.

Julie Cohen:

Right. It was both cute and entertaining but also very telling about her character because the amount of determination she pours into getting the exercises right is kind of indicative of everything she's done in her whole life, in her career in her fighting for her own career achievements, which was quite a battle for a woman in her generation, but also for the fighting for the rights of everyone else. I mean, she just throws her whole little, not going to say a weight, but there aren't that many pounds. I'm quite sure it's under a hundred. She throws all of that weight into doing the absolute best and most she can at any moment. And it's moving to see.

Shaunagh Connaire:

I want to talk about access because any documentary makers listening to this knows that access is so key. Talk to me about getting access to Justice Ginsburg because you didn't have it immediately.

Julie Cohen:

Yes. It was a long involved process, but truthfully, getting access to the characters in a documentary is almost always a long process. I think there's a misunderstanding among people that haven't made a film before that the way you're going to get access to someone and the way you're going to, not only get an interview with them, but get verite footage that you need to be, in our cases, to be going with her to the opera, to watching operas, to going with her to an opera she performed at, to going to her home, to spending time with her and her grandchild, and the ultimate for us was going into the gym to film her workout routine. It's not like you just come out to someone and ask them all these things and then they say yes or no. I've never had that experience, and I've made a lot of documentaries.

Julie Cohen:

Usually what people say is some form of maybe, and your job, at that point, becomes, how are we going to move this in the direction of happening? The answer to that usually isn't just by persuasion. This isn't really a debate. You have to sort of show them something. I think when we first approached Justice Ginsburg, which was a letter that we wrote to her, we were able to get her to read our letter because, as I said, we had each interviewed her before. So at least the people in her office knew who we were. We had a feeling she would get the letter. In fact, she answered quite quickly, and her answer essentially said not yet. She just didn't feel like it was the time yet to be making a documentary about herself where she was 82 at the time. To us it seemed like it would be a perfectly good time, but rather than just, we're not going to push back and argue with her. We also noted that she didn't say no. She just said not yet.

Shaunagh Connaire:

Am I correct in thinking, Julie, you guys wrote to her in 2015 sometime, and she wrote back to say, "I'll do an interview in the summer of 2017"?

Julie Cohen:

Our first letter to her, all she said was sort of not yet. It's just not time. We then spent a couple months doing a whole bunch of research, and we circled back to her with another letter saying we understand you're not ready to be interviewed yet, but we're wondering if we could have an okay from you to start interviewing some other people because it takes a long time to make a documentary, and even if you're not ready, we'd love to start doing some work. At that point she said to us, "Well, I wouldn't be ready to be interviewed by you for at least another two years, but if you still want to proceed ... " We had given her a list of people we were planning to talk to, and she mentioned to people that weren't on our list that we could talk to.

Julie Cohen:

We realized we were taking a chance at that point. When someone says they're going to do something in two years, that's kind of a long way away, but we decided that the way to make this happen, if it was going to happen, was just to move forward with it. In fact, at some point in production, because she gradually let us start filming more stuff with her, although she wasn't sitting down with interview yet. It became clear at a certain point that she was cooperating with the project, even if she wasn't doing the interview.

Julie Cohen:

At a certain point, about a year after that, we asked if we could maybe set the interview for two or three months later because we know we're getting ... She wrote back like what are you talking about? I said I wasn't going to talk to you til the summer of 2017. This was like in maybe the ... This was around September of 2016. We were like okay, nevermind.

Julie Cohen:

In fact we did, finally, the sit down interview was basically two years to the day.

Shaunagh Connaire:

She's a lady of her word. Julie, how was it then getting funding for such a big project when your key character has told you it's a "maybe" in two years?

Julie Cohen:

Yes, it was hard. That's why the way we did it was in stages. We didn't go out asking a funder like fund our full documentary because which we may or may not have because our main character hasn't really agreed to this yet. What we did was we said we've got this idea. Remember, we actually know this woman. We've interviewed her before. Look at the interviews we've done. You can see that this ... and she's told us. It seems to us from our communications with her that she said if there's going to be a documentary about her, it's going to be our documentary. We want to start filming some of the things that surround this because we think that's the way to make this happen. We don't want to push her anymore about her participation. She's going to develop more of an interest in this when she sees that we're really serious about doing it.

Julie Cohen:

We went to CNN films, who did ultimately become more producing project on the whole project, and said could you give us a small amount of funds for three days of shooting to do a little bit of research, for three days of shooting, for a few days of editing to edit some of that? Then you can reassess at that point because we think that's how ... Then we'll go back and see where we stand. That's exactly what happened. They gave us, I mean, I'm not going to say amounts, but they gave us what ended up being maybe like 5% of our budget at that time to start shooting and start working. We were like okay that's great. Then we spent just basically a couple months setting, researching, doing those interviews, putting together some highlights of them.

Julie Cohen:

Then, at a certain point, we actually interviewed five people in those three days. So we made a fair amount of progress. Some of them were people that the justice knew well, so we had a sense that they would get back to her with what we were hoping were favourable reports, that we were serious, and we took the project seriously. At that point, in the end of the process when CNN was considering whether to keep going, we sent the justice's office a note and said we just want to keep you posted on where we stand with this project that we're hoping to interview her for in the future. Her assistant wrote us back an email at this point saying here is a series of things the justice will be doing over the next year or so that she thought might make interesting filming opportunities.

Shaunagh Connaire:

I wanted to ask you, after filming with Justice Ginsburg for it took three years, I think, in total, do you and Betsy ever call her Ruth?

Julie Cohen:

No, absolutely not. It's a good question. Many people have asked us that. In fact, sometimes when executives and stuff were talking to us like the people at the distributors and that kind of thing, there's almost like a Hollywood thing of calling famous people by their first name sometimes like if someone's talking about Spielberg, they're like Steven wants to do this. Someone would say well can you see if Ruth can come to that premiere? We would be like do not call her Ruth. They weren't saying it in any public forum. They were just saying it in a meeting, but, no, we call her Justice. We do not her Ruth. Not saying that her closest friends don't call her Ruth. Certainly, her close friends do call her Ruth, and some of the people that we interview her have earned the right, but no, she's way too intimidating to call Ruth.

Shaunagh Connaire:

That's brilliant. Well, another scene that we haven't spoken about is when she talks about being referred to as the Notorious RBG. I mean, that is just so magical. Do you want to tell us a little bit, Julie?

Julie Cohen:

Yes. Well, the young people who have made RBG a star on the internet started referring to her as the Notorious RBG. A young law student at NYU Law School who was really loving her dissents started a Tumbler page that she called Notorious RBG named, of course, or maybe not of course, I don't know quite what audience I'm talking to you, but named after the noted east coast rapper, the Notorious BIG now sadly passed away. Yeah, so people started calling her Notorious RBG, just because it's like a funny joke. There's obviously this huge contrast between the two people.

Julie Cohen:

Well, the great thing about that is Justice Ginsburg gets that joke, and she loves that joke. What she likes to say, she'll say ... People ask me, don't you think it's strange to be compared to the Notorious BIG? She says, "Why would I be surprised? We have a lot in common." Everyone will ask us, it's like, what's she talking about? Then her next line is "We were both born and bred in Brooklyn, New York." Now again, Brooklyn, the borough just outside of Manhattan, is a point of pride for those who were raised here. In fact, east coast rappers who came from Brooklyn are, in fact, quite proud of being Brooklynites, just like Justice Ginsburg who grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn in the thirties, forties, fifties, is very much a proud Brooklynite. My mom's from Brooklyn also and from Flatbush, and I completely relate to the Brooklyn pride. My husband and I live in Brooklyn.

Shaunagh Connaire:

Rightly so. Yes, we started off in Brooklyn, actually, Julie, in Bushwick, which we loved, absolutely loved, but we weren't cool enough to stay around.

Shaunagh Connaire:

Julie, I mean, one thing that really stood out for me personally, as a woman working in our industry was the fact that you and Betsy had an all female crew. Why did you decide to do that?

Julie Cohen:

Yeah. It wasn't something we gave a whole lot of thought to at the beginning. It just seemed like a natural decision to make. I mean, there's been a lot of complaints in terms of women in behind the camera roles getting to be represented and getting to bring their skills and their voices to a project. It seemed like for a project like this, where the film was going to be about a woman, for both women and men, but really in some deep way, we felt like for women. On a person who spent her whole life fighting for the rights of women, wouldn't it kind of seem like it would make sense to have a team of women in all the leadership roles to bring it to the public.

Julie Cohen:

There was some concern, like people would say like oh my god . We got asked this in Q&As all the time. Wasn't it like so hard to find, to get a team of women to ... and we were like, no, it wasn't hard. It was done with intention. The hardest role to fill was that of cinematographer because special cinematographers is a really male-dominated field. That's really much less true of most of the other positions. But the way we did it was just, we worked on doing it. We created a spreadsheet. We called around to everyone we knew. We weren't working ... the cinematographer wasn't someone we had worked with before. We called everyone we knew and like who were the great women documentary cinematographers you know? Then we would look at their reels, and then we spoke to a bunch of them Same thing with editors, our brilliant editor, Carla Gutierrez, neither of us knew her before. We just asked around like, who are the great women editors?

Julie Cohen:

I mean, truthfully in documentary editing, there's lots of women who have that job. I'd say it's close to 50:50 in that position. It's not like we didn't know of some, but we just thought we'd ask around to everyone for their favourite woman. We certainly got recommendations for Carla, and then when we spoke with her and met her and saw some of her previous work, we just felt like it was a really, really good fit. It turned out to be because, in fact, where she's in the midst of editing one of our next films as well.

Shaunagh Connaire:

Oh, that's really good to hear. I mean, there are so many beautiful moments captured in the film.

Shaunagh Connaire:

Let me move on to my next question, Julie. Is there a moment in your career that you would step back and say that was rather bonkers that you could tell us?

Julie Cohen:

I was attempting to get an interview, this was when I was at NBC, with an inmate in a woman's prison. A woman named Mary Kay LeTourneau who became quite famous in America for having started, when she was a teacher, an extremely troubling relationship, a extremely troubling sexual relationship, with one of her students, a sixth grader. The incredibly odd thing about this pair is that they ended up getting ... They had two children. After she got out of prison, they ended up getting married. It was a story that I covered over quite a period of time.

Julie Cohen:

I'd written her a number of letters, and she called me on the phone to talk to me in a crazy sort of sing songie voice. We didn't pay people for interviews. It's not an ethical thing to do in the network news world. I don't do it in documentaries either. She said, "I'll do an interview with you, but you'd have to buy a guitar for my roommate, my cellmate." That was a strange moment. In the end, and I can't remember how things transpired. No, we didn't buy her anything. In the end, she actually did call us up again and allowed us to do an interview.

Julie Cohen:

When she got out of prison and married the, by this point, young man, who she had been incarcerated for her earlier relationship with. They sat down together with us and gave us their first interview as a married couple.

Shaunagh Connaire:

Oh, that's hilarious, not surprising. I mean, you've just had the most wonderful career, Julie, and you are really an inspiration to any female filmmakers listening into this because it's a bloody [inaudible 00:27:07] leap from news into documentaries and especially into feature documentaries that take a long, long time to make. Julie, thank you so much for coming on today. We're so, so grateful.

Julie Cohen:

It was great to be here.

Shaunagh Connaire:

If you liked what you heard on this episode of Media Tribe, tune in next week as I'll be dropping new shows every week with all legendary folk from the industry. And if he could leave me a review and rating, that would be really appreciated. Also, get in touch on social media @Shaunagh on Twitter, or @shaunaghconnaire on Instagram and feel free to suggest new guests, right? That's it, until next week, see you then. This episode is edited by Ryan Ferguson.