Natalie Portman is taking a break from the Thor franchise to star in another superhero movie, a biopic of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Ginsburg spoke about the film in a conversation with California Supreme Court Justice Goodwin Liu, her former clerk, at the American Constitution Society Convention in Washington. The Notorious RBG revealed that the project was held up in development for a very good reason -- Portman wanted to make sure the director was a woman.
[seealso slug="sundance-2015-films"]
“Natalie Portman came to talk to me about this, and we had a very good conversation, and one thing, interesting, that she insisted on, it held up the project for awhile," Ginsburg told Liu. "She said, ‘I want the director to be a woman. There are not enough women in this industry. There are many talented out there.’ And now they do have a woman director.”
Eventually, they chose Marielle Heller, whose first film, an adaptation of graphic novel Diary of a Teenage Girl about a girl in the 1970s having an affair with her mother's boyfriend, was well-received at Sundance.
The film, written by Ginsburg's late husband Martin's nephew. “He asked if he could write a script about a case in which Marty and I were involved in 1971 and I said, ‘Yes, if you like to spend your time doing that,’” Ginsburg explained.
Portman herself recently made her directorial debut with A Tale of Love and Darkness, a film about the Israel-Pakistan conflict based on the autobiography of Amos Oz told in its original Hebrew.