The Business
Creative Space
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 36 OCTOBER 30, 2019
Photographed by Damon Casarez
HAIR BY BRANT MAYFIELD FOR LEONOR GREYL & T3MICRO AT SOLO ARTISTS. MAKEUP BY SPENCER BARNES FOR EA USING SPENCERBARNESLA.COM.Mimi Leder
Apple’s trailblazing The Morning Show director
on how to shoot Jennifer Aniston, her time in ‘movie jail’
and working in TV long before it was cool
By Michael O’ConnellM
imi Leder has three
offices: one on the
Sony lot, another at her
weekend house in Ojai and a third
in the hillside Los Feliz home she
shares with her husband, actor
Gary Werntz. But when she’s
not on set, the prolific director-
producer says she gets most work
done in her living room — where
a glance up from her MacBook
offers panoramic views of L.A.,
from downtown to Hollywood.
Though she was born
in Manhattan, this is very much
Leder’s town. She arrived on the
West Coast in 1958, growing up on
sets with her filmmaker father,
Paul Leder, whose credits include
such colorful titles as The Baby
Doll Murders and I Dismember
Mama. “They were B movies,”Leder, 67, says over coffee at
her dining room table one early
October afternoon. “But they were
B movies with a message.”
Despite her father’s legacy,
her own Hollywood path has
been more groundbreaking.
In 1973, she became the first
woman to graduate from the
AFI Conservatory. She paid
her dues as a script supervisorand eventually earned a direct-
ing gig on the NBC drama L.A.
Law in 1987. She ranks as the
second-ever TV director to get an
executive producer credit (ER in
1995); in 1998, her feature Deep
Impact bowed to $41 million — at
the time, the highest opening
weekend for a film directed by a
woman. (Movies may be in the
Leder DNA: Daughter Hannah’s
directorial debut, The Planters,
a collaboration with Alexandra
Kotcheff, is making an impres-
sion on the festival circuit.)
Now, after an invigorating turn
directing HBO’s The Leftovers
and helming the 2018 Ruth Bader
Ginsburg biopic On the Basis of
Sex, Leder is behind one of the
most anticipated TV projects
in recent memory. The MorningShow, Apple’s flagship series,
which she directs and produces,
launches the streaming service
Nov. 1. It unites Jennifer Aniston
and Reese Witherspoon on cam-
era and behind, tackling sexism,
ageism and the lingering stink of
sexual abuse behind the scenes
of America’s ostensibly sunny
morning news programming. The Morning Show is a mashup of
Brian Stelter’s tell-all Top of the
Morning, the ousters of Matt Lauer
and Charlie Rose and a com-
pletely fictionalized story of two
newswomen clashing. What’s the
elevator pitch?Of the actors still on Mimi Leder’s bucket list,
she cites Michael Caine: “I want to work with
that guy so badly, I’d write something just for
him.” She was photographed Oct. 16 at her
home in Los Feliz.Among
the fellow film
directors whose work
Leder has books
about are Federico
Fellini and David
Lean.