We recently connected with Maria Burton and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Maria thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Any thoughts around creating more inclusive workplaces?

One of the things I love about being a filmmaker is that the stories we tell can shape the world. This goes deep, because of course it makes a difference what stories we tell, and it’s also the people we show on screen – are we casting inclusively? Are we representing full, real people and not feeding stereotypes?

I have a personal passion for telling stories of women, often real women who did incredible things, yet they were lost in history, as women so often are. I have directed six independent feature films and am now developing projects including Mercury 13, a narrative feature about the women pilots tested to be astronauts at the same time as the original Mercury 7 men, and The Pepper, about the early Californian photographer Sonya Noskowiak. I also work on a series with my sisters in our Five Sisters Productions company, called Half the History, and we’ve made a number of short films on groundbreaking women, in conjunction with Tufts University. My sisters and I are also developing a limited series based on our Mom’s award-winning books on Tamsen Donner and our family’s retracing the Donner Trail.

As studies show, women filmmakers hire more inclusively below the line as well, and this has always been a conscious practice for me and my sisters, which has turned out to yield a treasure trove of (too often underutilized) talent, as well as make our sets happy places to work.

Currently, I’m working with directors Monique Sorgen, Susan Dynner, and Nandi Bowe on the GenXX initiative, with the mission to advocate and expand opportunities for the generation of experienced, talented, and vetted women directors who’ve been overlooked, lost between sexism and ageism. It is both sobering and gratifying to see how many terrific women have persisted in creating work independently, despite being shut out of opportunities at the studio level. And we are optimistic to be talking with many smart and committed executives who are working to change this within the studio system.

As far as advice for creating a more inclusive workplace, it’s easy: Just do it! Look at Ava DuVernay, in hiring for Queen Sugar, where she gave opportunities to many directors who had not yet had the opportunity to direct television. Those directors proved their talents and now most are working regularly in television — they just had to be given the opportunity. And same with cast and crew — just make the decision to hire inclusively and you will find that you’re richly rewarded in talented people working on your project! The problem comes when people forget that underrepresented talent may not have the resume that others have in the industry because they have not been given the opportunity. You may have to be the one to remind others of this, and also you may have to search them out through different networks, because they are not represented on the usual studio and agency lists. Again, just do it and you will be a richer storyteller for it.

Maria, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

As mentioned, I’m a filmmaker and have directed 6 successful independent feature films, the latest of which are currently available on Netflix and Amazon: A Sort of Homecoming, with Laura Marano and Katherine McNamara, and For the Love of George, with Rosanna Arquette, Tate Donovan, Rex Lee & Kristen Johnston. Earlier films include Just Friends (AMC/WE), Temps, and Manna from Heaven (MGM/SONY).

I also run Five Sisters Productions with my real-life siblings, through which I directed the pilot for the Emmy-qualifying short form series Old Guy and produced The Happiest Day of His Life (MTV/Logo), Kings, Queens & In-Betweens, and Julia Sweeney’s “Letting Go of God” (Showtime).

I’ve spent the last several years working to break into directing television as well, and have been selected for television directing programs including the recent DGA’s DDI Emerging Directors Mentorship Program, the Disney/ABC Directing Program, the CBS Directing Initiative, the Ryan Murphy HALF Foundation, the SONY Diverse Directors Program, and ProjectHER, for which I wrote and directed the short pilot Good Eggs.

I also have served on the National Board of the DGA (Alt), as Co-Chair of the DGA’s WSC, and on the DGA’s Council of Joint Co-Chairs. I was past Co-Chair of Alliance of Women Directors and am a member of Film Fatales.

The eldest of five sisters raised by activist parents, our Dad taught us to proudly claim our heritage of the Indigenous American and Mexicans of early California, our Irish ex-Catholic Mom had us pass out fliers with her when she campaigned as a delegate for Shirley Chisholm, and the mix of cultures we grew up with inculcated empathy and made me a bit of a chameleon. Add to this a childhood of creatively low-budget travel and short-term residences in different cultures from Malaysia to France to India, and my interest in seeing the world through different perspectives led to my exploring character through storytelling.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Being an independent filmmaker requires resilience every step of the way. For my first feature, JUST FRIENDS, I earned a small grant of 35mm film – and because I could not afford to buy more, I had to make it work with the limited amount of film I’d been awarded. I story-boarded every shot before shooting so that I was sure to use every foot of film on a shot that would go into the movie, and thus learned to be an extremely efficient director. Being highly prepared as a director also allows me to make the best use of time, something that’s always in short supply on a set. On my second feature, TEMPS, we were given an editing space we could use from 7 pm to 7 am. I had never drunk coffee before, and started to drink coffee to keep me going through the wee hours of the morning — and then I started liking it! Maybe someday I’ll go back to not drinking coffee, but for now, it’s a daily pleasure in my life.

What you learn after you’ve been a director for a long time is that problems will always pop up and that’s okay – it’s part of the process for locations to fall out or an actor to get sick or an equipment truck to not show up on time. The job is to roll with it, to figure out an alternative and pivot to that solution. And when you’ve done it long enough, you accept it as the nature of the job and you learn not to stress, but to take it all in stride. Stress doesn’t help, and staying positive keeps the rest of the cast and crew positive, and that will ultimately help make a better movie, as well as definitely make for a better experience for everyone!

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

As mentioned earlier, I am passionate about telling stories of women, both because women have spectacular stories which are exciting and inspiring to me, and also because women’s stories are far too underrepresented in our culture. The stories we tell both reflect and shape our culture, and by being more inclusive in our storytelling, we will become a more inclusive culture. So to me, this is a more than an artistic passion. I’d say it’s political as well, and then it was pointed out to me that it’s just humanistic, because equality and inclusion should be normal values for all ethical, caring people, and we have a special responsibility as artists to carry that representation forward. And representation can be accomplished in any project — it doesn’t have to be a story specifically about an underrepresented character for me to make sure that all the characters populating the screen are representing real world humanity and richly drawn. For example, perhaps there is a press briefing and the news reporters and camera people are played by background actors. We can make sure that there is a good gender and racial mix in these actors, showing a positive representation that will model an inclusive world going forward.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.mariaburtondirector.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mariaburtondirector/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/maria.burton/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariaburton/
• Other: https://genxxprods.wixsite.com/genxx https://fivesistersproductions.com

Image Credits
Ashly Covington, Charity Burton, David Mathieson