No Tofu Magazine | Rose McGowan

Rose McGowan knows three versions of herself through and through: the woman she is, the woman you thought of her as, and the woman she’s becoming. The former is a staunch feminist, articulate and no-holds barred. The latter is a filmmaker with what many are finding to be surprising depth and vision. It’s that middle one—that pesky version that for years shaded McGowan in every color but gray. That’s the one she ran away from seven years ago, that’s the one that she’s making sure never comes back.

We speak the day after the Golden Globes, which she was slated to attend until her body went into what she calls a “psychosomatic seizure” that debilitated her. Considering the alternative—hobnobbing with industry elite and foreign press members—it seems she may have gotten the better end of the stick.

“It just all feels like a scene in a movie that you’ve been in so many times, you forget why you keep going,” McGowan says. “It becomes about, ‘why did you cut your hair?’ Why the fuck not? How about that?”

That type of antagonism comes up more than once over the course of our talk. Now at 41, McGowan is in a different stage of her life. Her directorial debut, Dawn, was critically lauded, screening at the Sundance Film Festival, and gaining inclusion in the short film program that toured the country shortly thereafter. When she submitted the film, it was in a pool of over 8,000 submissions, a festival record. By the time it began screening around the U.S, it was one of only eight films on the bill. Even the New York Times took notice, spotlighting McGowan with a rave review, citing her as a director to not just take seriously, but to pay attention to.  “I’m proud of the reception it’s gotten, McGowan says, “but I didn’t do it for that. I did it because I had to. I made the film because I had to.”

Dawn tells the story of a teenage girl in 1961, in the years before the thrill of counterculture and the hangover of Vietnam fully obliterated everything in its path. In the days before the fire, there were just post-war mothers, disgruntled and controlling, and teenagers eager to learn lifeís hard lessons. One of them is Dawn, whose life resembles a strange prison as drawn by Ed Ruscha. Bright colors and mid-century architecture hide a world teeming with bubbling hormones, giddy rebellion and, as the film progresses, strange wisps of violence on the horizon. For viewers, the film’s spell feels discombobulating, candy-coated and uneasy at once; for McGowan, it’s far from fantasy.

“The world for a 13-year-old girl with breasts is a very loud and disgusting place,” McGowan says, her voice dropping an octave to emphasize the fact as both revelation and redundancy⎯you can tell she’s had to make the case against the male gaze more than once. “To go from being mostly in your head to suddenly having the world come at you in such a shocking way really is startling. It’s a lot of what fame feels like.”

This new stage in McGowanís career feels very much like a response to just that. Fame for McGowan operated similarly to Dawn’s color-soaked universe: bustling with strange dangers just beneath the shimmer of the surface. From her upbringing (ìI was raised for much of my life without mirrors”) to life in LA (“I was locked up in a house with a guy in Beverly Hills for three years”) to her past loves (“I found a boyfriend after escaping that situation, and then he was murderedî), and even her strange beginnings (“I was discovered at 18 crying on a street corner”). Everywhere in McGowan’s story⎯which often features what, at first, seem like Dylan-esque exaggerations of whimsy⎯is that same creeping sense that things are never quite what they seem; that the world can never be ordinary for a person who’s made a life out of being looked at.

“It was a really fucked up life,” she says. ìIt just all seemed so silly and embarrassing. Mostly during those years I was embarrassed, and I was waiting for it to stop. You’re paid a lot of money to not be you. For those 80-100 hours a week, you’re being paid to be someone else. That’s a lot of time to not be you.”

Instead, to hear McGowan describe it, she was paid to be something worse⎯a version of herself, cobbled together from various points of reference. You know the roles: spitfire teen (Scream), gothic mean girl (Jawbreaker), acerbic my-girl-Friday (Planet Terror), or as McGowan says with only a hint of irony but plenty of loathing, “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn this way.”

At first, the two dimensional pigeonholing was something of a challenge. “I remember before the red carpet of the MTV Video Music Awards, I was thinking, ‘you want me to walk down this red carpet? Okay, fuck you, let’s do it.'” She is, of course, referring to her infamous black see-through fishnet dress with then-boyfriend Marilyn Manson. “It was really a big fuck you. I didnít anticipate backlash because I didn’t care or think that far ahead. I was a kid and I thought it was funny.”

That rebellion eventually became paramount. Rose McGowan became ìRose McGowanî. Those tiny acts of punk expression turned into definitive traits, characteristics of both her and the late-90s/early-aughts that she came to embody on the fringes. The era’s obsession with subverting the mainstream by championing the disinterested kids in the back of the class found an unlikely icon in McGowan. And it became increasingly clear that she had very little say in any of it.

“I never played it safe, I was never going to be an InStyle Magazine darling, I was just never going to be that person. I was inspired by Carol Lombard,” she says. “She would show up to premieres in a stretcher, her bits and pieces covered in medical tape, and I just thought it was hilarious to be a prankster. But I never had studio bosses to protect me.”

In the intervening years, she in her own words got “lost on TV” staring in The WB’sCharmed and falling victim to a grueling schedule that made her lose touch with everything around her. “I didn’t see friends or family. I lost touch with the world and had no idea what the fuck was going on. I was too tired to fight. I’d fought all my life, so I just wanted to go to work. I didn’t have time to fight the idea of the machine I was in, or figure out how I could make it better. I was too busy just trying to survive it.”

During the end of series, McGowan pulled double-duty when she was cast as the lead in Robert Rodriguez’ Planet Terror, one-half of a double feature with Quentin Tarantino. (Tarantino would go on to cast McGowan in a small but crucial role in his film as well). During the shoot, she would film Charmed half the week in LA, and then Planet Terror in Texas during night and weekends. The grueling shoot took its toll both physically⎯she says to have weight as little as 96 pounds by the end of it⎯and emotionally. By the time it was over, McGowan had reached her breaking point.

“I was doing psychotherapy, I was having breakdowns. You’re never allowed to be unhappy, because you’re in such an enviable position,” she says, her voice taking on a timber of empathy and resentment at once. “I would be in a restaurant in LA where the hostess would be throwing daggers at you, looking and wanting to be you. So you don’t complain, but just because you don’t doesn’t mean…” she pauses.

“It’s not that,” she halts again.

“I was just in the wrong job. It’s not that big of a deal, I just didn’t realize I was in the wrong job.”

So she did what any person who was constantly vanishing into other roles would doóshe literally vanished.

“I was on the run. I just left, traveled everywhere. Anywhere you can think of, put a dot on the wall and I would have gone there, anywhere from three days to six days to six months.”

That was seven years ago. Now, McGowan is back, and has come to realize that somewhere in the rubble of the life she left behind, she still has a voice and something to say with it.

“I realized that nobody was saying things. 50% of the population is being underserved because 50% of the directors and writers out there are silent. And that’s fucked up. But nobody is saying anything, so why not me? Why shouldn’t it be me?”

“Believe me, I would love for somebody else to do it, for somebody else to take up this mantle, or for somebody else to be making points, or bashing people over the head, because I’ve got other things to do. But it’s just so silent.”

After years of living outside of herself, McGowan is now firmly interested in the bigger business of working inwards, parceling out thoughts and seeing where her taste leads her. While acting, she says at times she liked not being in her own head. But her brain is, as she describes it, “a very strange and interesting place, and I quite like being in my own brain.”

Now she’s finding a new set of ideas to rebel against: titles such as first time director (“I’ve had more time on sets than most directors ever will. I have had a film education I’m incredibly grateful for. Most people study it as empiric evidence, I live it.”); trends like the barrage of superhero adaptations (“I think conglomerates finally figured out how to press this button and that button, and bam! You have money. But they have 23 of them slated for release over the next nine years. The culture is just going to completely cannibalize itself.î); and that pesky modifier she finds most readily attached to her new title (“We don’t say ‘female doctor’ or ‘female artist,’ so why ‘female filmmaker’? It’s a gender-neutral position, and the disparity is so great that it still feels like an oddball thing. We just need to fill the gap.”)

The latter problem isnít just a matter of semantics. When Dawn was accepted into the Seattle Film Festival, it was screened under the category of Female Director, which, aside from playing it fast and loose with the term “genre”, makes for a rather crowded category. If every film helmed by a female filmmaker is automatically placed under a single category with limited screening spots, it doesn’t take a mathematician to see why there is a dearth of their work in the mainstream marketplace.

“It’s just occurring to the men, I think,” she says. “You’re told to write what you know, and most men are going to write men. And if most executives are men, then they’re going to hire men⎯it’s really just all they know. Literally waking them up a little is important. It’s not like they’re these evil people trying to keep the women out, it just doesn’t occur to them.”

Which is why it all comes back to re-definition. After years of success in its varied forms and pain in its many shapes, McGowan is forging a radically new identity both professionally and perhaps personally as well. Where once people saw something akin to a femme fetale with limited scope, McGowan finds herself looking for more while also championing that very same off-kilter identity.

“We need weirdos now more than ever. Because the freaks? They’re really the normal ones who get the joke of it all, the ones with their heads screwed on fucking straight. It’s everyone else that’s got it wrong. And every message, from the person across the street or the pastor in your church, your parents, their friends—everyone is telling you you’re wrong, but no, you’re right. That’s what makes you real.”

For McGowan, feeling real is the antidote. “My life’s work is to make people feel. They might not like me, they might not like my character, but they felt something.”

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