Haifaa Al Mansour on finding your voice through art
Saudi Arabia’s first female filmmaker and a controversial figure in her homeland, HAIFAA AL MANSOUR’s latest movie tells the story of novelist Mary Shelley, the creator of Frankenstein. Here, she explores how the radical author defied convention in a way that contemporary women could still learn plenty from today
“I owe so much of who I am to my mother. She came from a very small, conservative town in Saudi Arabia – the same town that I was brought up in – but she was adamant that her 12 children grow up with a strong sense of their own identity. Whenever we went out in public, she would never allow my sisters or me to cover our hair or our faces, as tradition dictated. As children, our instinct was to fit into the culture that we grew up in. But my mother – supported by my father, the poet Abdul Rahman Mansour – was adamant that we should always be proud of and celebrate who we were.
As a filmmaker, my mission is to celebrate the sort of strong womanhood that my mother encapsulated. When, in 2013, I was given the opportunity to direct a film about Mary Shelley, I was instantly hooked. Any initial reservations I might have had – that this was a period piece about an English woman – were dispelled as soon as I read Emma Jensen’s script. Here was a story that captured my heart; the story of the young Mary Shelley (Elle Fanning) trying to find her creative voice in a world where women were constrained by their sex. I had read Frankenstein when I was at school but, beyond that, I knew very little about this extraordinary woman’s life; her scandalous elopement with a married man (the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, played by Douglas Booth) when she was just 16 years old, and her tortured creation of a precocious literary masterpiece when she was 19.
As a young woman, I had fought my own battle to make myself heard in a culture where women have no voice. As a schoolgirl, I had written and directed plays – I was shy and liked the opportunity this gave me to speak – but I had no hope of pursuing this passion for a living. This was a culture where women were forbidden to drive or show their faces in public. A country where cinemas and theaters didn’t exist. It was my father who introduced us all to film; he set up a projector at home and encouraged us to watch whatever we could rent from our local Blockbuster Video store.
I no longer live in Saudi Arabia. Home now is Los Angeles. My husband [diplomat Bradley Niemann] is Californian, and our children – Adam, 10, and Haylie, eight – are at school here. Although I am not there, I am viscerally experiencing the thrill of the changes that are happening in my country. These are momentous times for Saudi women; for the first time in our history, women are allowed to drive cars and watch football games in stadiums. As for me, I am finally able to have my own production company in my homeland, and I am very excited about filming my next project there. It is called The Perfect Candidate and tells the story of a Saudi woman who decides to break taboos by entering into politics.
And it is not just in Saudi Arabia where the culture is changing; even in Hollywood, as Frances McDormand so brilliantly pointed out at this year’s Academy Awards, women are stepping up to the front, writing, directing and starring in films that matter. This is our moment. Mary Shelley would be proud.”
Mary Shelley is out now. Read the full interview in PORTER’s Summer Escape 2018 issue
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