STACK #184 Feb 2020

interweave? Cathy did that so beautifully in her film and when she came in with her pitch; her understanding of the characters and what she was going to bring to it and how she was going to elevate it, included things that we hadn’t even considered. You need someone who’s going to add all those extra layers.” With an ever-expanding female superhero universe – be it Black Widow, Captain Marvel or Wonder Woman – Robbie believes there’s room for many more women. “I think all women – not just on screen – express their femininity and feel empowered in different ways, and we certainly have a very eclectic group here; different age ranges and different walks of life. You can tell obviously that everyone is different. I think it’s important to reflect different aspects of female empowerment on screen.” Following the success of Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman , Robbie’s co-producers Sue Kroll and Bryan Unkeless, were certainly keen to hire women in all key positions. “It is a female led movie with a strong feminine perspective. We’ve always said we wanted the right person for the job and we‘re thrilled that it’s Cathy Yan directing and Christina Hodson as our writer. We have a lot of really interesting women involved with the production,” Robbie says. On set, she’s been pulling 15-hour days between shooting her scenes and fulfilling producer duties. Yes, she could easily have handed her baby off to someone else once the project was green-lit, but she was determined to see it to the end. “When I first pitched the idea four years ago, at that point, I hadn’t produced anything. But I guess if you’re there

I so rarely see a girl gang on screen and I crave that, and I'm sure audience members do too

Margot Robbie, Rosie Perez and director CathyYan on the set

involved in that capacity.” Surprisingly, Tina Fey was a big inspiration: “I’ve produced a few times now and really enjoy it. I don’t mind wearing two hats and don’t feel like one role is sacrificed in lieu of the other. Tina Fey once told me when I did a film with her where she was acting and producing, ‘It’s kind of like a wedding day. If you do a lot of planning in advance, you can just enjoy the day’. Unforeseen things often crop on the day that, no matter how much planning we do, you must deal with it in the moment, but we’re a really strong producing unit, and when I’m on

set, my co-producers have got everything covered.” On the day we visit the Birds of Prey set, Robbie is filming a sequence with Winstead and Perez, the three women escaping an angry assailant by jumping down a fairground slide in a funhouse. Serving as an origin story for the Birds of Prey, Robbie enjoys the group dynamic, adding, “In the world of the comic books, there’s just a million different scenarios you could see Harley in; all as exciting as the next,” she says with undisguised enthusiasm, her blonde/pink hair drawn back in Harley’s trademark pigtails. The Birds of Prey loosely come together after a girl named Cassandra [Ella Jay Basco] steals a diamond from Ewan McGregor’s powerful and dangerous nightclub owner Roman Sionis, aka Black Mask. Everyone has their own reasons for wanting to recapture that diamond, Cassandra becoming the most wanted person on the outskirts of Gotham that day. Taking place over a 24-hour period, the film further utilises flashback sequences. “Harley is hugely motivated to get this diamond back and it also puts her into a very strange predicament where she’s also hanging out with a child who she feels the need to both protect and potentially betray,” she adds. This time out, Robbie aims to show a more personal side of Harley Quinn. “You get to hear her story from her perspective; obviously she’s a very unreliable narrator, but she’s the narrator nonetheless and you get a glimpse of what it's like to be inside Harley’s head – whether it’s some scenes being shot from her perspective or whether it’s just the spin she puts on the narration, or whether it's something as simple as going back to Harley’s apartment. You really get to know Harley in a more intimate way.”

at the inception of the idea and you want to see it develop in the creative spirit that you initially pitched it as, the producing aspect occurred organically. Obviously I’ve spent so long on this and have so much passion for it that I definitely wanted to be

Birds of Prey is in cinemas Feb 6

F

.

U

.

.

R

G

T

H

N

I

E

R

W

E

V

I

13