Anna Gunn, Alysia Reiner and Meera Menon of Equity Talk Women on Wall Street, in Hollywood

Anna Gunn, Alysia Reiner and Meera Menon at the KCET Cinema Series screening of Equity. | Photo: Liz Ohanesian.

The KCET Cinema Series continued on June 28 with a screening of Equity. Produced by Broad Street Pictures and distributed by Sony Pictures Classics, the film is a Wall Street drama where the stakes are high and the intrigue is deep. The film was produced, written and directed by women and features Emmy Award-winner Anna Gunn (Breaking Bad) in the lead role, as an ambitious and self-sufficient investment banker in the midst of a deal that could change the course of her career. Sarah Megan Thomas plays her equally ambitious protog while Alysia Reiner plays a tough investigator. Thomas and Reiner are the co-founders of Broad Street. Equity features a screenplay by Amy Fox and was directed by Nora Ephron Prize-winner Meera Menon. The film premiered at Sundance and will be in theaters at the end of July.

Following Tuesday nights screening of Equity, KCET Cinema Series host Pete Hammond led a discussion with Gunn, Reiner and Menon, an edited portion of which you can read below.

Sponsored by the James and Paula Coburn Foundation and the E. Hofert Dailey Trust, the KCET Cinema Series brings advance screenings and Q&A sessions to audiences. The summer season launched on June 7 at Santa Monicas Aero Theatre and will continue through August 2.

Anna Gunn on researching her role

I was very lucky in terms of talking to Alysia and Sarah, working with Meera in a really detailed way on the script and then hearing the experiences and stories of these women who made it to the top echelon of Wall Street and what they had to do, the sacrifices, the psychological navigation -- all of it. It was really fascinating. Research is one of my favorite parts of the job, and we really had to dig into it and dig into it fast and I was so grateful for all of the really personal experiences that women shared with me because one of the things about Naomi, when she says that thing about money, that it shouldnt be a dirty word and women shouldnt be afraid to go after that because men arent afraid to and it never seems like its a bad thing for them to say it, to have that open ambition, but also to really want to go after money.

What I found interesting was that so many women came from backgrounds where they didnt have a lot or they felt that they needed to help support their families and they never wanted to find themselves in a position of being without [a salary]. And her naked, almost brazen, statement about the fact that we dont have to make it about, we dont have to pretend that its not this. We dont have to couch it in something thats more soft or gentle, that it really can be that open. Those were a lot of the stories I heard.

Alysia Reiner on the development of the script and her character

I have to give our screenwriter, Amy Fox, a lot of credit for that part of the storyline because Anna was talking about how fun research is and how delicious it is as an actor to delve in. For me, for the first time developing a story with Sarah and Amy, its like that. You do all that research and youre creating it and its so incredibly exciting. Its this really collaborative process.

We had things that we brought to the table, but Amy read this book and Im embarrassed that I cant remember the name of it, but shes usually sitting here with us to say the book is called blah blah blah, its about this woman who falls in love with money. It was one of the influences on the script when she was writing it and she came and brought us these pages at one point with that speech. At first it was Annas speech. We were like, oh, this is perfect. It really embodies so much of what we wanted to talk about about ambition and about money and about these issues that we really wanted to bring up.

I would say that it was maybe two months later that she made the decision to have my character echo it. I love that. One thing that we talked about a lot was how I was so influenced by Naomi. One of our secrets that we talked about in rehearsal: Anna was talking about rehearsal earlier and what a joy it was to rehearse for this and we got to really develop our relationship, one of our secrets that Meera and I talked about was that I had a crush on Naomi for years. I was dating her little brother and she was the cool girl and I had this big crush on her. I think that comes out for me. I want what she has, not in an envious way, but in an Im a little in love with her way. I want to be her in that girl crush way of your youth. It was an interesting journey coming to that last moment for that character. In my family, I am the breadwinner, in that characters life, and theres nothing wrong with wanting money, truly, truly, truly. I think Sam believes that she will do good at the bank, that she will still be able to wear the white hat at the bank. We all know that you can rationalize anything, right. Im curious what her future will be at the bank.

Image: Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics.

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On the possibility of bringing Equity to television

AR: Yeah, when we were writing it, that was our dream was that it would be sort of a back door pilot. So, well see what happens.

Meera Menon on directing Equity

When youre working with actors that are this kind of deep and just intelligent and understand their characters inside and out, my job is just to kind of control the environment such so they can sit there and express that in a way that is as kind of pure, in sync with the intent that youre hearing from them, how deep their intention was with the way their characters were going. I feel like my job was simply to facilitate that and not allow things to get in the way of that.

When I walked into it, the script was pretty far along. I was kind of immediately in synch with them about the themes that they were interested in exploring

LINK:	https://www.kcet.org/kcet-cinema-series/anna-gunn-alysia-reiner-meera-...
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