Of course, it’s entirely possible that Allison Anders doesn’t want to be as well-known as Taika Waititi or Ryan Coogler. And goodness knows I am not disparaging the talents of Taika Waititi or Ryan Coogler. Maybe Colin Trevorrow is a better example? I’m sure you can think of your own example of Indie Director Given An Enormous Franchise For, You Know, Reasons. Or even just Indie Director Given An Enormous Budget For, You Know, Reasons, if you don’t think she’d want to be a director of pre-existing IP. Still, Anders is one of the indie directors of the ‘90s who never managed to be as successful as colleagues Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez.

I’m not exactly pulling their names out of thin air; she was one of the four directors of Four Rooms, along with those two and Alexandre Rockwell. She directed the first segment, “The Missing Ingredient.” Probably not most people’s favourite. I’ve at least always liked it better than “The Wrong Man,” which I don’t like much at all. It’s also interesting to note that the middle two segments have roughly equal populations of male and female characters, whereas Anders and Tarantino created mostly gender-segregated worlds, each with only one character whose gender doesn’t match the rest of the cast. Obviously, Tarantino’s is all men with one woman; Anders created a segment with all women and only Ted the Bellhop as a male character.

The other two films of hers I’ve seen also involve women’s stories. Gas Food Lodging is a story of a family—a mother and two daughters—dealing with their own personal issues. Grace of My Heart is sometimes believed to be a thinly veiled biography of Carole King, and while it doesn’t seem to be, it is definitely the story of a woman in a similar position as King’s. I’m not saying that her focus on women’s stories is why she didn’t become the kind of indie darling that Quentin Tarantino did, but on the other hand I’m not not saying that.

Now, she’s done TV directing as well as her handful of movies. She’s done such pop culture cult shows as Sex and the City, Orange Is the New Black, and Riverdale. It’s still not difficult to compare her career to that of the male directors of the ‘90s indie boom and wonder. Suspect, even. She won a MacArthur Fellowship grant in 1995. She was a member of the Sundance jury in 1994. She’s got Wim Wenders as a mentor. And she ended up directing an episode of The Mentalist?

It’s also true that she’s done teaching in film school at UC Santa Barbara, which given her appreciation of film school is probably personally satisfying to her. Heck, for all I know, maybe she’d rather teach than deal with the studio system. I can’t blame her if she feels that way; the studio system is well established to be terrible. Santa Barbara’s a nice city, too, so if she’s still living and teaching there, there are worse lives to have. It still tells you a lot that her films are barely even discussed.

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