A case for indie movies: Better roles for women, says Vera Famiga

“I’m least challenged or inspired by [Hollywood] stories… I’ve gravitated towards independent cinema because you have to work harder in studio scripts to flesh out characters, particularly female ones. They are not as sharply edged, they tend to be quite watery. They are not renderings of women as I know them.”
— Vera Farmiga

In an interview with the Guardian in 2011, about a year after she was nominated for an Oscar for an outstanding performance in Up In the Air, Vera Farmiga spoke eloquently about the appeal of seeking out roles in independent productions.

She had already by then known both. On the bigger budget side, she had already appeared in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed and for this particular interview was plugging the cyber-thriller Source Code, and had worked in the indie world too.

In the years since, Farmiga has had a varied kind of career, although she seems to have leaned into the “scream queen” moniker that’s been attached to her for years (it shows up a heck of a lot in profiles), with multiple roles in the Conjuring series.

At the risk of sounding snobby, it’s not quite the career trajectory I would have thought, although she is at least connecting with audiences. Last Rites, the most recent Conjuring movie, pulled in about US $500 million. Hard to ignore that.

That said, I’d like to see directors and producers give Farmiga more of those eclectic, sharp, punchy roles she can clearly handle. She’s still in her prime.