Zara Hayes
If you are looking for a great summer documentary to watch this summer then look no further than Battle of the Sexes; a film that follows the match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs and the social impact that it had.
We caught up with director Zara Hayes to chat about the film, what inspired the project and what lies ahead.
- The Battle of the Sexes is the new film so can you tell me a little bit about it?
It tells the story of a tennis match that changed the world (laughs). It is about a match in 1972 between Billie Jean King, who was the twenty nine year old women’s world number one, versus a fifty year old former Wimbledon champion called Bobby Riggs.
Riggs said that he could beat any female tennis player in the world - even a woman who was years young than him. So she took up the challenge and it became this huge circus affair. It shouldn’t have mattered that this crazy old man was challenging all women but it did and people took it very seriously.
It became a symbol of something much bigger. So with this film we tried to tell the story of this match and how big it became but we also wanted to show why it mattered on a bigger scale to women.
The Women’s Right Movement was in full flow and 1973 is regarded to be a massive year in the feminist movement. The match became this huge thing because it was at a time when everyone was talking about gender and what women could do.
I am not really a sport person or a tennis person but I was really interested in the story from a social history point of view.
- You are in the director's chair for the film so where did this project start for you? And what intrigued you about it that made you want to get involved?
The production company came up with the idea and they knew me and they knew that I was interested in feminism. I had never heard of this tennis match and so I asked my dad and he was like ‘yeah I remember that’ and I just thought ‘this must have been a massive thing if my dad has heard of it’.
So I started looking into a little bit more and I think that it was really fun and really funny. So many things that try to tell you a piece of history, especially women’s history, can be a little po-faced and a little boring or they feel a bit issue led. This felt like it was all about entertainment and spectacle.
The whole point of what women were trying to do in tennis was ’hey we put on as good a show as the men’; they were not saying ’we are stronger. We are quicker. We are better tennis players’. Instead they were saying ’we put on a good show and we are entertainers’.
I felt like that was a perfect film story and there are so many great archives. I always think that the things I enjoy the most are small stories that says something about something bigger rather than trying to ’here is a film about second wave feminism between 1968 and 1973’.
This story was going on at the same time anyway and in the background all of this bigger stuff was going on. So I think it is a really clever way to contextualise what was going on but not ram it down people’s throats.
- Where did the research period start for you? And how much did you know about what was going on at that time?
I knew a little bit and had read a few books on it. I had done a philosophy masters and I had been interested in a history of gender. I remember reading The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer and thinking ‘this is amazing’.
I knew who Berry Friedan was but I had never read her books and so I started by reading all of these key texts. Billie Jean King is an executive producer on this movie and from just one conversation with her you can get so many ideas of books that you want to read and people that you want to talk to.
I guess it just started by immersing ourselves in those sorts of things and watching a whole host of movies. You just start immersing yourself in a world and one things leads to another as you realise ‘gosh, when this was going on this was also happening’. It just sort of unfolds really as you go along.
- Billie Jean King played a huge part during that time and in the film so how keen was she to get on board and partake in the film?
Because it is was such a big part in her life it was almost like she was auditioning us to see if we were the right filmmakers. I guess people have always wanted to tell this story but she has to tell it in the right way for her.
It is quite rare to get a living legend as they are usually dead; it is quite rare to get to make a film with the person who is the subject of the film. She was very keen but she was keen to have it told in the right way.
I think she was glad to have a female director on board and I think that she liked the fact that we were British. So she just made that leap and she was brilliant.
- The likes of Margaret Court and Chris Evert are also involved so how easy/difficult was it getting them on board?
The tennis world is quite a small world and as long as you don’t piss anyone off once you are in it you are in it. Billie and Chris have a very good relationship and once Chris knew that Billie was doing there was no doubt that she would do it as well.
Margaret Court was different because her and Billie Jean… they have a cordial relationship but they are not best friends, they never have been. Also in the story Margaret Court could be made to be a real villain - I don’t think we make her out that way - and you have to be a bit more delicate; especially now she is not in the tennis world at all.
The original nine were all delighted because we were telling their story. I think once they knew that this is happening and going into cinemas they want in on it because they feel that they are part of that story.
- How did the movie and the story you were trying to tell evolve from the initial idea to the final film that we see on the big screen?
We always knew that we were going to end with the match but we also wanted to bring in the whole original nine and the formation of the Women’s Tennis Association; that is why the match mattered.
I think we changed our opinion of not all the women coming on board and rebelling against as along the way as we met people and we realised how difficult it was and just what they were up against.
When I first read about the story I remembered thinking ‘why didn’t Chris Evert join them?’ But when you meet her and talk to her you realise what a missive think that would have been for an eighteen year old girl to have defied every tennis authority in the world as well as her own father who was saying ‘no you cannot do this’.
We never changed what the structure of the film was going to be because we always knew that the match was going to be the ending. But along the way I think we re-emphasised certain things and the extent to which they were part of the movement or not.
I think when I first approached it I thought ‘of course the women knew they were feminists and they were doing a great thing for feminism’ then when you meet them and talk to them there were only a few of them who realised how big of thing this was at the time.
A lot of them were like ‘I just want to play tennis and I want to paid fairly for it’ they were not thinking ‘women have got to fight for equal rights and the world in general’.
- The movie is made up of a whole host of footage from the time - including great shots from the match between Billie and Bobby - so how did you go about getting your hands on that?
That is a really complicated process. We had a really good archive researcher who helped us. But it is a lot of rigorous research but it is also a bit of luck as well within the time frame. Certain things came about from connections that we had made.
The footage of the match between Bobby and Margaret Court has not been seen since the time; there was two minutes in a news reel but the actual film reels had been lost. But we managed to track them down via this random guy that we met at a tennis tournament in Charleston last year who was doing a PHD in the women’s tennis movement.
He put in touch with these other guys from California who had been involved in setting up the match in the first place.
To cut a long story short they ended up leading us to the original film reel of that match that have never been seen. So that was never before seen footage and that was a real coup.
When you are making a film like this you only have a limited amount of time but it really is like an Aladdin’s cave. Sometimes these places haven’t kept the film reels because they didn’t think they were important or other times they just have one, but it is damaged.
Other times they have more than we could have imagined. We also got personal archives from a few people who were collaborating with us as well.
- There are still a couple of weeks until the film is released but how have you found the early response to the film - it does seem to be going down well?
I have seen lots of positive things about it and I am very excited. But it is going to be decisive because of the tennis thing. We are doing the premiere with the WTA and all of the female tennis players are getting on board.
Yesterday there was an article in the Telegraph and you should go and read all the comments underneath from men as they are hilarious; it is as if we have not moved on in forty years. They all miss the point completely.
A lot of them are saying ‘you want to talk about equality? You want to talk about five sets verses three’. This is the argument they were having forty years ago; it was never about five sets versus three it is about who puts on a better show for the audience. You don’t go to an Elton John concert and ask how many songs is he going to sing.
I think the importance of the film will matter to the informed eye of the people who are watching it. If you are of that generation or of that mindset it may cause an interesting and divisive response in terms of whether her victory was a victory.
The other thing is a lot of people say that Bobby threw the match and lost it on purpose - this adds to the whole mythology. It is typical that they made a massive thing of the fact that he would win, you could say that it was a ridiculous challenge anyway because she was twenty nine and he was fifty five.
But when she did beat him it is taken away and undermined because obviously he was trying to get higher odds for the next match; we looked into that and it is bullshit.
I think it will depend who watches and I think it will be interesting to see who thinks it is a cause for celebration and who thinks it is another cause to get angry as to why women should be paid equally in tennis.
- This is you fourth film in the director's chair so what is it about this genre of film that you really seem to enjoy? And have you any plans to tackle a fiction feature film?
Yes I definitely have. I have made quite a few television documentaries but this is my first cinema release film. I love documentaries. I feel that I am young and I have a lot to learn about the world and people and life and documentaries are a ticket to do that.
It is such a privilege to get into people’s lives and get them to tell you things that have been really important to them. The access that you get it just incredible; we were hanging out with Billie Jean King in her house in New York.
I love of trying to think if create ways of editing together real testimony to make something that is more that the sum of its parts; I really do enjoy that. But in the future I really do want to be able to direct fiction.
- Finally what is next for you?
Good question. I have got a feature length documentary coming out - there is a UK and a US version of it - the UK version was on Channel Four a couple of weeks ago called 12 Year Old Lifer; which is about this murder case in America. The American version is coming out in July in America.
Once that has come out I am going to work with which stories I want to tell. I have got this company that I set up that makes short films about art, so I am trying to develop that. But I am looking for the next bit story that inspires me - but I haven’t found it yet.
Battle of the Sexes is released 26th June.