A Conversation with Director Amy Goldstein of Underestimate The Girl

Director Amy Goldstein has been working in the film industry since the nineties as both a director and a writer. Her work has ranged from features and television shows to award winning music videos. Now she’s headed back into documentaries with a new release from Alamo Drafthouse Underestimate The Girl (2020), a documentary about British singer-songwriter Kate Nash and her journey from pop to punk, London to LA, and from music to Netflix’s Glow.

This interview has been edited and condensed

Back Row: We’ll get this started with some basic info about your work and how you got started on this documentary. What’s your background in film?

Amy Goldstein: I went to film school at NYU. I come from narrative; I directed some television, a lot of music videos. I wrote for TV, I wrote a couple of features, I directed a few features. And, you know, it’s hard to be a woman in the film business. I’d write something and a studio would pick it up and they’d say, “oh we’re going to have this hot young music video director direct it,” and I’d be like, “have you seen that I did Rod Stewart’s number one video on MTV right now?” And they’d be like, “oh no, but we’ve got this guy to do it.” (laughs) It was very open, the discrimination. It wasn’t something hidden.

My thesis film from graduate school which premiered in Toronto was a vampire lesbian musical and they would say things to me, “we noticed your crew was all women,” and I’d be like, “well, that’s who was interested in working on the movie.” Why is that a strange thing or something?

On getting into documentaries and meeting Kate:

My brother, who works in film journalism, had said, “why don’t you start doing documentaries?” And I told him that I didn’t know how to make them, and he said, “well, why don’t you try?” Kinda of saying then you wouldn’t have to deal with these people who clearly aren’t playing fair. And I knew a bunch of people who were hula hooping and they changed their names and their lives and they seemed much happier. So I interviewed a bunch of them, a lot of them naked, and I cut it together and I applied for some grants and I got them. Which was shocking. Then I went and learned a lot about who started the movement, and it’s a crazy entrepreneurial effort mainly entirely women, and it’s the first subculture really that I’ve ever known of that was jump started by women. With each person [in the documentary The Hooping Life], hula hooping had dramatically changed their lives.

As I was finishing that, I met two trans guys, and we decided to do a kind of follow documentary and PBS picked it up and helped us make it. And while I was doing that, I met Kate [Nash] who was at a really interesting point in her career where she was just starting to get it back on her own. She kind of wanted to have it documented...we (laughs) we share a hairdresser. She was dying her hair hot pink for Coachella to match these vaginas she was putting on the stage. And we sort of just jumped in because how could we not be filming that? We thought we’d try to get funding from a cable company or Vimeo or someone, and we had a lot of meetings and how they wanted to tell the story was always about her dating, things that were just not what she wanted to be doing and not the story we wanted to show. So we just kind of kept filming and stuff happened that really made it a movie.

On her documentary process and artistic collaboration:

I always give people cameras. Some people take to them more than others. Kate took to it really well. You know, we looked through hundreds of thousands of hours, and she helps tell the story. She gets into rooms we can’t get into, and it’s very personal. It’s a dimension of film that changes because people are different when you’re not in the room. And we were  a very small crew. Mainly it was filmed by myself as cinematographer with multiple cameras and my producer recorded sound. That’s how we were able to tour because you can’t fit that many people on a bus but also, everyone kind of got used to us and forgot we were there.

BR: While I was watching it, I had to wonder if it was filmed in real time.

Yeah, totally. Well, not the stuff from the past, right? Like, there’s some archival footage from her earlier career when around 18, 19 she goes platinum. Then when she moves to LA and starts her career again, we met her. We met her as she was moving to LA. So four and a half, five years is in real time. We knew that Kate was really fighting back to have this independent career, and she really wanted to act actually. She came to LA in part to do that, and that’s when we hooked up with her. The majority of the film is in real time. 

BR: Kate talks about how in her earlier career, her songs were often described as “silly, teen girl” songs. Working in film, have you seen your own work infantilized?

The point about her teenage songs, and if you listen to the lyrics is that they actually aren’t, and she did become a soundtrack to young women’s lives and she talked about things that weren’t being talked about in top songs. What’s crazy is that they were thought of as pop. Because they really don’t have the lyrics as pop songs. What she likes to say is that teenage girls do have important things to say. The title of the film, Underestimate the Girl, is based on a song she had around that time, which she played at a concert when her record company was there ten times. She played it over and over and over.

Kate was being asked to re-record a song because she screamed on the track, and whoever was representing her at that time didn’t feel they could go out to a record label and try to get her new music out if she screamed.

But, of course, as a screenwriter people would totally say things like, “you can’t make the movie about that.” And, you know, gay people and trans people and anyone different is invisible. So many stories when I first started out but the answer was just no.

On making money with art and the state of documentary films:

The reason so many women work in documentaries is because we’re either not paid or severely underpaid. Documentaries are not the field you pick to make money. Every once in a while one breaks through but it takes years to make them. I think there’s a renaissance going on with documentaries, which is really great, and we’re probably going to be able to keep making them but it’s still not a financially viable field.

But I think I identify with Kate in so many ways. I actually had thought about that: her choice to make a punk album was like my choice to make documentaries. My agent brought me–you know, trying to bring me things that people wanted, and I started to stop enjoying making films because I was trying to make things they wanted me to make and I wasn’t being very authentic. I didn’t think I was doing a very good job of things. I mean, I love the hula hoopers! I feel like I’m celebrating heroes of mine.

Underestimate The Girl is available on BBC iPlayer and Alamo Drafthouse.