Patty Jenkins

• 1. Introduction

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  Patty Jenkins was seven years old when her father died during a NATO mock dogfight. He was thirty-one years old, a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot who had earned a Silver Star in Vietnam. Not long after, her mother was driving the family from Kansas to San Francisco and stopped to drop Patty and her sister off at a movie theater. The film was the original Superman, starring Christopher Reeve. Something in that film caught and held her. It planted a seed that would take two decades to fully flower. What drives a person shaped by loss and constant movement toward making some of the most commercially successful films in Hollywood history? And what does it mean to do that as a woman in an industry that spent years quietly telling women like her to stay in their lane?

• 2. Military Childhood

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  William T. Jenkins was a fighter pilot and U.S. Air Force officer who served in Vietnam, earning a Silver Star for his actions there. His daughter Patricia Lea Jenkins was born in Victorville, California, on the 24th of July 1971, into a life built around his postings. The family moved frequently, spending time in Thailand and Germany before settling in Lawrence, Kansas. When he died at thirty-one in a training accident, the family's center of gravity shifted to her mother, Emily Roth, who would later work in San Francisco as an environmental scientist.

  Jenkins finished most of her schooling in Lawrence, then moved with her family to Washington, D.C. for her senior year of high school. She graduated from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1993 with an undergraduate degree in Painting. She went on to earn a master's degree in directing from the AFI Conservatory in 2000. The path from painting to film was not direct. Starting at age twenty, while interning at a commercial production company, she was told she could learn filmmaking by working on set for free. She did exactly that for months, eventually advancing to second assistant camera and focus puller, then spending eight years as a camerawoman.

  A director of photography she worked with while shooting a Michael Jackson music video recommended she attend the American Film Institute. That recommendation sent her life in a new direction, toward the career she had been circling since that Kansas movie theater.

• 3. Monster and Aileen Wuornos

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  Aileen Wuornos was a street prostitute who killed seven of her male clients during a murder spree in 1989-1990 and was on death row when Jenkins first wrote to her. Jenkins had originally tried to get producer Brad Wyman to direct what would become Monster, but Wyman urged her to write the script herself. Wuornos was initially distrustful of Jenkins. Then, on the night before her execution, Wuornos left Jenkins all of her personal letters. Jenkins has described that exchange as convincing her she was the only person who could tell this story.

  She spent months researching Wuornos's life, talking to people who knew her and visiting Florida locations tied to the real case. The film was made on a budget of one and a half million dollars, with Charlize Theron in the lead role. Theron's performance earned her first and only Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role. Monster grossed sixty-four point two million dollars. Critic Roger Ebert ranked it first on his list of the best films of 2003, and later third on his list of the best films of the entire decade.

  For the film, Jenkins won the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature and the Franklin J. Schaffner Award from the American Film Institute. She was also nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Screenplay. Jenkins has said the exchange with Wuornos shaped her commitment to telling stories about complicated, often misunderstood women, an orientation that would run through every project she touched afterward.

• 4. The Television Years

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  After Monster, Jenkins was approached by former U.S. Air Force test pilot Chuck Yeager to develop a film about his life. That project never happened. A Ryan Gosling film called I Am Superman, unrelated to the DC Comics character, fell through when Jenkins became pregnant. What followed was a decade primarily in television, during which she directed episodes of Arrested Development and Entourage, among other projects.

  In 2011, she directed a segment of the made-for-television anthology film Five, earning an Emmy nomination. That same year she directed the pilot of AMC's The Killing. The pilot earned her a second Emmy nomination and a win at the 2012 Directors Guild of America Awards for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Dramatic Series. Jenkins has spoken publicly about how difficult it was during this period for female directors of character-driven films to secure financing for larger feature projects. Studios offered her crime dramas and biopics similar to Monster, and she turned them down to avoid being typecast.

  In October 2011, she was hired to direct Thor: The Dark World but left the project after less than two months due to creative differences. Her vision for the film was a Romeo-and-Juliet-style space epic; Marvel Studios wanted something different. Her departure became a widely discussed example of female directors encountering creative constraints inside major franchises. By 2014 she had been attached to a film called Sweetheart, about a female assassin, but that project was never made either.

• 5. Wonder Woman and Pay Equity

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  When Wonder Woman was released in June 2017, Jenkins became the first female director of an American studio superhero film and the third female director to direct a film with a budget over one hundred million dollars. The film starred Gal Gadot with a screenplay by Allan Heinberg and a story co-written by Heinberg, Zack Snyder, and Jason Fuchs. It opened to the biggest domestic opening weekend for a female director at that point, surpassing Fifty Shades of Grey, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson. The film grossed over eight hundred million dollars worldwide, exceeding original box office predictions, and eventually became the highest-grossing film directed by a woman, until Frozen II and Captain Marvel displaced it in 2019.

  The salary negotiations for the sequel became a landmark conversation in Hollywood. Jenkins has said she considered walking away from Wonder Woman 2 due to a salary dispute with Warner Bros. Her goal was to receive the same pay her male counterparts would earn for a comparable tentpole film. She negotiated an estimated seven to nine million dollars for Wonder Woman 1984, which would have set a record for a female filmmaker. Because she had signed on to the first film without a guarantee of directing a second, she was in a stronger negotiating position when the sequel was confirmed. The ability to secure pay equal to male directors of similar-budget films was viewed broadly as a significant moment for women working in Hollywood.

  On the 6th of December 2017, Time named Jenkins the seventh runner-up for Person of the Year.

• 6. Style, Themes, and Influences

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  Connie Nielsen, who plays Hippolyta in the Wonder Woman franchise, has said Jenkins fought to include feminist themes in the film and rejected a proposed origin story for the Amazons that would have portrayed them as victims rather than warriors. Jenkins's approach in Wonder Woman was to position Diana Prince as a universal human character experienced from the inside, not observed from the outside. The major theme of the film, as Jenkins has described it, is the idea that humans themselves are the only real villains.

  Her earlier work in Monster explored morality and femininity directly, and the emotional honesty she developed through her correspondence with Aileen Wuornos carried over into her directorial approach. Mentors and influences she has named include Gary Ross, Kathryn Bigelow, and Steve Perry. Jenkins has said Perry served as a musical consultant on Monster and that she often discusses the process of making soundtracks with musicians, drawing a parallel between the organization of music and the structure of drama. She uses rhythmic thinking to direct the delivery of dialogue.

  As a student at AFI, Jenkins was an avid fan of the films of Pedro Almodóvar. Her 2001 short Velocity Rules, which she described as a cross between a superhero film and Almodóvar's tone, followed an accident-prone housewife who discovers she is a superhero. The film won the Warner Brothers Production Grant. The tension between genre mechanics and grounded character psychology has remained a constant in her work.

• 7. Projects After Wonder Woman

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  In July 2017, the cable network TNT announced Jenkins would direct the premiere of a six-episode drama called I Am the Night, written by her husband Sam Sheridan and starring Chris Pine. Jenkins also served as executive producer. The series allowed her to return to darker visual storytelling, echoing stylistic choices from Monster but within a prestige television format.

  In October 2020, it was announced Jenkins and Gal Gadot would collaborate again on a film about Cleopatra, with Gadot in the title role. Jenkins dropped out as director in December 2021, remaining as producer, to focus on a third Wonder Woman film and Rogue Squadron. The third Wonder Woman film was reported in December 2022 by The Hollywood Reporter as not moving forward and was described as dead in its current form, as it did not fit the plans of the newly appointed DC Studios heads. Jenkins later released a public statement saying she had been willing to revise her treatment but that the studio chose a different direction.

  Disney announced in December 2020 that Jenkins would direct Rogue Squadron, a Star Wars spin-off film about a group of starfighter pilots, originally scheduled for release on the 22nd of December 2023. She would have been the first female director to helm a Star Wars film. The production was delayed, and Disney removed the film from its release schedule in September 2022. It was shelved in March 2023. In March 2024, Jenkins revealed she had returned to the project, finalizing a deal with Lucasfilm prior to the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike, and that she now owes a new draft of the script. She has cited her father's military aviation background as a major source of inspiration for the project, a thread that runs all the way back to that fighter pilot who died in Kansas when she was seven.