Book Reviews
San Francisco Chronicle
"Chopra’s efforts paved the way for the likes of Jane Campion, Sarah Polley, Ava DuVernay and others. It was never easy. But love rarely is.”
The Washington Post
"Her autobiography traces the evolving role of women directors in Hollywood by drawing extensively on her own five decades in film and television. The insights she offers into the profession are rare . . . Chopra writes in a prose style that is both unflinching and unsentimental."
Library Journal. **Starred review**
"Award-winning film director Chopra’s memoir pulls no punches. She candidly describes navigating sexism and abuse in the film industry; her start as a documentarian; her groundbreaking autobiographical short Joyce at 34; winning Best Director at the Sundance Film Festival for her first feature film, Smooth Talk; and her constant battles with Hollywood producers who refused to work with a woman director.”
Booklist
"Chopra chronicles her career as a pioneering film and television director during an era in which women were not being welcomed into the field. She has now created an engaging account of the life of a working director who persevered through numerous and harrowing setbacks."
LitHub
"From Jean-Luc Godard to Bong Joon-ho: Joyce Chopra on the Films That Have Influenced Her.”
Publishers Weekly
"Documentarian Chopra offers an insider’s perspective and settles some scores in this shrewd memoir of her life in the film and TV industries. Brisk and unsentimental, Chopra writes with fierce intent to set the record straight. Much like Anne Theroux's The Year of the End, this is a revealing and retributive glimpse behind the curtain.”
ALTA
"In her roller coaster of a memoir, Chopra shares what it was like to be one of the first female directors in Los Angeles. Recalling remarkable experiences of sexism, the effort of balancing a career with the pressures of motherhood, friendships with Hollywood legends, and the ways filmmaking has changed over the past 60 years, this memoir sheds light on the continuing fight for women’s rights.”
LIBER
"It’s exhilarating to travel alongside her as so many well-known figures cross her path; in every phase of her adult life, Joyce Chopra has been there, in the thick of things, at the center of key movements and moments."
IndieWire
"Go Ahead, Call Joyce Chopra a ‘Lady Director’ One More Time"
Inklette Magazine
“This memoir should assume its rightful place among core texts in film studies…”
Compulsive Reader
"A fascinating insider view of the film industry from a director’s perspective."
Picture This Post
“An important capsule of the importance of equality and what is lost when we force quiet on promising creative voices.”
Daily Progress
“In ‘Lady Director,’ Joyce Chopra looks back at career.”
425 Magazine
“Joyce at 86”
Mental Floss Newsletter
"How Joyce Chopra Filmed the First Live Birth on Television — Hers"
Willamette Weekly
"In Her Memoir “Lady Director,” Joyce Chopra Recounts Her Groundbreaking Career in Hollywood”
Talkhouse
Exclusive Book Excerpt: From Lady Director, Joyce Chopra on Living the Bohemian Life in Paris
Other Recent Press
Hollywood Reporter
"Long before Netflix's NC-17 Marilyn Monroe movie arrived amid controversy, Chopra made a TV miniseries for CBS based on the same acclaimed Joyce Carol Oates novel.”
IndieWire
“Over 20 years ago, acclaimed director Joyce Chopra produced the first adaptation—a tv-movie—of Joyce Carol Oates' novel Blonde. Unlike Dominik’s interpretation, Chopra’s is now being admired for its empathetic, humane approach to the telling of Monroe’s life. It is, also, the only Monroe biopic to be written and directed by women.”
“Chopra’s memoir – both personal and political – is a deeply necessary corrective to histories of cinema and tales of the great artists of the 60s and 70s that tend to focus on big men and their big movies. Like all of Chopra’s work, this memoir candidly reminds us of the injustices that structure our world, and gently says, we can do better. The book is a gift to all of us digging for authentic, revealing stories about the lives of women artists.”
— Shilyh Warren —
Film Professor, University of Texas and author of Subject to Reality: Women and Documentary