Where are all the great female roles?

Name one female best actress performance as strong as Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood? Just one, in the last ten years! Best actress awards routinely break my heart, because the winners, while talented, rarely deliver to the same degree that the best actor winners regularly do.

It's not the women. It's the scripts.

Here's how I see it: performance is really the only environment where it can be safe and good to stress-test a person's character. Taking a woman to her emotional limits on film can show the world how strong she is.

But then you have to be right there for her. She has to know she's safe.

What's hotter than a woman, an actor, pushed to the sweaty extreme of her capacity for understanding, emotion, and growth? Watching an actress push right up to her limits, and past them, to completely give herself to the moment... that's what separates the women from the girls, right there. To take those big, big risks, to surprise herself and everyone else, and then to collapse into the safe place you've kept for her so she can come back to herself a stronger, more whole person...

How can male directors resist this relationship? That's what I don't understand.

Then again, the great ones can't. Autumn Sonata? Liv Ullman's best performance in a Bergman film. Woody Allen. Fellini. Tarkovski's Solaris, in which Hari practically tears her own guts out. And on and on...

Maybe the problem is that taking those risks goes against everything men are taught about women. Either women are strong, independent freedom fighters or they're the delicate fairer sex. Right? RIGHT?

On the one hand, I think directors and producers are afraid of damaging the woman. On the other hand, I think they're also afraid the woman will prove to be far stronger than the conflict of the story. Who wants to find out their deepest fears and biggest hang-ups are actually stupid little nothings - in public, no less?

Isn't it always about fear? And isn't fear always a two-way, damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario?

You've got to trust the woman actor unconditionally, and then you have to support her unconditionally. That's how you do it.

With men, it's actually not that way. Men are more predictable, and therefore safer to other men. We relate to each other conditionally. Totally conditionally. I trust you to do this one thing, and I'll give you what you need to get the job done.

With a woman actress you're going to get more than you bargained for, and that scares people. Instead of trusting and loving our actresses unconditionally, we write them very specific, very safe rolls. Here, lady. Here's an emotional range in which you can work. Keep it safe, will you?

In American Cinema, we have very few Haris. Very few Liv Ullman performances.

That's the price we pay for cowardice.