Swimming with Sharks (1994)
I hate to recommend a movie starring Kevin Spacey, but it’s almost appropriate that the guy who plays the abusive boss in this film is himself an abusive person in real life. Watching Swimming with Sharks, which deals with the relationship between a cruel movie mogul and his new assistant (Frank Whaley), you’re drawn to the spectacle of Spacey’s character because awful people are often more interesting screen personalities. The film quickly goes to dark places, though, and ends up even darker, especially for its biggest female role. But it’s more apt — albeit to the extreme — to the misogyny of that world.
Office Space (1999)
Green has noted that she watched a number of office-set movies in preparation for making The Assistant, but I haven’t seen which ones specifically she used as a reference. I do know she watched some of the TV series The Office, but that’s no good for this list. So, I’m recommending the closest thing cinematically: Mike Judge’s hilarious comedy Office Space. The boss is horrible but maybe not abusive. Still, there are parts to Office Space that do, like The Assistant, feel akin to a horror movie.
Secretary (2002)
This is a tricky movie to pull off, but writer Erin Cressida Wilson and director Steven Shainberg managed to do it. Secretary stars Maggie Gyllenhaal as a lawyer’s assistant who enters into a consensual sadomasochistic relationship with her boss, played by James Spader. In a way, it brings back and offers a twist on the old fashioned film depiction of the boss/secretary romance without any sense of regression. And in a way, the movie also challenges modern expectations for Spader’s character to come off as an abuser without dismissing the reality of stories depicted in something like The Assistant.
Elephant (2003) and Last Days (2005)
I thought about Gus Van Sant’s early 2000s “Death Trilogy,” particularly Elephant and Last Days, while watching The Assistant. With a minimalist aesthetic, those films similarly focus on the mundanity of life on the surface of and just before a tragedy. Another reason I expected The Assistant to end differently. As it turns out, Kitty Green did watch Elephant, which is a fictionalization of the Columbine school shooting, ahead of making her film. But this was specifically for the reference of its sound, and she even hired Leslie Shatz, the sound designer for all three parts of the “Death Trilogy,” for The Assistant.
“Early on, we knew that we needed a really great sound designer,” Green says in an interview for Slashfilm. “We looked at Elephant and a bunch of films that have a really incredible soundscape built into them. [Our sound designer] sent out a bunch of people to record office noises, buzzes, hums of lights. We were able to create a lot of tension with that. There’s also a musicality to it — you can really get tones out of the hums and buzzes that you can play around with.”
The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
There’s nothing really wrong with The Devil Wears Prada, but I am recommending it as a contrasting take. If The Assistant had been made in Hollywood, the result would be something more like this fictionalized portrayal of Vogue magazine’s Anna Wintour as a horrible boss. The bad guy, a movie mogul caricaturing Harvey Weinstein, would definitely have overshadowed the Jane character. Through Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly, Wintour comes off terribly but also fabulously. In the end, it’s a win for her.
Hunger (2008)
Steve McQueen’s biographical drama about IRA member Bobby Sands (portrayed in a breakout performance by Michael Fassbender) and his hunger strike while in prison probably doesn’t seem that relevant to The Assistant. But Kitty Green has mentioned it as one of the movies she watched in preparation for the HR confrontation scene featuring Matthew Macfadyen.
“There’s a scene in Steve McQueen’s Hunger which is a seventeen-minute dialogue,” she says in an interview for Letterboxd News.” It’s an incredible scene. It’s not an argument but still some sort of confrontation. I was interested in scenes like that which are really long and stand out from the rest of the movie.”
The Hateful Eight (2015)
And now I’m recommending a 19th century-set film by Quentin Tarantino that’s mostly an homage to his favorite Spaghetti Westerns? Yes, well, for the people wondering what a fictionalized portrayal of Harvey Weinstein would have been like, The Hateful Eight sort of offers that. In the documentary QT8: The First Eight, producer Stacey Sher reveals that Kurt Russell’s bounty hunter character, John Ruth, was based on Weinstein (who distributed The Hateful Eight). At least that was the intention. “If you read it on the page,” Sher says, “it was a little more accurate. Kurt is the most charming person on the planet.”
Indignation (2016)
Here’s another period piece, this one set in the 1950s, that inspired Kitty Green in the making of The Assistant, specifically for the HR scene. In the Letterboxd News interview, she acknowledges, “James Schamus, one of my producers, made a film called Indignation, which has a confrontation between two characters, which also influenced the structure of what I was doing.” The confrontation she’s referring to in the Philip Roth adaptation is the heart of this film, lasts almost twenty minutes, and involves the main character, a college student played by Logan Lerman, and his dean, played by Tracy Letts.
Personal Shopper (2016)
Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper is another movie in which you don’t really see the boss. She’s not entirely off-screen a la the guy in The Assistant, but it’s pretty close. Kristen Stewart plays the titular employee who assists a famous supermodel in menial tasks, mostly buying clothes and other goods, and it’s pretty much thankless work for a terrible human being. There’s also much more going on in Personal Shopper, all of which is spoiler territory. Just watch it.
Untouchable (2019), On the Record (2020), and Athlete A (2020)
For the true story of Harvey Weinstein, there are a handful of documentaries, including 2011’s Unauthorized: The Harvey Weinstein Project, which was made years before the full extent of his creepiness and criminality was exposed. Since his arrest, the most notable feature on the scandal is Ursula Macfarlane’s Untouchable (also streaming on Hulu), which does a good job covering his background as well as multiple survivor’s accounts of his inappropriate and illegal behavior.
Where I wish Untouchable was better is in the amount of focus on Weinstein. While it seems obvious that a documentary about him and his crimes would have a lot of images of the man and some biographical material, but it’s a little much and kind of overshadows the women giving testimonials. Compare it to The Assistant, which intentionally keeps the Weinstein type out of the picture in order to stay centered on the woman’s story.
Two more recent films in the necessary trend of abuse docs are On the Record and Athlete A. The former is mostly tied to the allegations against moguls, albeit in the music business rather than the film industry, but it shines most of its spotlight on the women making those claims, keeping the camera on them to respect their every word. Athlete A isn’t about abused employees so much but it’s an even stronger film in part due to how it honors the women as survivors who get to tell their stories.
Related Topics: Movie DNA, The Assistant
