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When Katja Meier got on to a leading scheme for female writers over the age of 40, she could not have been more delighted.
After finishing her script, production companies loved it – but had just one request: could she make the female protagonist 20 years younger?
“You’re thinking, ‘Oh my God, the script came out of a programme for women over 40, and I’m sitting here being told the only way to get it made is to make my lead woman 35?’,” she says. “It was literally heartbreaking.”
Despite being backed by the UK arms of the Writers Lab programme, which has backers including Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman, she was met with blank stares in multiple meetings when she argued that her target audience of women over 50 were underserved.
“In one pitch somebody told me: ‘Yeah, we don’t really believe that women over 50 are a valid audience’,” she says with a laugh. “And I was just like, ‘are you fucking kidding me?’.”
As such, Meier, 52, did what women of a certain age are wont to do – she got on with it. Having set up her own production company, Zenka Films, she begged and borrowed to fund the show’s pilot.
Along with director Delia Mayer, director of photography Isabelle Simmen and camerawoman Caroline Hepting, her 25-strong team filmed in below-zero temperatures in the Swiss Alps for six days in March last year.
None of the crew were paid, costs were met with grants and the local campsite and hotels gave free support.
Now she is hoping that her target audience will prove their validity – and help her fund the rest of the series. This week $hare, which tells the story of 59-year-old Lena Corbyn and her bid to upend the British-Swiss mining company she part inherits, launched on the independent streaming service Olyn, a platform which allows creators to sell their content directly to viewers. Meier is asking viewers to pay $8.95 (£7.24) – of which the series’ makers get $5 after taxes and fees – and asking supporters to leave feedback and become part of the show’s creative community.
To get the show made they will need a whopping 500,000 viewers, but she says many donations are larger than the suggested amount. “A lot of people in the industry will just laugh at me and say for 500,000 viewers you need a huge marketing budget,” she says. “But as a team we have been told so many times you cannot do it, and we keep proving that it can be done.”
Statistics suggest that despite high-profile programmes like the Writers Lab and outspoken comments from big-name stars like Kidman and Michelle Yeoh, the film and television industry remains a heavily male-dominated enclave.
According to research from the Centre for the Study of Women in Television and Film, women made up 23% of creators on original television series in 2023-24, down from 30% in 2021-22. Women are also erased onscreen as they get older – the number of female leads in Hollywood movies hit a 10-year low last year, according to a study by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. In British films men over the age of 50 outnumber their female counterparts by a ratio of two to one, according to research from the Centre for Ageing Better.
Meier hopes that the alternative way $hare is being funded and created can act as a template for other creators struggling to get their work made – as well as a challenge to the status quo. Like the series’ protagonist – who is in part inspired by the pioneering computer programmer Dame Steve Shirley, who made 70 of her staff millionaires, the screenwriter is interested in a more equal distribution of money and power in the creative industries. Giving a small example, she explains that the credits for $hare are presented in alphabetical order, with the assistant camera (who supports the camera operator) and catering both appearing before her.
“The industry is broken, it is in recession, at the moment hardly anything is getting produced. Maybe we can be a prototype for a new model,” she says. “I want to get my story produced, but I’m also an audience member – I want to see women of all ages on screen, and I want them to see in inspiring roles.”
Despite the sexism she has faced, Meier is confident that the series will be made. “Women are always being told we should wait. Like Sleeping Beauty, you’re supposed to lie there and wait for somebody to see how talented and beautiful you are,” she says. “No. Honestly, at my age, I don’t have the time for that. I’d rather go out there and do this thing.”
