Worldly Advice

In her directorial debut, In A World..., Lake Bell – the film's writer/director/star – plays an aspiring voiceover actor who yearns to be the first woman to intone the title's mythical words in a movie trailer. It wasn't a stretch. “Voiceovers, voices, mimicking announcers' voices, accents, that was totally my repertoire growing up,” says Bell. “I really did record people with a tape-recorder. And trailers are like the most epic version of voice work; that omniscient 'Voice of God' was always remarkable to me. I always used to do that voice, just goofing around – like, if I'd have to go to the bathroom, be like 'In a world where one woman...' – and then I realised that I'd never heard a woman's voice be allowed to be the Voice of God, which became an interesting conversation on men and women, and gender, and Hollywood.”

In A World... is the first movie to ever take place wholly within this insider industry. “The Golden Trailer Awards are a real ceremony. There have been lots of people in the voiceover community who've reached out to me to say 'Thank you for accurately depicting my world.' So many niche industries are super competitive, and people who've made their way to the top don't want to share the pot; that's just human nature, right? It's not pretty, but it's real.”

Here, the chief rivalry is between Bell and her own father (Fred Melamed of A Serious Man). “It became like therapy to me, this place where I could explore all these interpersonal relationships from my own family. There's a universality to it because it's really a film about a father/daughter relationship, about familial rivalry, and about a egomaniacal patriarch.”

And it's a film about gender; where even in the faceless world of voice work (“You are your voice, and you can manipulate it to be any way, any age, any race, any gender”), old male standards die hard. “This array of headless sounds telling us what to buy or think, that was always mystifying to me. If a woman's voiceover is used to sell a luxury car, for example, the insinuation is always, 'if you buy this car, you'll get to have sex with me,' never: 'If you buy this car, you'll get to be me, a strong, powerful woman'... Exploring this idea made me somewhat obsessed with my own personal problems with how young women vocally depict themselves today, and the vocal trends that exist. Hence the 'sexy baby vocal virus', which is something that is my own personal plight.”

Young women who dare to write and direct their own films often come up against such gender prejudice, but making In A World…, Bell didn't encounter any. “When you're dealing with a budget as low as mine, the stakes are too low,” she says. “When you make an independent movie, you just wanna make sure your mum sees it. Anything that comes after is just a bonus.”