Interview with Mary Mazzio – Olympian, Lawyer, Filmmaker

On Thursday I shot an interview with Mary Mazzio for Episode Four of Inside Wellesley. Mary was an Olympic rower, a lawyer, and has directed six feature-length documentary films. I had a million questions to ask her, figuring that anyone who has achieved so much in so many different areas must have some serious pearls of wisdom to share. Mary definitely didn’t disappoint.

We covered most of her life, stopping to discuss the major milestones and how each one informed the next. She detailed her unlikely road to the Olympics, recounting all her failures as a high school athlete. We discussed her law career, instigated by her mother’s advice to get her degree because “a woman with a law degree will always be presumed intelligent.” We also covered her current career as a filmmaker, something I was particularly curious about.

I asked Mary if there was a specific event in her youth that steered her toward filmmaking. She remembered being brought to tears as a girl after seeing Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel. It was at that point that she realized the “extraordinary power” of film. That power is something Mazzio has since harnessed to tackle topics like poverty, immigration, and food justice. Tom Freidman of the New York Times felt her last film ten9eight was so important that he wrote, “Obama should arrange for this movie to be shown in every classroom in America. It is the most inspirational, heartwarming film you will ever see.”

According to Mary, her numerous successes boil down to a few basic ingredients – a willingness to work harder than everyone else, a refusal to be deterred by failure, and a generally optimistic attitude. Relying on those things allowed her to reach the Olympics with a “modicum” of talent, build a successful law career, and get her fifth film a national distribution deal – something star-studded indies fresh out of Cannes often can’t do. She still considers herself just a hockey-mom from Needham, “but if you work really hard and try to do something with excellence, you may not always get what you tried for, but good things are going to happen, no matter what.”

Stay tuned for Mary’s segment on Inside Wellesley coming this month!