 While on safari with Kazan in 1966, a mutual friend, Harry Schuster, offered Loden $100,000 to make her own movie.Encouraged, she wrote the screenplay for "Wanda".The story, an existential rumination on a poverty-stricken woman adrift in Pennsylvania coal country, did not attract any potential directors, including Kazan, so Loden directed it herself, in collaboration with cinematographer and editor Nicholas T. Proferes, on a meager budget of $115,000.