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 to the project, including Kazan. So Loden directed it herself, made in collaboration with Cinematographer and Editor Nicholas T. Proferes, on a meager budget of $115,000.