Talent Development Resources..............directing: page 2*****

I actually learned my craft well before I got into school [UCLA]. It started as a survival instinct, and ended up being my job. When I was 15 years old, I put together a whole fantasy world for myself because my home life was not so good.  I went a little bit off the deep end. It was 1969, and there were all these rumors that Paul McCartney was dead, and all these clues on the album cover and stuff.  To escape my home life, I started to believe that I was actually communicating through a Oija board with a dead Paul McCartney. This actually saved my life, because it transported me into this fantasy world where I learned to create characters, talk to them, and make up stories.  Allison Anders**from book: **Great Women of Film  by Helena Lumme

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Taking a break from directing an episode of Sex and the City, Allison Anders, who has made such indie films as Sugartown, Grace of My Heart and Gas Food Lodging, says: "I've seen men who can't direct their way out of a paper bag make a film that bombs, and they turn around and get a huge studio film.... When our movies don't [succeed], we don't get a chance to make a second movie." Most of the filmmakers interviewed for this story tell the same tale. In a town based on the buddy system, where socializing and work are intertwined, executives prefer to hire friends who can go with them on rafting trips and to Lakers games. "Male directors who haven't had a hit in 20 years continue to get work, while most women drop off the radar after one flop. Faced with the prospect of a client's decreased earning potential, agents rapidly lose interest. The result is that many talented women don't get a chance to learn their craft and build a [career] over time."     from article: The industry women on the side by Laurie Winer, Los Angeles Magazine

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I have a different reason to choose what I choose as a director and what I choose as an actor. Acting is much more about wondering who I might have been... hypothetical situations.. people I'm either afraid to be or that aren't like me, so I wonder what I might have been like if I was more that way. They're much more about shadow sides of myself, so I get to take them on for three or four months and I get to see the world through this person's eyes and maybe even solve a problem.    Jodie Foster   [Toronto Sun 10.29.95]

Acting, directing, and producing are very different tasks. Of these three, directing is my favorite.  It's not just half of you, it's all of you. It's the music I hear, the colors I see, the experiences I've had, the people I've known, the stories that move me.  I think it very much reflects who I am as a person.  My acting reflects who I'm not. The characters I play are people I could never be, but wonder, "Gee, what would that be like?" My acting is a reflection of my questions about life. Jodie Foster  quote and photo from book: Great Women of Film  by Helena Lumme

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Motherhood hasn't just changed Lea Pool's life; it's changed her filmmaking. "I'm more open, you know, to say it simply," says Pool, whose seventh feature film Lost And Delirious... [is] a deeply felt coming of age story, maybe her most emotional film yet.  For that, she credits her mini muse, daughter Giulia, now 51/2, for rearranging her priorities, improving her communications skills and loosening her own emotions.  "Before this, filmmaking was the centre of my life. It was the main part of my life. So it had a kind of importance and gravity that made it perhaps too much," said Pool, who is 50 this year.  "In a way I take more risks now knowing that it's not so important. But in fact taking risks is a good thing, because you move better, you communicate better, it's more open to a larger audience, it gives more power to what you are doing."

Lost And Delirious, based on Susan Swan's 1993 novel The Wives of Bath, is about boarding school roommates Paulie (Piper Perabo), Tory (Jessica Pare) and Mouse (Mischa Barton).  Looming large is the influence of their unseen mothers: Unsophisticated Mouse's mother is dead, Paulie's is a mystery figure who gave her up at birth, and Tory's embodies the harsh societal judgment she fears will result if she acknowledges her love for Paulie.  When Tory denies their affair and rejects Paulie, tragedy results. Taking the trio through such intense territory, the director found herself playing mother to Perabo, Pare and Barton, who were 22, 19 and 15 at the time of filming.  "(I) was more like a mother helping them so that they can fly by themselves. It's very deep, and they go very far in their emotions so you have to be very careful with them," Pool explained.  "You have to help them and protect them and give them comfort to do what they have to do ... They can go as far as they want and I will be there. They can fall and it's okay."   [Toronto Sun, July 27, 2001] **dvd:**Lost And Delirious

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There are obvious areas in my life where I was almost good enough to do something, but not quite good enough to do it. Like I have a sense of style, but I couldn't be a clothing designer. And a musical talent, too, but I couldn't be a composer. But when you're directing, you get to use all of these talents, and all these parts of yourself, and bring them together and really create a world. Particularly when you've written it, it's really special and exciting to watch that happen. I honestly don't think I bring anything different to a movie set because I'm a woman. I go about working on a film the same way anybody does, male or female. When you're work is done, and you're trying to market the film, you're ghettoized then: 'You're a woman filmmaker.' I didn't know that I was. I just thought I was a person making a film. Adrienne Shelly - in a Sundance Channel interview about her film "I'll Take You There."

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[When you saw movies did you think, 'I want to do that'? I mean, you started making films when you were kids, didn't you?] Ethan Coen: Yeah. Super-8 things. But it didn't rise to the level of serious ambition. It was another way of goofing off. I don't know when it got sort of serious for me. Certainly later than Joel, since he went to film school and I didn't. For me it was more an opportunity that presented itself through Joel's work than any long-harboured ambition I'd had. Joel Coen: But these things are sometimes just pursuing what might be a casual interest in the path of least resistance. Even the decision to go to film school. Something that strikes you at that moment as being a bit more interesting than something else. It's not as if you really know what you're going to do with it. Or if you're going to do anything with it. Ethan Coen: Yeah. There are other people you read about like Scorsese for whom it seemed like a religion from an early age. It certainly wasn't that with either of us. ***from book:**Stephen Lowenstein. My First Movie : Twenty Celebrated Directors Talk About Their First Film

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[What made you want to direct the material in "Due East?"] Every woman that I have ever known has at sometime been worried because her period has been late, tried to get pregnant, suffered a miscarriage, had to make the choice of having an abortion, after discovering she has an unwanted pregnancy. Every woman I know has gone through one or a number of these things.  It is something that is rarely addressed in material. Also because I grew up in a small town with all the prerequisites, small-mindedness, unrequited dreams and so-on, and I grew up in a family of women - I have five sisters- so I was in the small town but I was surrounded by unique and brilliant women. Women who I seldom see reflected in Hollywood films.  Somehow in Due East there was this wonderful marriage of a motherless young woman, a child, who finds herself with child unexpectedly, surrounded by these wonderful women and it really just spoke to many issues.  And really it is a film about choice, which is the thing that separates humans from animals is that we get to choose. That we are not always just in reaction and this is simply told in a small community, it just plucked my heart strings and made it a story I wanted to tell. ***Helen Shaver****[Safesearching Newsroom interview - posted on helen-shaver.com]

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Philip Seymour Hoffman took to directing because "acting is an incredibly self-centred type of thing. I don't mean that in a bad way. It's one of the hazards. In acting, you've really got to go to work every day, trying to take what you seem to know about life and making it art. You just have to. There's no way around it. As a director, you don't have to come all caught up in yourself."  from article: "The Multi-Talented Mr Hoffman" - about directing his West End play "Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train" - The Daily Telegraph, March 12, 2002 - posted on ddraven.tripod.com/psh/

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Ida Lupino  (1914 - 1995)

 Paramount had no idea what to do with an such an odd mixture of beauty and toughness.
About the only good thing that happened to Lupino at Paramount was that she met her
best girlfriend there, Ann Sheridan.

The two of them did several innocuous pictures, when Hedda Hopper saved her by giving her
some good advice. She told her to take that junk off her face, let her eyebrows grow in,
and remember that first and foremost she was an actress.

It worked. She began to get parts that mattered. She soon became pegged, "the poor man's Bette Davis."

Eventually getting so bored to tears of standing around the set while "someone else
seemed to be doing all the interesting work," Lupino teamed up with her second husband,
Collier Young, and formed her own company.

"Her work for The Filmmakers," says Carrie Rickey, "could serve as a model of modern
feminist moviemaking. Not only did Lupino take control of production, direction and
screenplay, but each of her movies addresses the brutal reprecussions of sexuality,
independence, and dependence."

excerpt from Ally Acker. Reel Women: Pioneers of the Cinema, 1896 to the Present

*more books:    Queen of the 'B's - Ida Lupino Behind the Camera edited by Annette Kuhn

                        Ida Lupino As Film Director, 1949-1953: An Auteur Approach by Lucy Stewart
 

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***Anjelica Huston

[Do you think you would have started directing films without the example of your father?]

"I simply think the time had come when I'd acted enough to feel I was maybe ready to take that on.
And with Bastard Out of Carolina [1996], which came to me out of the blue, it sort of took me on." ...

[When people talk about you, they talk about your strength. How do you think that strength
has been able to surface given that you've spent a lot of your life in the company of powerful
men -- I'm referring to your father and Jack Nicholson?]

"At times it was tremendously challenging, and I was very much at odds about how to deal with both people.
My father was extremely loving to me and funny and wise and understanding, and at other times extremely
demanding, critical, calculating, exacting.

When you're a young woman, I think you want to please a lot, so maybe you accept more of the criticism
than you would as an older person. But criticism can be very wounding. It certainly was to me. ...

I think I've had to be strong. I've gone through a few pretty rough things. The death of a parent
when you're young is very challenging emotionally. And I've had a lot of sudden changes in my life."

      Anjelica Huston   [Interview, Feb, 2000]

   << related interview: Anne Meredith - screenwriter: Bastard Out of Carolina
 

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***Christine Lahti

Women suffer a sharp falloff in offers after about age 35. It is one of the most common
complaints among once-in-demand actresses: As they reach the pinnacle of experience and talent,
the work seems to evaporate.

It is one of the main reasons that Christine Lahti, 50, decided to become a director; her first feature,
"My First Mister," will be released this month.

"I became a director by default," she said at the Sundance Film Festival, where the film premiered.
"When I turned, what, 35, the scripts got fewer and fewer. I'm at my creative peak. Am I going to
sit around and become bitter? That was not an option for me. There's clearly a double standard in
the industry. It's deplorable. And that absolutely influenced my decision to become a director."

    [from "Women's Roles in the Movies" by Sharon Waxman, Washington Post Service, 2001]

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***Sally Potter

I started as a director. When I was fourteen. And then, how to become a film director
at fourteen is not self-evident. And it was a long and winding road which necessitated
stepping sideways: this way, that way, the other way.

But with hindsight I now realise that all the decisions that I made along the line
whether that was to be dancer for a while, a singer for a while, a performance artist,
whatever, it's all facets in fact of film-making, and the skill of directing, for which
there is no real training.

You have to know a little bit about a lot of things. At school I had already directed
shows, but as a fourteen-year-old it was with an 8mm camera. And then, the London
Filmmakers co-op was just about starting up, and I used to go and watch hours of films.

Independent, underground films, anything. And we would go and rummage in the dustbins
in Soho for out of date film stock and use that. We're not talking low-budget filmmaking,
we're talking no-budget filmmaking.

Instead of going to filmschool, I learnt on the job with scraps of this and that and then trod
the boards, as a dancer.

I think that often the big life steps that one takes are taken unconciously. I think it's very rare
for somebody to know from the very beginning, I'm going to be that, and stick with that.
You have a dream, but you face so many discouragements along the way.

But I think often our unconsious is steering us in ways that are much more intelligent than we think."

  [from London Student interview: londonstudent.org.uk

  book:**Sally Potter. The Man Who Cried

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"Making a movie was similar to making art, Schnabel found.
A movie was like a series of paintings. He tried to create those
images in the moment, without much rehearsal. And he exercised
a gruff authority. When veteran cameramen and assistant directors
he hired explained how a scene should be shot, the usual way,
Schnabel was angrily dismissive."

from "Julian Schnabel's Lust for Life" by Philip Weiss,
NY Times 3.25.01  [pictured: director / painter Julian Schnabel]

dvd:  Before Night Falls   video: Basquiat

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I do love acting, but certainly now, having written and directed something, it pales a bit in comparison. I just loved it, every bit of it, going to the editing room 10 hours a day, the pre-production. We had no production designer, so it was [a matter of] going to different furniture stores all over town [asking], 'Can we borrow stuff for six weeks?'  And I brought all the books from my bookshelf that Joe and Sally [the characters in the film] would have in their library, even though you don't see them. I'm so into details, and it's so great to be able to bring everything that you have to a project." Jennifer Jason Leigh  - about her film "The Anniversary Party" [LA Times 5.13.01]

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"The SharkTank Redemption"

Natalie Van Doren - Director/Producer

Natalie hails from Colorado Springs, Colorado and moved to Los Angeles
to realize her dream to be a feature film director. Along the way she worked as
an agent's assistant for a few years at a large, prominent Beverly Hills talent agency.

While she valued her time and experiences there, she realized that agency life was akin
to drilling a hole in her own head with a $14.95 bottle opener from Crate & Barrel.
Thus she teamed up with her brother, Doug, in order to make The SharkTank Redemption
on a budget of less than $50,000.       [press release from film website:sharktankredemption.com
 
 

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Mira Nair

**

scene from "Kama Sutra.."

 "Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love is not a documentary on sexual positions.
It's a tale about sexual politics. It's inspired by the book, but fortunately,
I didn't have to report back to some Kama Sutra higher order! ...

I was.. working off various classical Indian poets. And in using different
sources as inspiration, I wanted to achieve, to a certain extent, a kind of
mythic quality. A little bit larger than life. ...

You know, one of the things I like about The Kama Sutra is that it does not
moralize or judge who is better, the courtesan or the wife. And of course,
the irony I am trying to put forward is: in a certain way, is there a difference?
Who are we to cast the first stone as to who is better?"

director Mira Nair [from interview on Urban Desires site: desires.com]

**dvd: Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love

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"It's much easier to be postmodern and cynical and bitter - you're much more protected...
You're so goofy if you're sublime about something that everyone else is completely ho-hum about.
I think I'm laughable to some people... I know I'm laughable, but you have to dare to be absolute."

Patricia Rozema   (director: "When Night Is Falling" etc.) [Out, 1996]

   << more: social reactions

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"My sisters and I were always in soccer leagues and on softball teams, and we were always the only girls on the teams. Which I actually think has helped me today because this business is so male-dominated, [and] it doesn't faze me. I've always had to fight my way into games because I was a girl."  Gina Prince-Bythewood    [director: "Love and Basketball"] [Hollywood.com]

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I think women are particularly well-equipped [to direct]. They tend to be more aware of people's feelings, what's going on around them... Particularly as a mother - I run a household, I raise two children, I want to get these guys to do what I want them to do in a way where they'll be happy. And that's a tremendous amount of directing skill."  JoBeth Williams   .. [LA Times 9.26.95]  [portrait by Joan Lauren from her site : joanlauren.com

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"Maybe I want to have my cake and eat it too, but I think
collaboration needs an auteur. I am the writer and the director,
and I'm happy to say I didn't design it or shoot it. It's liberating
to give up control to the people you trust. I think that's love."

 Karyn Kusama from feedmag.com interview by Lisa Levy  // Kusama directed Girlfight

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"You suffer rejection and you think, 'Wow, I must really suck.'
Then you get into a group, and you realize it's about something
bigger than you.

As a group, women filmmakers have been quiet
for a long time. Now it's time to raise consciousness, to say to
people, 'Look at what you're seeing. At the end of the year, how
many of the films that you've seen have been directed by men?
All but one? Think about that.'"

    Director Nancy Savoca     [Los Angeles Mag. Sep.00]
 

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Catch-22 was the first failure. Instead of being dashed by it, I was very interested in both the experience and its aftermath. As my friend George Wolfe pointed out, you don't learn anything from a success, you learn from failures.  I think I had stopped paying attention enough. In the theater there's always this terror as the audience is approaching. And you work out of a panic.  In the movies I think you can get lulled into thinking, This is how we do it, and we like the process and it's always all right, and then suddenly it isn't all right.  Director Mike Nichols [Film Comment, May, 1999]   related article: Ego and Creativity

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"At first, it's hard--especially in our culture--to get men to take a younger woman seriously. They think they're superior. Some say you can't be young and thin and female and be a serious director. But who says you have to be old and fat and male to make movies? ...  A lot of barriers are being broken in Iran today. I show the men I work with that I'm their equal. I never ask them to do something I won't do too."  Samira Makhmalbaf  [LA Times, 7.7.0]  [age 20, co-winner of the Cannes Jury Prize]

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"People think that fame is going to solve all their problems and all fame does is make the problems different. I went into show business, like all people in entertainment with low self esteem, so the rest of the world can tell them how great they are.  Fame has only brought me funny things. I don't understand people that say they hate it... Anyone who wants to be in the movie business to get laid or to be famous, if that's the main reason... they will never have success. You have to be completely obsessed with it for real.  You can't fake obsession."    John Waters   [from cuff.org interview]  [his book: Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters]

*related page:**fame / celebrity

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[Are you able to compromise when the locations or interiors that you imagined  for your set simply can't be found?]  "No. There's no compromise possible. You keep looking until you find the place that will work for the story. And that holds for the objects, too. Many places are painted or rearranged, new furniture is brought in. You cant make compromises. Compromises kill the film."  David Lynch  [from interview in German design magazine form, issue 158, 2/1997]

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David Lynch once said to me, 'If something is not right in a scene, your instincts will tell you. You have to keep being open to that, no matter how much time you lose. If you ignore them, don't  be surprised if they (instincts) will stop talking to you completely.' As a young director, this was extremely valuable information."  Lesli Linka Glatter  [from directorsworld.com interview]

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