Interview: Liz W. Garcia — Part 3

Scott Myers

26 Jun 2013 • 10 min read

Liz W. Garcia is an American television producer and writer. As a writer, her credits include “Dawson’s Creek,” “Wonderfalls” and “Cold Case”. With her husband, actor Josh Harto, she created and produced the TNT series “Memphis Beat”. Most recently Liz wrote and directed the independent feature film The Lifeguard starring Kristen Bell which will be released in 2013.

I was delighted to have the opportunity to speak at length with Liz.

Today in Part 3, Liz describes some of her creative instincts which led to her movie The Lifeguard:

Scott: Let’s jump over to the film side of things. You’ve got this movie you wrote and directed, The Lifeguard. The plot described in IMDB:

“A former valedictorian quits her reporter job in New York and returns to the place she last felt happy, her childhood home in Connecticut. She gets work as a lifeguard and starts a dangerous relationship with a troubled teenager.”

Do you remember what inspired you to this particular story?

Liz: I worked as a lifeguard at a pool in high school and college. I always wanted to write about it. I loved the job which didn’t involve a lot of lifeguarding, but a lot of eavesdropping, a lot of sitting around an empty pool and thinking. I loved the environment, the pool. Like in the film, I worked at a pool that was surrounded woods so it was really peaceful and mysterious. When you’re the lifeguard, you get to watch everyone. I got to watch these interesting people come and hang out at the pool, different families and couples. There were teenagers who would come around who were so different than the type of teenager that I was. When I was working as a lifeguard, I was earnest and hardworking. Thought I had everything figured out. These kids were bad ass rebels smoking cigarettes at age 13. I was fascinated by them.

I knew that was an environment that I wanted to…I knew from the time that I was working there, and I was 17, that it was something that I wanted to write about in some way. I just didn’t know how.

When I was around turning 30, I started to realize that it would be interesting to write about a 30 year old lifeguard, someone who goes back to the job that she had when she was in high school because it was so peaceful. Just about watching people and having a false sense of power, feeling like the dictator of this tiny kingdom around the pool.

That would be a way to explore what starts to happen when you’re a woman looking at adulthood. When you know you’re going to wind up being somebody’s wife and somebody’s mother and how scary that can feel. It would be interesting to tell the story of someone dealing with that fear by going back to this job that she remembered fondly.

Scott: After the title page, you’ve got a quote from “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.” Here’s an excerpt:

“He would return to the earliest chapters of his life. It was all there somewhere, waiting for him.”

In the Lifeguard, your protagonist Leigh does return to her home and literally takes over this job she held over a decade ago. In a way, you’re inverting the pattern of the Hero’s Journey. Instead of going on an adventure and then returning home, you start the story with the heroine and her return, at least geographically?

Liz: Yes, right.

Scott: How conscious were you of that theme of return and what did that mean to you as you were exploring the story?

Liz: To me, this is her hero’s journey. She just doesn’t know it. She’s doing…Well, let me say that different. She thinks she’s going on a hero’s journey. She doesn’t think she’s doing something out of fear. This is how we played it, that Leigh thinks this is a great idea and she returns home. She is doing something that is good for herself [laughs] and that makes a lot of sense. What ultimately makes it an authentic hero’s journey, is that she shakes up everyone’s lives including her own, lastly her own. She brings healthy chaos and a need for change to the lives of her friends and her family who are all in stagnant places. They’re all sort of stuck. Then, ultimately, she can return to New York.

I was obviously very conscious of her wanting, her drive to propel everyone’s…Her need to avoid change and avoid moving forward that that would have the opposite effect on everyone around her and, ultimately, compel her to move forward which is what she needs to do.

Scott: I’d like to drill down into that a little bit more. You do a lot of work with the theme of time. Leigh’s facing an uncertain future. She returns home which is, essentially, re‑experiencing the past. She’s hoping to find meaning in her present. Yet every single character of substance, all those subplots, they’re on a journey regarding their own time. Some are stuck in the past. Some are completely putting their focus on the future. Some are avoiding the present. I’m guessing that was a pretty central idea for you, this idea of characters dealing with time?

Liz: Yes, it is. I was interested in dealing with the dawning realization, that I think happens toward the end of your 20s, when you realize that you only have one life to live and that life is short and that you are mortal. [laughs] I think that’s really when the marker of childhood is fading away is when you have the humbling realization that it’s only this. You’ve been waiting for your life all this time, but your life is happening now. That if you’re not present and you don’t face that fact, that you’re missing it. It is an existential struggle. I think it’s a struggle for most people, unless you’re highly evolved, or a monk or something, that [laughs] you’re juggling with your whole life. How do you be present and appreciate that you have only this? You have only this one time at the wheel. That’s something that I feel and go through in my life.

I wanted Leigh, and everyone else, to deal with this idea of time. As one of the characters said, “Time only moves in one direction.” That is a fact and hideous truths to realize. [laughs]

Scott: There’s another side to that. Leigh, at one point early on in the story, says, “My life hasn’t turned out how I pictured.” There’s a universality to that idea, isn’t there, especially among people who are in their 20s or late 20s? Could you talk a little bit more about that idea, “My life hasn’t turned out how I pictured it?”

Liz: I think that, particularly, if you had notions that you would be special and that your life would be somehow special or remarkable…I’ve made Leigh one of those people. She was the valedictorian of her class. Everyone thought she would be extraordinary, and, I think, she thought she would be extraordinary. The reality is that you’re definition of an extraordinary life needs change once you’re really in life. Being an adult means facing, dealing with mundane tasks, and dealing with the fact that you may be the center of your universe, but you are not the center of the universe. That’s why I have Leigh living in New York, a punishing crowded place where you’re surrounded by remarkable people. [laughs] It can be overwhelming and depressing to be one of the crowd in New York.

I think, again, that feeling when you’re at the end of your 20s. You look around and go, “Oh, I had a notion of what 28, 29, 30 would look like and this is not it. I didn’t picture credit card debt. I didn’t picture loneliness. I didn’t picture this sort of mundane every day aspects of my life.”

It would be much more comforting to return to, say, childhood [laughs] when I didn’t yet know that life was going to be hard. I didn’t yet know that I am one of many. I thought that I was the whole universe. That’s what Leigh tries to do, is return to that comforting solipsism of adolescence.

Scott: It’s interesting, the very title of it and the comment you made earlier about your own experience having been a lifeguard. There’s a line in the scene description, a paragraph, where it says, “Leigh watching, looking in again on other people’s lives. The life watcher. The lifeguard.” It’s an interesting distinction that idea of the lifeguard. Like you were talking about being the rule of this little fiefdom, right?

Liz: Mm‑hmm.

Scott: Almost, literally, like the big fish in a small pond. Yet, what she’s been doing, in effect, while she’s been caught up with her life in New York, she has been watching her life in a way, hasn’t she? I get the feeling, living more in the surface of her life. That the experiences she goes through helps her to deepen her own life experience and, I guess, that of those around. She’s moving more from a life watcher to a life participant. Does that resonate at all with you?

Liz: I think, yes. That is absolutely her journey, being outside of life. [laughs] She’s a journalist so she’s reporting on what goes on with other people. You can see that she longs to connect and that she is an emotional person, but she can’t connect more deeply in her relationship. Her attempts to connect more deeply with her work, her stories, go unrewarded. Then she goes home and she wants to maintain a surface, a comforting surface relationship with everything. She doesn’t want to talk about why she’s really home, and the pain she’s really in. She wants to go to the pool, zone out, and have a kind of distracting false sense of power that comes from sitting in the lifeguard chair.

You’re absolutely right, then as the movie goes along. She’s not only forced into her own feelings and the reality of her own life, she’s forced to become involved in the lives of her friends, and the boys, who she meets. Eventually become, in her own way, a life saver.

Scott: There are a lot of subplots, but there’s a key one that Lee has. There’s this other character, a young boy, named Little Jason, who’s a teenager. In fact, they develop a very intense, emotional relationship, that involves a sexual component. There’s a moment in there, with that relationship, where you describe, Lee watches him a moment, then looks out at the night, the stars. “It smells so good here. The must and spike of dirt and lake in your nose, to look at the dark shapes of the town. Dark outlines layered on dark outline. The depth that doesn’t end, is to feel possibility in your chest, with an ache that hurts so good.”

I got the feeling what the function of this relationship with Lee and this young boy, was about pulling her into present, about not worrying about the possibility, giving herself over to possibilities, and not getting lost in this future consequences. Does that feel on target at all?

Liz: Yeah, I think the relationship is serving a few needs for her, and they conflict in some ways. I think that she, that the physicality, that the lust, is like a drug that blocks out the past, and blocks out the future, and drugs and lust, serve that purpose throughout the film to cut off her vision, so she can only be where she is. So, yes the relationship makes her present, in the sense that it stills her mind, but it also is a distraction from the reality of her life. So, she can kind of lose herself in this beautiful kid, and the fact that he needs her, and the lust that she feels for him, and not think about the fact that, in her present day, she’s a 29‑year‑old lifeguard, who has quit her job and her career, and she’s depressed.

I think she goes toward him, in a way, thinking that he’ll be a drug. He’ll be a distraction, and then, in fact, he becomes, he opens up her heart, because she connects to him. She cares about him, what’s going to become of him that she has to face the reality that she is an adult, and she needs some big changes.

Scott: So many times when I read a script, I know precisely where the story is headed, but midway through The Lifeguard, I’m like noting in the marginalia, “I have no idea where this story is going.” That was such a refreshing experience.

Liz: Good.

Scott: So as you were developing the story, did you have a similar experience? Did you know all along where you were going? Or where there times when you were like, I’m not sure where this is heading, where these characters are taking me?

Liz: No, I knew. I knew from the top. I figured out OK, I want to do something about a lifeguard, like I said, for so long as I knew I want to shoot something about a lifeguard. Then, I figured out it was about a 30‑year‑old lifeguard, and she comes to her job, and she gets her job. There are these kids at the pool and that relationship will be really important. Then, I realized, oh, she’s going to have an affair with one of these kids. Oh, wow, that will be the thing, she’s given, that sort of came to me. It wasn’t calculated. It came to me, like oh that’s what she’s going to do, oh wow, OK. Right after that then I knew what the tragedy would be at the end of act two, because that is something that come from, not literally, but an experience that I’d been through just growing up in suburbia.

We experienced that type of tragedy, and it felt really real to me. So, I knew. So, for me, the whole time, even when I was writing humor, when I was writing the sexy stuff, there was an underlying sense of dread. But, I do think come through, even though I’ve had people say to me that I didn’t know exactly where it was going, like people sense from the beginning that something, something is not quite right. [laughs]

Here is a clip featuring Liz and the star of The Lifeguard Kristen Bell at event at the Sundance Film Festival:

You can go here for the movie’s Facebook page.

Tomorrow in Part 4, Liz goes into some business aspects of The Lifeguard and the realities of being a woman in the male-dominated environment of movies and TV.

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