Interview (Part 1): Julia Hart and Jordan Horowitz (“Miss Stevens”)
Entertainment Weekly calls it a “breezy indie gem”. Bilge Ebiri of the Village Voice calls it a “tight, unnerving and deceptively complex movie”. David Ehrlich of Indiwire writes, “With her directorial debut, The Keeping Room screenwriter Julia Hart proves that she belongs behind the camera.” And the New York Times has named it a Critics Pick.
It is the movie Miss Stevens and it debuts in select theaters this weekend in LA and NY, then on video on demand (VOD) beginning September 20.
For those of you starved for strong adult movies, I highly recommend Miss Stevens. It is a pitch perfect film… authentic… human… and entertaining.
Here is a trailer for Miss Stevens:
The movie currently has a 92% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
I was fortunate enough to snag an interview with Julia Hart, the movie’s co-writer and director, and co-writer and producer Jordan Horowitz. They not only make a great creative team, they are also married and parents of young son.
Today in Part 1, Julia and Jordan discuss the inspiration for the movie and the process by which Julia ended up directing the project:
Scott: Let’s just jump into it here. We’re talking about Miss Stevens, a new movie just coming out that. Julia, you co‑wrote and directed it. And Jordan, you co‑wrote and produced it. Here’s a plot summary:
“Stuck at a crossroads in her personal life, it falls on Miss Stevens to chaperone three of her students — Billy, Margot and Sam — on a weekend trip to a drama competition. Exploring the fine line between being a grown up and being a kid, Miss Stevens is about students becoming teachers and teachers coming to realize that the messiness of youth never really goes away.”
Julia, before you ventured into screenwriting, you were a high school teacher, I believe for something like eight years, is that right?
Julia: I was. I taught high school English, here in L.A. I taught 11th and 12th Grade.
Scott: What was it about your experiences as a teacher, which provided the seeds of inspiration to write Miss Stevens?
Julia: Everything that happens in the movie never actually happened to me as a teacher. It was very much inspired by not based on my time when I was a teacher.
Once I became a teacher, I realized that a lot of what we’re fed via film and television about what it’s like being a teacher, or what the student‑teacher relationship is like, is a lot of Hollywood myth making. I was 25 when I started teaching 17‑ and 18‑year‑olds and it’s a lot more complex and nuanced in reality than portrayals have been in the past. I was interested in exploring those other shades that I hadn’t seen before.
Scott: You have those two general takes, right? One is the idealized, perfect teacher who inspires students. Then, you’ve got the deeply flawed teacher who has lost their way. Those seem to be the two extremes in Hollywood.
Julia: A real teacher is any of those things, all at once, on a daily basis. I wanted to show a real female teacher who was complex, sometimes brilliant, and sometimes a disaster.
Scott: I thought that was interesting too, because you establish Miss Stevens, Rachel’s character, inside the context of the school. Then, you do a road trip outside.
Getting her outside the classroom situation really helps to bring that character into the gray area of what it means to be a teacher on the one hand, and what it means to be their own individual.
Julia: Something else that I haven’t seen explored that much on film is the idea that real teaching, or the bulk of the teaching, is what happens before and after the classroom. Obviously, it’s important to teach them how to construct a grammatically correct sentence, but the life lessons and the experience of being humans together is far more important at the end of the day. You’re teaching them how to be an adult. You’re teaching them what it means to live in the world.
Scott: You and Jordan co‑wrote the script. Going back to the interview I did with you on The Keeping Room, Jordan was intimately involved in that process. This was actual co‑writing. How did that process come about, where the two of you ended up writing this script together?
Julia: It’s interesting. Our process hasn’t changed that much since then. I just had to convince him that he was a writer. I don’t think he wanted to be. He was good in the producer role, and didn’t quite realize that he had actually, over the course of our time together, become a screenwriter himself.
Jordan: That being said, you’ll never see my name on anybody else’s movie, or on a movie that I’ve written by myself. The co‑writing credit on Miss Stevens, and honestly, on any other work that we’re doing, is just a reflection of our process. Especially now that Julia’s become a director.
Julia and I actually have a company together now, Original Headquarters. Miss Stevens is the first movie from that company, but we have a bunch of work that we’re putting together now, looking to the future. We wanted to be a little clearer, outwardly, about what our process is, and the idea that Julia’s the director, we co-write the scripts, and I produce. “We co‑write stuff, and I produce,” felt a little more true to what we had always been doing.
Julia: I think it’s more than that. We were both very timid, especially you, as you had a reputation as a producer, to acknowledge to yourself that you had actually become quite a good writer. I made him put his name on the Miss Stevens screenplay. I was proud of the work he’d done.
As I said, the process hasn’t changed that much, but it had evolved to the point where there was no more denying it, you were contributing to this as a producer, yes, but also as a writer. Since that moment, we’ve just let the floodgates burst open, or whatever the phrase is.
Jordan: It definitely gave me permission to behave more like a writer on the work that Julia and I are doing. The work has…
Julia: Become better.
Jordan: We’ll talk in a year or two, once there’s more work to talk about. You can let us know if you think it works or not.
Scott: That’s funny. I often talk about how writers benefit from putting on the producer’s hat, thinking like that, as they’re writing a script. You’re a producer who put on the writer’s hat.
Jordan: You’re totally right, by the way, about writers putting on the producer hat. But I might actually argue that it’s more that writers would benefit from a good producer. Julia has always written with her work being produced in mind. And that’s because I am a producer and always have been a producer.
There’s this projection of what a producer would want, or what a producer needs, or how movies get made, that sometimes writers maybe… But often, it’s a projection, not an accurate thing… So I would actually just tweak it slightly and say that writers ‑‑ artists, in general ‑‑ would benefit from good producers. Or maybe this is my way of tooting the horn for producers in Hollywood, because we sometimes get a bit of a bad rap.
There are a handful of us for whom our only objective is to realize the fullest potential of the work from the artists that we work with. It’s about the work. That is really my MO. As long as everybody is open to that relationship being what it’s supposed to be.
Scott: How early in the process did you decide that this is a project Julia’s going to direct?
Julia Hart: Very, very late in the process. [laughs]
Jordan Horowitz: Pretty late.
Julia: There was another director attached to it, at first. Then we, with Lily Rabe attached to it, went out in search of a director. It was all just inevitable that I was going to direct it myself. We thought it was going to be a TV project at one point. It had many different permutations. I was in denial of the fact that I needed to direct it myself. When I finally accepted that, it all came together really fast.
Scott: You weren’t writing a script with the inclination or instinct to direct it?
Jordan: It’s funny. Whenever we write, a lot of times people come back to us, especially with Miss Stevens, it happened a lot…. Miss Stevens is a very personal story. People would read it and come back to us and be like, “You’re directing this, right?” We also tend to write relatively visually so that was probably part of it too.
Anyway that combined with how personal the story felt on the page… It was funny. One of the things that stood in the way of getting anybody else to direct the picture was just how much it felt like Julia should be directing it. I think that happened a couple of times and finally we were like, OK, Julia is going to direct it.
Julia: [laughs] Once I officially decided to direct it, we definitely rewrote it.
Tomorrow in Part 2, Julia and Jordan dig into the key characters in Miss Stevens, exploring their complexities.
Here are links to some reviews of Miss Stevens:
Twitter: @juliahartowitz, @jehorowitz.
