Interview (Part 2): 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 an interview with two of the movie’s actors: Lily Rabe and Rob Huebel.
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 2, Julia and Jordan dig into the key characters in Miss Stevens, exploring their complexities:
Scott: I don’t want to give away much of the plot, but I would like to talk about the characters because each of them is interesting, nuanced, and complex in that great way that indie films can do.
Five primary characters. There’s Rachel Stevens who is played wonderfully by Lily Rabe. She was just terrific. She’s the teacher. Then three students ‑‑ Billy, Margot, and Sam. Then there’s this other adult, Walter, who is quite an interesting character in himself.
Let’s talk about Rachel. How would you describe her character?
Julia: I like the idea of getting to show that a real woman is actually like. There are probably a lot of women that we don’t even know how complicated and flawed they are in our real lives because nobody has the privilege of seeing someone when they’re alone. I really liked getting to show the moments of her brilliance and capability where she’s totally able to bring her students through a difficult moment and also where she’s a complete disaster. I have a lot of love for her. It was really important that we show a woman making mistakes who is also incredibly lovable.
I have a very wonderful, full, grounded life and had a very healthy relationship with boundaries even when I was a young teacher. I just stripped all of that away and wondered what it would be like to be a young woman in that environment if I was at sea in my own life and we went from there.
Scott: You’ve gotten her outside the confines of the classroom and out on the road and then at this drama contest they go to, there really is that boundary thing going on. Sometimes she goes beyond what you would consider to be appropriate as a teacher, but then there are other times when she’ll sort of snap out of it, “You got to go. You’ve got to go,” those moments with Billy. There’s that dynamic tension going on with her pretty much throughout most of the story.
Jordan: We were definitely playing with audience’s expectations of what that character is in this movie traditionally. We tried to be very conscious of where the audience thought she would go because of what they’d seen before and trying to live in that tension, but not hitting it over the head, but also understanding what an audience member brings to this type of movie. Which was tricky, because you’re trying to project what people are going to think about the movie that the movie’s not doing, in a way. But yeah, the movie tries to operate in that gray or “almost” space as much as it can.
Julia: Authenticity was just our God at every possible turn, because it’s really simple, weirdly, if you just think about what a human would actually do [laughs] …I’m surprised more films don’t just do that, because to me it’s the most surprising sometimes to just have your character do what a human would actually do in that moment instead of what they would do in a movie. Just have them be a human instead of a character.
I know when we’re writing sometimes, especially in a character‑driven piece like this, we don’t necessarily know exactly where a scene is going. We just let the character be a human and guide us where they want to go.
Scott: I want to talk about surprise as a theme in just a bit. Let’s continue with some of these characters. Billy. What’s your thumbnail take on his character?
Julia: It’s so funny, because I literally can’t remember who he was before Timmy. Timmy’s performance has just so completely overtaken any notion I had [laughs] about the character that we once created.
He was definitely a composite of some of the young men that I taught. I taught some really incredible kids. One who actually delivered that speech, the Arthur Miller speech, at a drama competition. But when Timmy took on the role, he made Billy completely his own.
Scott: That’s Timothée Chalamet?
Julia: Chalamet, yeah.
Scott: Yeah, he was terrific. In fact, the whole casting was great.
Julia: Thank you. We did a lot of rehearsing and rewriting based on those rehearsals before we started shooting. I think on the page…it was funny, a comment that we got a lot, which I loved, was that the characters felt really lived‑in on the page, and then I think they just really became humans on the day because of the time that we all got to spend together working on those characters before we started shooting.
Scott: Jordan mentioned about playing with the expectations the audience would have about teacher types in movies. Margot and Sam play that role a bit, because they’re surprised by what they’re seeing in Rachel, whereas Billy, on the other hand, I think sees her as almost a soul mate.
Julia: Yeah.
Scott: That she’s fractured, has highs and lows like he does. Is that a fair assessment of those characters?
Jordan: That’s good.
Julia: That was something that I definitely took from my teaching days because there were moments where I thought I was doing my job of hiding myself and being professional, and some of these kids, man, they would just see right through it.
Something that was also really important to us was to portray how brilliant and aware and engaged teenagers are today. They often get a bad rap, that they’re all just lost in their phones, but honestly, what they all want is for somebody to take their phone away and look them in the eye, because they don’t get that very often.
Lily Rabe, star of Miss Stevens, and writer-director Julia Hart
Scott: Margot is a really interesting example, that you were talking about, because she seems at first to be of a type. We’ve seen that sort of Type A personality.
In fact there is a moment there where you literally have Rachel take her phone. That’s just what you’re talking about, but then there’s a surprising twist in her character too, and she turns out to be much more multidimensional, Margot does, over time.
Jordan: We definitely talked a lot about not wanting her to be the down‑the‑middle… I love Election, but we didn’t want her to be the Tracy Flick character, because it could have easily skewed into that. That felt like an easy choice and we pushed back against that, both on the page and in Lili Reinhart’s performance.
Luckily, Lili…
Julia: She’s so amazing.
Jordan: …was so amazingly natural and has a really amazing comic sensibility. If you watch the movie, I think more on the second and third time, even her listening is very active. She’s always doing something. Not to pull away from anybody…
Julia: Not distracting, but…
Jordan: …but just in a very naturalistic, very authentic, in the moment…
Julia: In the background, on the edge of frame.
Jordan: Yeah. It’s pretty amazing all the things she’s doing and what’s going on with her at every moment. A lot of that was just her being a great performer.
Julia: Definitely a theme in the script and then the film for us was this idea that we’re all always performing to some extent, and especially in a school setting, my God, everyone’s always playing a part or being what they think they’re supposed to be.
The teacher is playing a role, the students are playing a role, and so we definitely wanted to set it up at the beginning as these, as you say, classic archetypes of students and teacher and start to slowly break that down throughout the course of the story as they actually can’t keep performing and actually have to become who they really are.
Scott: Sam’s kind of the one who embraces that always‑on‑stage kind of thing. He’s dancing in the back seat and the performance artist kind of thing.
Julia: Totally, and then even he has his moment where it’s real.
Scott: He has his moment too, yeah. Let’s talk about Walter, this other major adult in this story who, again, at first you meet him and you think he’s this conniving guy with good lines and whatnot, but by the end, he’s an honest truth‑teller. What were you going for with the Walter character?
Julia: Again, he was another teacher character I hadn’t really seen before, because I feel like the myth is that the teacher who clocks in at the beginning of the day and clocks out and leaves his emotions at the door is a “Bad teacher,” and the teacher who stays until eight o’clock at night and is there for her students 24/7…
Jordan: And gives up her or his life for students, yeah.
Julia: …is the good teacher and actually a lot of the time it’s the opposite. I would watch these career teachers who I worked with who were just so in control of their emotions and their time and their boundaries. At his school he’s probably everybody’s favorite teacher and has been there for 20 years. He’s not affected by, as he calls it, their silly little lives. I thought that was an interesting twist on the expectation of the teacher who seems like they are checked out but is actually the great teacher.
Tomorrow in Part 3, Julia discusses some of the story’s key themes and Jordan talks about the process of producing a small indie film like Miss Stevens.
For Part 1 of the interview, go here.
Here are links to some reviews of Miss Stevens:
Twitter: @juliahartowitz, @jehorowitz.
