Interview (Part 3): 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 Q&A at the 2016 SXSW Festival featuring Lily Rabe, Julia Hart, and Anthony Quinta:
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 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:
Scott: Let’s talk about this theme of surprise. You literally even have it in dialogue. At one point after a situation where Sam has had an emotional upheaval over a relationship gone sour, Rachel says, “I didn’t say this but most people suck, Sam. Some of them are wonderful but mostly they’re not. The weirdest part, that it’s surprising every single time.”
Was this idea of surprise, playing against type, that seems like that was something that you both were consciously trying to work with in the story?
Julia: Yeah, absolutely, and I think it was all borne of this idea of wanting to tell a story about this world that hadn’t been told before. We’ve gone so far in terms of shock value that it seems like there’s nothing left. We’re numb. So we decided to do the opposite, that somehow doing the thing that isn’t shocking can be the most shocking thing of all.
A lot of times in a film you’ll be told in the first five minutes what’s going on with the character and then throughout the course of the movie you’ll watch them learn to deal with it.
Instead, again, thinking about authenticity and surprise we wanted to keep those secrets not only from the other characters, but from our audience in order to play around with this idea of how we learn information about people in real life instead of how we’re given it in a traditional story structure.
Scott: One of the things I really appreciated about the movie is it has lots and lots of these special little moments. There’s a lot of quiet in the movie. Some movie productions feel like, “Well, we’re paying the composer so let’s have every single second filled with music,” but there are times where you’ve got these quiet little moments.
I remember there’s a quote by Ann Beattie, the author. She says, “People forget years and remember moments.” I’m wondering, was that something you were conscious of? Because there are times, for example, Julia, where you just let the camera roll and let the actors…there’s a couple scenes where it just goes on for 20, 30 seconds where people are just standing there and looking at each other. You know what I’m saying?
Julia: Yeah, no, absolutely. It’s funny, too, because the movie is simultaneously really tight. We tried to be very economical and deliberate about those silences. It’s definitely not a movie where that happens a ton. It makes it all the more potent. If you’re smart about your quiet and you’re smart about your music I think it makes the piece stronger overall. Rob Simenson our composer is incredibly talented.
Jordan: I remember once we were talking to Rob, because there was a sequence where we were considering putting score. He was just like, “Listen, my job as the composer is to beat silence. If I can’t beat silence then there should be no music there.”
Julia: That is such a great line.
Scott: Wow. That’s really interesting to hear. Talking about music, there’s a song by America, “Sister Golden Hair,” which is used twice in the movie. There’s a line that Billy and Rachel are singing as they’re heading out to the refrain of the thing.
“Will you meet me in the middle? Will you meet me in the air? Will you love me just enough to show you care? Well, I tried to fake it. I don’t mind saying I just can’t make it.” That’s thematically resonant, isn’t it?
Julia: [laughs] Yeah.
Jordan: Yeah.
Julia: Jordan and I very much believe in the movie gods and that you can’t get in their way. You can’t be too egotistical that you don’t just shut up and listen to them sometimes. It’s so funny because that wasn’t the original song in the script. That was the song that we…we work with a really amazing music supervisor, this guy Dan Wilcox. We couldn’t get the original song in the script and then he gave us a couple of options, and Sister Golden Hair was one of them and we got it. As you said, you listen to those lyrics and the feeling of the song, and just what part of our time and place in America that song and that band represent. It’s meloncholy and upbeat at the same time, just like the movie. We’re very big on the best idea wins and that you always have to be listening. You can’t be talking too much that you miss that stuff.
Jordan: Yeah, you have to just listen to the work. The work is paramount. The work…if you’re invested in the work and you’re patient then the work will tell you what it wants. This was just one of those cases that proved that out in the best possible way.
Julia: I couldn’t imagine another song now.
Scott: Oh, yeah, the very end of that where they’re singing the refrain, they give each other a look. It’s like, “Wait a minute. Has this got subtextual meaning here?” That was terrific.
Okay, let’s talk about how the movie came to be. You’ve got the script, and eventually you got Lily attached, and Julia’s going to direct it. Jordan, in this era of spandex and spectacle and superheroes what was your pitch to financiers? How did you convince someone Miss Stevens can work in today’s movie marketplace?
Jordan: I’ve been fortunate enough in my career to make these kinds of movies so I think at this point people expect them from me. Interestingly, I have never been… I’ve never worked on something that’s not an original idea.
I’ve now made 10 movies as a producer, and I’m about to make my first television show, and all of them have been — for better or worse — based on original ideas. Not even adaptations of books or anything, but all just purely original ideas.
Julia: Which is literally a miracle. [laughs]
Jordan: Yeah, again for better or worse, I mean not everything I’ve done has been successful. Everything I’ve worked on has tried to be artistically ambitious, but not everything resonates.
At this point people just expect that from me I guess, but again, being a producer and having made a number of pictures in this vein, I went out with the package with a very what I think was a responsible budget and a production plan that was reasonable.
Our expectations for the picture were very much… I don’t want to say managed… But they were very much in line with what the movie wanted to be.
Julia: Again, it goes back to that writer/producer hat being passed between us as we work that we very purposefully wrote a script that could be fully realized, and characters and scenarios and settings that all could be fully realized on a small budget with a first time director.
Jordan: I tend to take a holistic view of these things. I don’t necessarily believe in compromise with these types of movies. Compromise means you’re giving something up, it’s kind of a negative. I believe in finding solutions and knowing what your… You build your box, you should know what box you’re working in. And that box needs to be a responsible box. Then you find solutions in any number of ways and the tension of finding those solutions is oftentimes what makes things great.
It’s really important for me as a producer to build that box responsibly because when you build that box and you realize you’re picture along the limits of that box and take a holistic view of the film, the film becomes much larger. I think it becomes larger when you build that thing properly from the start.
When you have a $10 million picture on the page and you only have $2 million to make it but you decide you’re going to just go for it I think.. You’re never going do the… It’s never going to feel necessarily full or bigger than… the sum of the parts. The whole is never going to feel bigger than the sum of its parts.
That’s always my goal with any picture, any size movie I’m making, from something as small as Miss Stevens to something as big as La La Land. It’s always about setting the initial box, building it properly, and then finding solutions off of that.
Scott: The benefit you have for this project is that whatever special effects they are it’s basically the acting.
Julia: Exactly.
Scott: It’s got these great characters and largely one location. It’s really an actor’s movie.
Jordan: Yeah, for sure.
Julia: That was very intentional as the movie itself is about acting and performance.
Tomorrow in Part 4, Julia goes into what she learned about writing from her experience directing Miss Stevens.
For Part 1 of the interview, go here.
Part 2, here.
Here are links to some reviews of Miss Stevens:
Twitter: @juliahartowitz, @jehorowitz.