Interview (Written): Liz W. Garcia

The writer-director talks about her new movie One Percent More Humid.

An MTV.com interview with Liz W. Garcia whose writing credits include the TV series ‘Dawson’s Creek’, ‘Wonderfall’, ‘Cold Case’, and ‘Memphis Beat’, and the movies The Lifeguard and One Percent More Humid, both of which she directed.

MTV News: Tell me about the process of writing this script — where’d the initial idea come from?

Liz Garcia: I don’t know if you heard or were told this, but I wrote this in 2001! I wrote it the week before my 25th birthday. I was just out of college, and I grew up and went to college in Connecticut. The tragedy in the movie — I’ll be non-spoilery — was sort of a hideous coming-of-age that we experienced growing up in suburban Connecticut, where you were young and thought that nothing would ever touch you, and then there were these incredible tragedies. I’d heard a few stories, and been in proximity to a few stories, where kids who’d been involved in accidents had to suffer legal repercussions. Given that all of us were constantly fucking up and taking our own lives and others’ lives into our hands and being reckless, the idea that fate would swoop in for these particular people, and visit them with grief and guilt and punishment, just interested me. It was really terrible and painful, and I was really fascinated by how a person would survive that.

At the time, I was working as an assistant, and I wanted to be a screenwriter, and I’d just gotten a manager. It was 2001, and everything that was being made was a hideous teenage-boy gross-out comedy. It was like, “Write a spring-break romp!” And I tend to react perversely to any kind of expectations, and I certainly did in this case, because I wrote this tiny movie instead of something that could sell. I’d never read anything like this. The world of film and TV has changed a lot since I wrote this, because when I did, there wasn’t a script that went across anyone’s desk that took young women’s lives seriously, that was honest about their sex lives, the drugs they did, their interior lives. So when I wrote it, I thought, “Nobody’s ever gonna read this, nothing’s ever gonna come of this, and also, is it too embarrassing to show anyone, because it’s so personal?” And it ended up being the script that changed my career — it just took forever to get made.

Why do you think it took so long?

Garcia: One, until recently, I hadn’t directed a movie. I was a first-time director, a young female — in 2001, that was not a thing. There were very few women out there making movies. Two, we were shooting indies on film until somewhat recently, the last five to seven years. Instead of asking people for, you know, $1 to $2 million to make your little movie, we were asking for $2 to $4 million. And, again, this is in the era of people being suspicious of female directors, and not engaged with female stories. Also, usually you build financing around your cast, and the idea is that they should have foreign sales value. Well, there are very few young women who’ve been in the business long enough to accrue foreign sales value. So it was tricky all around.

So what made it finally happen?

Garcia: Well, finally, I made The Lifeguard. That changed everything. People had seen it, people who could set us up with financing had seen it. That was proven, and we just had to get interesting actresses who ticked the financing boxes, and we did. It was never hard to get interesting actresses.

Why’d you have an easier time with The Lifeguard, which also focuses on a woman experiencing a breakdown?

Garcia: The Lifeguard took nine months from first draft to production. Which, compared to 15 years, is insane. First of all, things had changed by then. There were brand names like Lena Dunham and Diablo Cody and Sofia Coppola. We were shooting on digital instead of film, which was cheaper. And the film revolved around an ensemble of actors who were around 30, and it’s easier to find somebody like Kristen Bell, who was worth something internationally.

For the rest of the MTV interview, go here.

For my June 2013 interview with Liz W. Garcia, go here.

Twitter: @lizwgarcia.