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First printed at www.movingpicturesnetwork.com

By Elliot V. Kotek
(Moving Pictures, Summer 2007)

Julia Stiles caught the attention of the press gallery when Save the Last Dance spun its meager budget into box-office gold and landed Stiles’s toned midriff a spot on America’s Most Wanted. Her career since can be labeled both “smart” and “varied,” and, in a world where maturity in young female actors is often deemed both scarce and scary, Stiles seems to have taken control of her destiny by optioning acclaimed prose in which to act and by dipping her directorial toes in the water with a short film simply titled Raving.

A mad fan of the N.Y. Mets baseball team, the native New Yorker let Moving Pictures catch up with her ahead of her film’s debut at the recent Tribeca Film Festival, a movie moment that signified a poignant re-introduction to Stiles ahead of her re-appearance in the latest chapter of the hugely successful Bourne franchise (slated to play its spy games in theaters from August 3).

 

Moving Pictures Magazine: With all that’s going on, I don’t know what you’re most excited about, so let’s chat about you directing Raving. How did that come about?
Julia Stiles: I was approached – there is an independent producer from Plum Pictures in New York who I met a couple of times. They had contacted me ’cause Elle magazine wanted to produce a few short films, and they wanted to know if I would be interested in writing or directing one. I thought it was a great opportunity even though I didn’t have any experience doing that, so I went in to meet with the editors at Elle and we discussed different ideas for stories.

I basically asked them what they wanted to get out of it ’cause I struggled with thinking, “Maybe they just want to make it commercial or an ad for their magazine.” But they made it clear that they wanted it to go film festivals and, even though it is sort of a brand extension for them, they wanted to produce an actual movie.

The concept was “a dress that changed my life,” which was a magazine article that came out in one of their issues. I spent the early part of summer trying to come up with ideas and, basically, just wandered around the streets of New York, looking at different people and wondering what their story was. “Dito” was sort of based on a character that I’d written in a play in college. So I kind of stole that and then, literally, I was walking down the street and some girl came up to me, hysterically crying and asking for money, and I started to think about how, when somebody asks you for money, you either feel guilty or you feel empathetic towards them, so you give.

But people always wonder whether they’re being scammed, and I started to think it was a crass idea for somebody to ask a stranger for money and be lying about needing it, and then thought that even if they are lying about it, their circumstances must be pretty dire (’cause I know it would take a lot for me to do that). So those two characters started the story.

MPM: Did you have creative control in casting Bill Irwin and Zooey Deschanel?
Julia: Yeah, it was great. Plum Pictures were wonderful in giving me the freedom to make the creative decisions in terms of casting and crew. The magazine had some input – they gave me notes on the script, they gave me notes on editing – but my producers really protected me from having to listen to that too much if I didn’t agree with it.

MPM: Were you thrilled or daunted by the prospect of directing?
Julia: I was thrilled by it. Honestly, I’d always been afraid of directing ’cause I see how many directors that I work with have bleeding ulcers by the end of shooting. But I guess because I had written the story so clearly in my head, I was really excited. When I was writing it, I thought about logistics of shooting, too, and I kinda realized I had been on 20 or something movie sets so I must know something about how to make a film. Plus, I was really good at getting input from my crew. I didn’t want to be dictatorial about it and, although I had a clear vision, I was really into collaborating and didn’t feel threatened if I thought somebody else’s idea was better than mine.

MPM: Could you become addicted to directing?
Julia: Totally. I absolutely loved the pre-production and shooting, and I think that it exercises some other part of your brain in terms of problem solving and time management and logistics of shooting, multi-tasking, all that stuff. When you’re acting on a movie set, you’re deliberately trying to isolate yourself from people ’cause you want to keep sort of… inside the story, and there’s a lot of down time that takes you out of it, but directing: You’re nonstop on your feet, busy all day long, answering questions, thinking ahead to the next shot. I loved it.

MPM: So Raving‘s life began at the Tribeca Film Festival…
Julia: Yeah; it’s part of the short competition at Tribeca and then it’ll be on Sundance Channel. When I was trying to come up with my idea for Raving, I was a juror [of the Tribeca Film Festival] to see what the short medium was like. I saw hundreds and hundreds of five-minute films, 20-minute films, 15-minute films; which kind of helped. It made me understand that a short film is sort of a beast in and of itself. Meaning, you want to tell a story in a limited amount of time that’s engaging and also resolves itself. It’s almost harder than a feature. You don’t have the luxury of time.

MPM: Do you think that you’ll now try and look for a feature project?
Julia: I’m not in a rush. I think it would be extremely rewarding, and maybe I’d even try writing something, but I sort of feel that, for whatever reason, I would definitely have to be the one to lead that charge. The industry wants to see you as what you are, what you came to be known as. Like, “Oh, you’re an actress.” And I think it’s hard to cross over, but also the director is the leader, so when all this money is at stake, it’s very hard to invest in that one person. Your producers have to be really confident in you, so I’m gonna have to prove that I am competent.

MPM: Looking over your filmography – 10 Things I Hate About You, Hamlet, O, Business of Strangers, State and Main, Save the Last Dance – it seems you either had smart people around you or you were very active in taking roles that didn’t allow people to capture you with one image. Were you conscious of mixing it up?
Julia: The actors that I admire are chameleons. You could never see their personality on screen; you see whatever character they’re playing. So I think I would always gravitate towards a role that would be very different from myself or different from a role I had just played.

MPM: Did you go to Sundance with either Business of Strangers or Wicked?
Julia: I did, I went for both of those films. And there was a movie I did with Forest Whitaker, A Little Trip to Heaven, that was at Sundance, not last year, but the year before.

[Sundance is] a great festival, but I think Tribeca’s just different in that the point of it may be to sell films, but that doesn’t feel like the major priority, at least from my perspective. What I’ve gotten out of it is, it’s a lot more about getting artists together. And, although there is corporate sponsorship, it still doesn’t seem as exaggerated at Tribeca.

MPM: Your credits run to almost 30 projects in 13 years, you’ve fit school in as well, and you’re still only 26. Do you ever think, “Holy crap, I should just relax”?
Julia: Oh, my God, no. But thanks for saying that. I’m so always on to the next thing, and yeah, I just love movies and movie making. I’m very passionate about it. So I’m always thinking, “I want to do more, I want to do more.” Plus, it would be kind of boring if you were like 26 and sort of going, “Hey, I’m retired. Everything’s good.” But I do have a lot of time off in between movie projects now that I’m not in school, and I’ve really come to embrace that it’s a huge luxury to be able to have free time to hang out with your friends and see your family and travel and pursue other interests (I’m really into photography, and also just reading a lot and writing). I’m very lucky in that sense.

MPM: What was it that you wanted out of going back to study at Columbia?
Julia: The first two years, I did an intense core curriculum and I didn’t really have that from my high school education, so it was great to read classic literature and the Greek tragedies and philosophy and study science and languages and art history and music history, all the things that I thought I was missing. And then my last two years, I really focused on the English major and writing, which was just enjoyable. But it’s also like a place where you’re free to make mistakes and figure out what in the world you’re interested in. And I didn’t really realize that the writing courses that I was taking were going to amount to anything. But it didn’t matter because, when you’re in school, it’s the one time in your life when you can focus on learning and cultivating your own intellect without having to have it amount to a job.

It’s not really extraordinary for somebody to go to college – there are thousands of other people who are getting bachelor degrees and it is not considered extraordinary for them, it’s just expected. So I was determined to finish. I felt like it would have cheapened it or made it just this sort of press anecdote if I didn’t.

MPM: Did your peers at school expect you to be the one buying drinks?
Julia: (Laughs) Probably, or at least I felt… I was neurotic about that. I felt like, I guess, I needed to overcompensate or something.

MPM: Are you a Myspace-r?
Julia: No, ’cause I think that can get kinda dangerous. I don’t have a membership to Myspace or Friendster or any of that stuff, ’cause I’m a little old-fashioned and I’m averse to that. I feel like – it seems like you’re communicating with people in that situation, but you’re really not. I’m a person who would rather have a phone conversation than text message.

MPM: On the other side of the coin, being part of the Bourne franchise – do you have a more significant role in this August’s installment, The Bourne Ultimatum?
Julia: I do, but it’s hard to tell because the way [director] Paul Greengrass works, he could get to the editing room and decide to swap parts of the story. I’m usually very critical of myself, and I try to be objective and learn from my performances, but with the Bourne movies, I’m always really happy with them. I really am lucky to be a part of that franchise because I think it’s really smart and entertaining. And you get to travel to amazing places you wouldn’t otherwise go to. And it’s working; you’re working with the same crew and producers from the first two. They’re like a well-oiled machine.

MPM: And you’re linked to an adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar?
Julia: Yeah. I have the rights to the book, and I have a production company in New York that wants to produce it. And I would like to act in it… It’s been a while; it’s been a couple of years in the making. But there’s already a writer who adapted it, and she’s working on the second draft of the script.

 

So many people think of Sylvia Plath as this dark and depressed woman who was sort of numb to the world, but if you read her poetry and if you read The Bell Jar, she’s so vibrant and she’s got these crazy visions of the world, and she describes them in The Bell Jar so well. And if you could realize that on film, it could make it almost like a hallucinogenic movie. I think it could be great.

MPM: Is all the celebrity and all the work and all the public attention worth it in order to throw out opening pitch at the Mets’ Shea Stadium?
Julia: Oh, yeah! Are you kidding me? That’s, like, that was probably the highlight of my life! If I got to do that simply because I had a movie opening, I’m all for it.