Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

She is, nonetheless, married, and O’Hare seems deeply protective of her. Several times during our conversation, he came into the room to let me know how much of our allotted time was left — forty minutes, ten, five. Her agent had given me a hard ninety-minute time limit and warned me not to overstay my welcome. When I asked about it, Stark said, “They know I get tired really easily.”

Asked what happens when she gets tired, she responded, “I say things people don’t like.”

It’s one of the perks of genius that you can be difficult or even impossible and not only escape censure but enjoy praise and the careful ministrations of others. This is a source of especial jealousy for those of us who are merely difficult without the benefit of genius.

My ninety-minute audience did include a screening of a small portion of the unfinished Woods . Any resentment I might have felt lifted as I began to watch.

It was a cut without sound — Stark says this lets her look at each shot with no distractions. In a rare moment of openness, she told me it was like when she taught her brother to draw — for the first year, she made him draw everything upside down so he’d really look rather than work from memory. I said she sounded like an unusual kid; she agreed. As a former unusual kid myself, I couldn’t help but ask if she’d been bullied.

“Sure,” she said. “Once in junior high, a boy took a cup of his own pee and poured it down the back of my dress. It smelled bad, but it didn’t bother me that much. At a certain point, I figured out I could learn a lot about people from how they teased me — I could learn what kind of people they wanted to be and how they wanted other people to think of them. And since I’ve never been that much like other people, I’ve had to learn about them any way I can.”

The scenes we watched featured star Olivia Warner and newcomer Jason Koutsakis as her teenage son. The film is said to be loosely based on O’Hare’s childhood, something I asked about when I saw Koutsakis noodling with the guitar. Stark wouldn’t comment, but soon it didn’t matter. A scene in which Warner and Koutsakis argue until she strikes him was fast-paced and, even without sound, riveting. Then came a scene shot, Stark told me, in the National Aquarium in Baltimore. The scene required delicate negotiations with the aquarium management over its lighting; they were concerned that too much artificial light would harm or disturb the fish. A consensus was apparently reached, because the scene begins with the ambient light and brilliant colors of a good dream; the fish themselves appear to glow as Warner and Koutsakis walk by them. They pause in front of an octopus, whose writhing purple arms and dark central shadow (what’s in there, you realize, is its mouth ) are completely hypnotic. Meanwhile the light is changing — the shadows deepen, the octopus and the two humans are marooned together on an island of light. Is this a good dream or a nightmare? And then the wide shot, the camera pulling back to reveal all the fish, pulsing silently in their tanks, and Warner planting a kiss on Koutsakis’s forehead. Amid all this, how could anyone be reassured? The scene feels like a terrifying exposure of the insufficiency of love.

Afterward I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “That was amazing.”

Stark merely nodded.

With my last five minutes, I asked her the question that had been plaguing me since the beginning of our interview: “Do you care if people like your movies?”

She was quiet for a long time. I could hear the ticking of the wall clock and then O’Hare’s footsteps, coming to shoo me away. Stark seemed to be looking at a surface a few feet in front of my face.

“Yes,” she said finally, “I do.”

And our time was up.

THE YEAR I GOT THE SCRIPT FOR ISABELLA , I WAS JUST SO TIRED of making bad movies. The company was doing well; the old bad days of not paying our electric bill were behind us. But in those days we’d made movies I was proud of. Now we kept the lights on and I made enough money to rent an apartment by the beach and send something to my daughter, Kat, every now and then, but we did it mostly by making shitty movies for women. The movies were all the same; they had that indie lighting, kind of crappy the way people like now, and a controversial-seeming premise, like a daughter finding out her dad is a cross-dresser. At the end the point of all of them was to make women feel like the world was an okay place and even if you were a little bit fucked up, you would eventually find happiness in it. I got it. I knew life was hard for women. I’d made it harder for plenty of them myself. I understood why they’d want something to calm them down without making them feel too dumb. But I was tired of feeling like a therapist, and every time I saw a movie that was actually good, I got terrified that I’d never make a movie like that again.

I felt that way when I saw Woods . I’d liked Marianne —loved it, even — but I thought it was a little green. Stark would linger on one of her actors’ faces for a beat too long or show some fingernail clippings on top of a dresser for no reason — it was like she hadn’t quite learned how to communicate with an audience. But in Woods she knew exactly what she wanted to say. The nurses crowding Beth at the beginning, one entering as soon as the other left, the kids in the schoolyard, the guests at her wedding, her family swarming to pick up a fork she’d dropped — nearly every scene stuffed with the sad fumbling of human love, the way well-meaning people hurt as often as they help. Those few scenes where Beth was alone and her whole body relaxed, like she was free. And the final scene, when Beth made it to a clearing in the woods full of green-gold light, a place clearly more beautiful and comforting than anything her family had been able to offer her, a place that would welcome her away from life. I stood up and clapped at the end, even though I think standing ovations are stupid — it just felt so good to see a movie that didn’t try to make me feel good.

After that I watched Marianne again, and then I tracked down Stark’s other work — a couple of music videos, a weird, beautiful short called Daniel . It wasn’t all as flawless as Woods , but it all had that quality — as if an alien had come down and filmed humans and shown us what we were like so much more honestly than any other human could. I talked about her to everybody I knew, which was easy, because Woods was blowing up — people were talking about Oscars. After a little while, I stopped talking about her, because I was worried somebody else was going snap her up, give her a big budget to make their movie, and I wanted to get her first. I felt like I’d discovered her, which was how I’d felt my whole life about anything I loved, even though it was rarely true.

Isabella wasn’t an obvious fit for Stark. She’d never done anything period, and the script was sort of schlocky and commercial in a way none of her own screenplays were. But it was the most serious property we had — it was the only one I could imagine being an Oscar contender. And it had a woman at the center who was strong but in some ways isolated, which I convinced myself was a connection to her previous films. Still, I didn’t think she’d call back. I figured people were probably beating down her door. And her agent was someone I didn’t know, a young guy with a confident-sounding voice even on voice mail. There were more and more people like that in the industry — ten years ago when I walked into a party, it would be full of my friends, but now I was in my fifties, and half the time I was the old, weird guy by the vegetable platter, pretending to text people. When I got ready to go out at night, I knew I didn’t look bad, just nondescript — gray hair, a little bit of a gut but not a lot, something gone out of my face in the last ten years or so. People I met now tended not to remember me. I was worried her agent would tell her not to call; I definitely wasn’t expecting her to show up at my apartment.