A Poetic Conversation with Jane Stephens Rosenthal
Courtesy of Artist
Jane Stephens Rosenthal is a published poet, an actor, and a filmmaker living in Los Angeles. She graduated from the American Film Institute as a Directing Fellow in August 2020. Her directorial debut, No One Ever Said, had its premiere at The Los Angeles Independent Filmmakers Showcase, and then went on to play in the LA Shorts International Film Festival and The Los Angeles' HollyShorts Film Festivals. Her award-winning thesis film, The Hideaway, debuted at The 16th Annual Hollyshorts Film Festival and is currently making the festival rounds all over the world. The Hideaway will be playing in person and online at the Catalina Film Festival until the end of September. I got the pleasure to ask Jane about the importance of editing, how important time management is for a creative person, how films are visual poems, and what hooks her when she is reading a script.
UZOMAH: How has being a poet influenced your career as an actor and director?
JANE: I don’t think poetry and film have ever been separate in my eyes, but for a long time, I didn’t know I could make film in the same way I knew and was confident in making poems, and poetry remains the place where I begin everything. It is how I make sense of the world, in a word, or a line break. Poetry has always been my way of ordering and grounding. George Oppen once said, “Modern American Poetry begins with the determination to find the images, the thing encountered, the thing seen each day whose meaning has become the meaning and the color of our lives.” As an artist, whether writing or acting, or directing, I am deeply interested in this tallying up. In this every day. I am quite unabashedly interested in the feelings of things, in our insides and interiors, about what lies underneath and makes us tick and how it affects our living - and then - how does this living come out in a word, or a string of them, or an image, or a posture? Does one lean across the table? Or in the doorway? Open their mouth and then close it? How does that feel? How does the body react when the mouth is just placed on the neck but there is no kiss? Each line and word in a poem is an action or reaction to what came before it, just like in life we act and react, and the same goes with acting and directing, each choice and decision or decision not to choose comes from what happened before it. And I am interested in mining this space, always.
U: What do you think are the biggest things filmmakers and screenwriters get wrong when adapting a book to the big screen?
J: Obviously, being a poet and a filmmaker, I think about this question constantly. I am absolutely fascinated by the translation of words into images and all the time I think how does one honor? Novels are internal and active, meaning they require the reader to actively engage with them and I don’t think film should be any different, regardless of it being a different medium. A novel envelops and demands a certain sort of attention and respect from the reader, but it also respects the reader, and I think in film this respect for the audience can be forgotten, especially in the world of American film, where we have trained audience on plot, and bludgeoned them with information rather than letting a story unfold and trusting them to piece it together, to engage on their own with the material. I would love to see American cinema go more in the direction of trust, allowing a film just to be felt. In terms of successful adaption, I’ve always thought Frank Perry’s adaption of Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays was masterful (and Tuesday Weld as Maria is just absolutely breathing taking) and Richard Brook’s adaptions of both Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Judith Rossner’s Looking for Mr. Goodbar are extremely good, faithful to the text, and equally as terrifying. And I’d be remiss not to mention Joan Didion and Gregory Dunne’s screenplay The Panic In Needle Park directed by Jerry Schatzberg. These adaptions just let the story unfold, and they seem to harness the quiet and intimate feeling of reading and allow it to play out on the screen. There are also plenty of movies that I love but have never read the book, like Trainspotting, and then, of course, there are movies like Lee Chang-dong’s Burning that just used Murakami as a starting point and jumped off into its own thing. Burning is quite possibly one of the best movies I’ve seen in recent years, and maybe ever. It’s pure poetry.
U: What makes being a filmmaker also a creator of visual poems?
J: It all comes back to building. In a poem, you are building an experience with words. The words create images, the space on the page creates images and meaning, and what is left unsaid also creates an image. What I love about poetry is that it can be read in so many different ways, and I often like to play with this concept in my poems, the knottiness /naughtiness of language and ambiguity, and I am interested in playing with this concept in film as well, but it arrives differently; the film is a whole experience and you can only begin to extrapolate at the end of the journey when the screen goes to black, which leads me to your other question about
U: How can a certain edit of a scene with a camera shot or angle change or improve the overall story? How important is the process of editing for the director? How can a certain edit of a scene with a camera shot or angle change or improve the overall story?
J: Editing is the process in which the film becomes a poem. Editing is the most essential part of a film, and is my favorite part of filmmaking. With a film, you just have an image, or a set of images, and the way you choose to order them, to build on them is what creates the emotion, what creates the world, what brings the audience in or pushes them out. In my the film, The Hideaway, it was absolutely imperative to me that we let the images really stand on their own before we cut out in or out of them, that we let them breathe because, in this breath, these beautiful images could bring the audience in; for example, in the continual slow pull-out and then interruption and then slowly pull out again at the beginning of the film, not only could we see the characters isolation, but we could also feel she was being left behind. If we stayed up close to her, or cut around, or came in on the shot rather than out, the feeling wouldn’t have been the same. Where you decide to cut in film is the same delicate dance of when to break a line in a poem, each shot should carry meaning, the same way each line does.
U: What are the top qualities and needed parts for you to be hooked on when you read a script?
J: It has to be about something. It has to be trying to say something in a way we might not have seen before. Film for me is spiritual, it’s about exposing, it’s about coming to something you might never have come to, it’s about looking at something differently, it’s about those moments we can sometimes so easily pass by.
U: How important is time management for a creative person?
J: It is extremely important. That said, nothing for me is ever easy and everything requires work, even and especially time requires dedication. And I find time to be very tricky - the wiliest and the most demanding thing. There is a great holiness in repetition, and there have been many years of my life where I have followed a strict schedule, and I am a great believer in it, but I am not very good at it. When I am not working, I get distracted, I like to wander. On my days off, before the pandemic, I spent many years going to matinees. The same group of strangers would seem to gather all over the city and we would watch Night Of The Hunter, The Misfits, On The Water Front, The Last Metro, Point Break, all at 11:30 AM on a Wednesday or a Monday. I don’t find this type of spending time as wasted though, my work tends to come to me from these spaces, this wandering around a city, this worship of movement and body that the pandemic has cut me off from. I am trying to find new ways of embracing routines and inspiration. For example, the other day a man drove by our home and stopped to tell us a famous drummer had lived in our house once and he was new to the neighborhood again, and “boy had things changed!” These are the little moments that I miss in the day-to-day that fuel me, these tiny interactions, these overheard snippets. The other day I also watched a woman go into the sea with all her clothes and jewelry on and come out again, which is a scene straight out of one of the movies I am working on, and it was such a striking thing to witness in real life, our strange and funny and desperate living, it reminded me I need to get back to writing again, and back to a routine.
U: How does knowing “how to” actively play a vital role as an actor help in how you direct?
J: As someone who used to think I couldn’t do things if I didn’t know how to do them immediately, or wasn’t an instant master at them, I’ve come to believe that there is actually so much power in saying “Hold on one second, I’m not so sure.” That’s the space in which we learn. So much of life and creativity is a series of figuring things out - of trying something one way and seeing if it works and then trying something another way. Don’t get me wrong, if there is anything I believe the most in, it is preparation, especially as an actor and director, you have to know what the scene is about, where the characters are going, what they want, how it fits into the larger theme, what is being accomplished in the scene, but sometimes you get on set and what you thought was going to work doesn’t and you have to figure out another way of shooting, or the actor brings something to the table that you never imagined, and it’s great. You have to be prepared, you have to know “how to” in that sense, but then you also have to be open to change.
Before I begin any project I create a visual board for my team with images and colors and film references, and sometimes little notes of things I have read that gets at the feeling of our project and how I want it to look, and then I get to start playing with my cinematographer, and production designer, and my producer and suddenly the project starts to grow and blossom in a way I might not have seen or been able to bring to fruition on my own, and then you add in editing and sound design and music!! This is my favorite thing about filmmaking, this collaboration, and that filmmaking is a constant process of growth and expansion, and learning.
U: When did you begin writing poetry? Why is the process of poetry important to you?
J: I was fourteen when I first heard David Bowie’s Hunky Dory, and the song Eight Line Poem and I realized what I was listening to when I listened to music was the words (now I listen to the sounds). It was the first time I had ever been introduced to poetry and I like the economy of it. That it cuts right to the quick, and also left so much up to interpretation, to feelings, to experience. I realized I wanted to only write like this. That poetry was the quickest way to get to the heart of the thing, and that’s all that matters to me. Getting right up in there and into one’s soul. That’s the only realm I want to play in. For me, there is no other point. I want to share while I am here, I want to witness, I want to mirror.
U: Can you discuss your new film The Hideaway?
J: The Hideaway was my graduating thesis film from the American Film Institute and it’s the themes that I got to explore in The Hideaway that excited me. Growing up, longing, desire. I love that I got to create a film that could be quiet and experiential and that relied more on what was not said. And what has me excited about the film going out in the world, is that people are going on this intimate, interior, FEMALE journey with our protagonist - so much so that they feel the cut of the blade, and are willing to sit in the silence of the film, and that they don’t want it to end. On a small scale, this is the type of film I am hoping to make next on a bigger scale - a film where image and feeling is what holds the film together, not so much plot. With all my work, I hope it will mean something to someone, and with all my work, I like to treat it as if it is the last thing I will ever make, so it has to be the best, and as with all my work, I am always much more interested in the receiver’s experience of it than my own. I love that some people see the film as tragic, some people see it as a reclamation, and I think both of these feelings are valid and interesting and say more about the person watching than the film. I love that people have watched this mother and daughter story and thought about their own relationship with their parents, their own growing up. My favorite John Cassavetes quote is “The way we make pictures is we make pictures for people who are interested in specifics, they are not going to be interested in the everything. They are going to be interested in that scene, I love that scene, somebody else is going to say, I hate that scene because it has something to do with their life, and in that sense, it is not like a movie, a movie tries to pacify people by keeping it going for them so it’s sheer entertainment. Well, I hate entertainment.” My producer, Ross O’Shea, always rolls his eyes to that last part, and I don’t hate entertainment, but I love the idea of putting life up on the screen and letting people just react to it.
U: How important is it to use artistic mediums such as movies to address serious issues such as addiction and sobriety as you did in No One Ever Said?
J: No One Ever Said came from a desire to see a film about sobriety, specifically early sobriety, the trial and tribulations of it, the complexity of it, how desire continues in all of us, and how one deals with it. I had seen plenty of film about what it’s like to be in addiction, but never a film that was just about being sober. I have found the way to help most people is to listen and share experiences with them. We all need to be listened to, we all need to feel like we belong, and the cinema for me has always been a place of refuge, of seeing people who feel like I do on the screen and making me feel less alone or alien. And I believe films should tackle this stuff, I want to make films that you have to view more than once (I believe The Hideaway is this type of film) or a film that when you view it just bowls you over. Italian Cinema does this best. It’s always about the personal and the social and the political and the environmental and the spiritual. Someone like Alice Rohrwacher does this in her work all the time and it is always deeply poetic and deeply female. But no matter what the medium, I believe the artist’s job is to reveal themselves, to tell the truth, to spread the light on something that might be buried deep inside all of us and say, “Hey, it’s okay, here’s my hand.”
Please find more information about Jane’s work at her site, along with following her on Instagram.
