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She’s The Boss
The rise of the actress-director
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Hunt’s journey from actress to director took her on what she describes as “a 10-year odyssey,” in part because she spent so much time making sure she was ready. “I prepared on every level I could possibly imagine, as hard as I could, forever,” she says.
Over the years she showed the evolving script, based on a novel by Elinor Lipman, to a series of people, including Academy Award winners James L. Brooks (who directed Hunt to her own Oscar in 1997’s As Good As It Gets) and Warren Beatty. She also sought advice from a host of moviemakers at varying stages of their careers.
“I asked everybody’s opinion,” Hunt admits. “As interested as I was in very experienced filmmakers, I was equally wanting to hear from people who’d only made one or two movies, so they still remembered what it felt like without so much experience.”
Pinkett Smith says she picked up pointers over the years by observing moviemakers like Michael Mann, who directed her in Collateral and Ali.
“You just kind of have to figure it out as you go along, because each project is different and each actor reacts to different techniques,” she says. “So it’s really a process that you have to learn in the ‘doing-ness’ of it.”
Among the things Pinkett Smith learned while making the film, she says, is that “you really have to be very careful in how you handle your actors, because they’re very vulnerable and very open. For me, I think that was probably the most important aspect—making sure that I was handling my actors properly and that my actors were taken care of. It was very, very, very intense work, and we didn’t have a lot of time, so it was a matter of making sure that they could produce what they needed to produce within the timeframe that we had.
“For me as a director I had to make sure that I was keeping up with my schedule,” she continues, while “also making sure that they were getting what they needed and I was getting what I needed as far as the film was concerned. There were times where we had to shoot a 20-hour day because we had to get it done.”
Hunt, likewise, says she came to understand through her work as a director, “what a psychotropic experience it is to deal with that many personalities at once, to be the person working with such different kinds of personalities. The actors on this movie were all as different as they could possibly be.
“Your job is to make sure that the movie that you want has the best chance of being made. The only way to do that is to be the guy who is able to hold onto someone’s hysteria or someone’s introversion or someone’s panic or someone’s rage or someone’s great idea. You just have to be bigger than all of that.”
Like Pinkett Smith, Hunt also learned by observing other directors at work over the years. For example, she says, if the person in charge of props has something to say, make sure you’re listening.
“This no one told me,” she says, “but I saw it from being an actress on so many movie sets for so long: The best directors I have worked with are smart enough and they know the movie they want to make well enough and they’re prepared enough that they can take a suggestion from whoever it comes from.”
Pinkett Smith, who also wrote the script for The Human Contract, worked fast when she decided she wanted to direct.
“I really had my mind set,” she says. “I went out, I got financing—I wanted to do it independently. I didn’t want to have the studios in my ear, I just wasn’t ready for that. I went and I found $5 million and we were shooting within about six to eight months.”
Pinkett Smith wants to direct more films, and as she grows in her newfound role, she says she realizes that “I just have to make sure I keep my studies up.” To that end, she says she plans to spend some time observing Mann on the set of his upcoming crime movie, Public Enemies.
“It’s just a new interaction with my art that I really enjoy,” she says of the transition from actress to actress-director. “It’s just a whole different viewpoint and perspective.”
Hunt also plans more work as a director, and she plans to get to it in the near future. “I’ve already written another movie that I want to make,” she says.
The Human Contract will premiere at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. Then She Found Me, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, will be released by THINKFilm on April 25th.
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by Jon Raymond on 4/28/08 at 5:20 pm
I love watching films by women writers and directors. They have a perspective and voice we have seen too little of. As a man, I am at a loss watching some of these films. Juno is a great example written by a woman. I wouldn’t have a clue about what a teenage pregnancy is like, let alone the growing pains of being a teenage girl.
Two days in Paris was awesome. You get the female perspective which usually, unlike the male perspectuve, has very little to do with sex.
Of of the classic greats of all time in Kissing Jessica Stein. That film is so groundbreaking and insightful to a woman’s perspectve. I really feel unworthy. How could i ever come up with something as original. Women have a lot of new frontier to explore at their feet.
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This story was published in the Spring 2008 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
She's The Boss
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