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Robin Swicord: From Screenwriter to Director
February 14, 2008

Filmmaker Robin Swicord was excited about getting the opportunity to direct her first feature film, The Jane Austen Book Club (which was released on DVD by Sony last week), but she didn’t approach the challenge as a daunting chore or, conversely, as a blessing from the film gods. Stepping into directing, Swicord felt, “was like stepping into a familiar pair of shoes.”

 

“Many people believe this myth that only a rarefied few can attain the level and status of ‘director,’ but that’s not the case,” Swicord told me in a phone interview last week. “Directing, by and large, is a matter of pointing out things that must be done to those on your team.”

 

A veteran screenwriter who has penned such high-profile film adaptations as Little Women(1994), Matilda (1996), Practical Magic (1998) and Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), as well as The Jane Austen Book Club

(which is based on the best-selling novel by Karen Joy Fowler), Swicord approached her directorial debut with the same sense of care and logic that she applies to her writing. And that feeling extended to aspects of the production, from the planning to the editing.

 

“For a dialog-heavy piece and a thirty-day shooting schedule, we had to shoot with three cameras at all times, which lent a dynamism to the film,” Swicord said. “[Cinematographer] John Toon and I would spend weekends blocking the actors with my Fisher Price figurines.”

 

As for editing, Swicord says that an audience can play a major role during the latter part of the process. By the fourth week of editing, Swicord began to invite select people to view what she had.

 

“It’s hard to describe the process and sometimes it takes an audience to look at it. It’s not that you lose your own perspective, it’s that you get other people’s perspectives,” she said. “And losing scenes isn’t that painful—the editor and I have the best interests of the film at heart.”

 

Posted by Laurence Lerman on February 14, 2008 | Comments (0)