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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Tuesday, January 17th, 2006 - Comments Off on From NYC to Sundance: Hilary Brougher, 'Stephanie Daley'
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From NYC to Sundance: Hilary Brougher, 'Stephanie Daley'


[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]
I remember reading about Hilary Brougher’s drama Stephanie Daley last summer in The Times; I think it was something about a growing number of indie productions shooting upstate. Starring Amber Tamblyn as the title character–a young woman accused of killing her baby–and Tilda Swinton as the psychologist who evaluates her competency to stand trial, the film had indie cred to spare and Sundance written all over it.
At least that was my impression at the time, and evidently, Brougher thought so, too–even if the clock was against her. “We were really hopeful we could make the festival,” she told me over the weekend. “It was kind of a mad dash because we shot in the summer, we did winter pickups and we submitted with a rough cut. And we just finished sound mixing like a day ago.”
Brougher chuckled, then laughed as though absorbing the absurdity of it all. Of course, deadlines are hardly an unusual challenge facing premieres like Stephanie Daley. But less than a week before her Sundance debut (her previous film, The Sticky Fingers of Time, screened at the 1997 Venice and Toronto Film Festivals), Brougher’s attitude seems to defy the fatigue and stress standards commonly accompanying those deadlines. Her initial relief and happiness at cracking the competition line-up gave way to an even more concentrated resolution.
“Somewhere after relief, it’s a sense a panic,” she said. “And then you just kind of do what you have to do. I’m a big believer in efficiency. This happened for a reason–I really think the film came into its own and happened just the way it should. I think the the lack of time itself sort of offset with a really positive momentum and excitement that keeps you going, just from the energy. You find yourself saying, ‘I have to do this, I have a reason to do this and we can do this.”
Expressing her “hope in the marketplace,” Brougher also plans to avoid the distribution pressures likely to follow Stephanie Daley‘s festival run. Instead, she said, she views Sundance as her just-finished film’s unofficial wrap party. “In my heart, I really just want to enjoy some of these people I’ve worked with before we all disperse,” Brougher told me. “That’s what I’m thankful to focus on. I know that there’s going to be lot going on, and it’s going to be very new for me and not like anything I know. But I’m not going to worry about it. So far the film’s been a lot of fun and the center of a lot of growth, so I’m just going to try and have a good time and stay positive and be near the people that I love and trust.”

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon