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Features
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Hollywood Loves You, Baby
The indie film Sherrybaby hasn’t just been a boon to the ever-evolving career of Maggie Gyllenhaal. It’s also opening a lot of doors for its writer-director, Laurie Collyer.
Friday, January 19, 2007 at 4:30 PM
By Daniel Robert Epstein
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Stephen Lovekin/WireImage.com
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Collyer at last November's Gotham Awards
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Even though Sherrybaby was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, the Golden Globe nomination this week of its lead actress Maggie Gyllenhaal (Best Actress – Drama) had to rank as the quietest one of the 64th annual HFPA ceremony. Perhaps even more shockingly, Gyllenhaal is not nominated in the equivalent category, Best Female Lead, at next month’s 2007 Spirit Awards. Then again, the same group – Film Independent - has also given an acting nomination to Forest Whitaker for American Gun rather than The Last King of Scotland.
Despite all this, there is a feeling in Hollywood that Gyllenhaal still has an outside shot at the fifth and final Best Actress nomination slot for the 2006 Oscars. During a backstage interview at the Golden Globes with E! Entertainment, Gyllenhaal insisted that although it’s a cliché that we’ve all become tired of, she felt it really was an honor just to be nominated in the company of fine actors such as Kate Winslet and eventual winner Helen Mirren.
Sherrybaby, which tells the story of an ex-con (Gyllenhaal) trying to readjust to her New Jersey home life after serving three years in prison, marks the feature length directorial debut of writer-director Laurie Collyer. Bespeaking the industry interest in her first film, Collyer has all this week been in Los Angeles taking meetings with various execs. That and of course accompanying Gyllenhaal to the Golden Globes.
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Steve Granitz/WireImage.com
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At the Golden Globes with her baby, Peter Sarsgaard
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“I have a new project I’m trying to get off the ground,” Collyer reveals during a recent interview with FilmStew conducted just before she hopped the plane from New York to L.A. “It’s cool, because I’m getting through the front door and I’ve never gotten in through the front door before. It’s nice to have people hold it open for me and everything.”
“I’m meeting with Harvey Weinstein the first day I’m out in LA at some swanky Beverly Hills hotel,” she adds excitedly. “Also, I’m up for a job to direct something that’s going to shoot this summer. That’s really exciting. It’s local [to New York], with a really cool actress attached.”
“I feel like I’ve never felt before. I’ve been trying to make movies for ten years, so it’s been a struggle.
In the past, Collyer has tended not to take phone calls from her manager until her child is asleep. But now, with the Sherrybaby momentum in full swing, it’s been more a case of fielding multiple calls while the kid runs wild in the background. The film arrives on DVD next Tuesday, January 23rd.
Amazingly, this former NYU student’s debut project was financed by a single individual, Marc Turtletaub. Even so, Collyer says it was an extremely difficult film to make, with people warming to the script only after Gyllenhaal and a production company were attached.
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Dave Lodge/WireImage.com
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Financier and producer Marc Turtletaub at the 2006 Deauville Film Festival
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“I really didn’t have any expectations,” she insists. “I didn’t expect that it would get bought [by IFC Films]. It was just a lot of hope: I hoped that it would make the producer’s money back; I hoped that people would like it; and I hoped that Maggie would feel good about having done it. All those hopes have been realized, and then some.”
Before Sherrybaby, Collyer had been, among other things, developing a script about a college student who goes to Germany and becomes a left wing terrorist. But when they couldn’t ostensibly get the Berlin Film Festival interested, the project fell apart and now sits in Collyer’s files as a writing sample.
Still, if there was any holdover effect from that creative process, it is in the pacing of Sherrybaby's narrative. Rather than classic American storytelling devices, Collyer used more of a subtle European approach, accenting it with very specific visual approach.
“Initially, I wanted it to be in the third person, more in the style of an early Ken Loach film like Kes,” Collyer reveals. “But that’s a luxurious way to shoot and we had a very short schedule, plus we were working with a six-year-old.”
“So we shot everything pretty much with a Lexus handheld,” she continues. “We had two cameras, which I think worked quite well because it gave a hectic, frantic child energy to the scenes. I figured if I shot the whole movie handheld in a fake documentary style, then it wouldn’t be so difficult.”
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Dimitrios Kambouris/WireImage.com
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Co-star Giancarlo Esposito, at last summer's New York premiere
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Even though Sherrybaby had a modest $200,000 run at the domestic box office last September-October, the buzz has been completely re-stoked thanks to some new screenings in L.A. Collyer says she has no shortage of ideas for a sequel, joking that perhaps Gyllenhaal’s character will gain weight, become more tired and have more kids.
On the page, the title character of Sherry Swanson was initially a little more violent than what transpires in the film. Collyer says that was just one of the layers that Gyllenhaal added.
“Maggie also brought some complexity to the relationship with her father,” Collyer remembers. “Like the scene where she jumps up and down on the couch when she sees her dad and the way she regresses. Maggie totally brought that out in her performance and adlibbed a couple lines that really made it much better. The way I wrote Sherry was a little bit scarier.”
“There was another scene where Sherry tears up the bed with a knife in the halfway house,” she adds. “After talking it over with Maggie, we took that scene out. Then there was some other stuff that happened on set that we worked out together.”
Collyer then goes on to reveal something very interesting about the Sundance Film Festival, which of course has just geared up for its annual run. She says things only really started happening in Hollywood for her after she stopped being perceived as a “Sundance chick.”
“I couldn’t even get across the desk of most of these people before, partially because I don’t live in LA,” she maintains. “I have friends who, after film school, moved out there or went out there for certain periods of time and got all of the meetings. That’s what LA is all about: meetings and development and meetings.”
“But I don’t feel vindictive, I’m not a vindictive person at all,” she adds. “I feel really humbled by the whole thing. I started off wanting to tell a story about this girl and I didn’t realize that it would reach so many people and affect them.”
[Maggie Gyllenhaal will be appearing at Borders Bookstore in Hollywood - just a few blocks from FilmStew, at the corner of Sunset and Vine - on Wednesday, January 24th, from 6pm to 8pm, to sign copies of the DVD edition of Sherrybaby.]
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