The Life and Death of Sophie Stark (18 page)

There are some directors who care a lot about whether you have seen their movies. I know this because as a young reporter for the
Burnell College Mongoose
, I had the bizarre good fortune to meet indie film god William Cockburn, all of whose films I happened to have seen. On learning this he took me under his wing and spoke only to me the entire evening, causing my already overinflated 21-year-old ego to swell nearly to bursting. (I did not tell him that I found all but one of his movies tired and obvious, and indeed this fact faded from my memory as he praised my intelligence and discernment.) Sophie Stark, whose hotly anticipated second feature,
Woods
, will be released in March, is not one of these directors. When I told her I was pretty sure I’d seen everything she’d ever directed, including the short film
Daniel
and the music video she directed for singer-songwriter Jacob O’Hare, she said only, “Good.”

When I asked her to elaborate, she said, “Well, you’re writing a thing about me, so it’s good you’ve seen my movies.”

We were talking in the small but light-filled living room of the Brooklyn apartment she shares with O’Hare, now her husband. Stark is 28, but she moved with the economy of an old person, or one conserving energy. She wore a light gray dress with loose sleeves like wings, and she perched on the edge of the couch as we talked, carefully picking clean a chicken leg.
She seemed by turns oblivious and hyperaware of my presence—when I asked to use the bathroom, she ignored me, but when I paused on the way back to examine a photograph on the wall behind her, she turned around to stare at me. The shot was of a young boy eating an ice cream sandwich, and it had a certain quality I associate with Stark’s films—an attention to framing that seems to convey a subject’s emotional state almost by accident. Stark confirmed that she’d taken it.

“It’s my brother,” she said, “when he was nine.”

The boy in the photo looked less serious than Stark, a little nerdy and put upon, but the resemblance was striking. Stark wouldn’t talk much about her brother—asked if the two were close, she narrowed her eyes at me as though it was a strange question. She was willing, however, to talk about how photography led her to film.

“I used to feel kind of isolated a lot of the time,” she said, “like I was in a box and the rest of the world was outside the box. After I started taking pictures, I felt less like that. But I started getting really interested in how people move, and you can’t really show that in still photos—or you can, but it’s difficult, and you can only get little pieces of it. So I decided I wanted to make movies, and I made
Daniel
.”

Daniel
is a fascinating, if flawed, first film, but noncompletists probably became aware of Stark after
Marianne
, the hyper-low-budget feature debut that won Stark the Cleveland Fellowship and the admiration of a number of critics. Even Stark gets animated, in her way, when she talks about it.

“I wasn’t sure I could do it,” she told me between chicken bites. “
Daniel
was a documentary, kind of, and I wasn’t sure I could write a whole movie and film it and have it be anything like life.”

Really,
Marianne
is almost more like life than life itself.
Over the course of her career, Stark has been perfecting a particular wide shot, with the camera placed slightly above the actors and giving a nearly 180-degree panorama. It’s not a viewpoint any human being could actually achieve—Stark seems less interested in reproducing life than in transcending it, showing us what it would look like if we were able to step back beyond the bounds of what’s humanly possible.

When I floated this theory to her, she seemed unimpressed.

“Mostly I just try to make what I see,” she said.

Stark’s eyes are huge, and she never seems to blink; it’s possible that she’s able to see a wider angle than most people can.

Marianne
was also notable for introducing the unconventional but strikingly talented Allison Mieskowski, who will not be appearing in
Woods
. Rumor has it that the two were lovers and broke up during the production of
Marianne
; Mieskowski did not attend the premiere. Stark would not comment directly on these rumors:

“Jacob wants me to get a publicist so they can tell me what to say to questions like that. But I’d probably still forget and mess up, and then they’d get mad at me. I guess what I want people to know about Allison is sometimes you see someone and it’s like, ‘There, that’s the face, that’s what I’ve been looking for all this time.’ And then everything they do becomes interesting. It’s not always the face though—it could be the way they move, or the way they stand, or even just one of their ankles. It’s like someone walking over your grave when you meet that person, and after that it’s the best feeling, like fitting puzzle pieces together.”

I asked if she was talking about movies or love.

“It’s hard for me to talk about love,” she said. “I think movies are the way I do that.”

She is, nonetheless, married, and O’Hare seems deeply protective
of her. Several times during our conversation, he came into the room to let me know how much of our allotted time was left—forty minutes, ten, five. Her agent had given me a hard ninety-minute time limit and warned me not to overstay my welcome. When I asked about it, Stark said, “They know I get tired really easily.”

Asked what happens when she gets tired, she responded, “I say things people don’t like.”

It’s one of the perks of genius that you can be difficult or even impossible and not only escape censure but enjoy praise and the careful ministrations of others. This is a source of especial jealousy for those of us who are merely difficult without the benefit of genius.

My ninety-minute audience did include a screening of a small portion of the unfinished
Woods
. Any resentment I might have felt lifted as I began to watch.

It was a cut without sound—Stark says this lets her look at each shot with no distractions. In a rare moment of openness, she told me it was like when she taught her brother to draw—for the first year, she made him draw everything upside down so he’d really look rather than work from memory. I said she sounded like an unusual kid; she agreed. As a former unusual kid myself, I couldn’t help but ask if she’d been bullied.

“Sure,” she said. “Once in junior high, a boy took a cup of his own pee and poured it down the back of my dress. It smelled bad, but it didn’t bother me that much. At a certain point, I figured out I could learn a lot about people from how they teased me—I could learn what kind of people they wanted to be and how they wanted other people to think of them. And since I’ve never been that much like other people, I’ve had to learn about them any way I can.”

The scenes we watched featured star Olivia Warner and newcomer Jason Koutsakis as her teenage son. The film is said to be loosely based on O’Hare’s childhood, something I asked about when I saw Koutsakis noodling with the guitar. Stark wouldn’t comment, but soon it didn’t matter. A scene in which Warner and Koutsakis argue until she strikes him was fast-paced and, even without sound, riveting. Then came a scene shot, Stark told me, in the National Aquarium in Baltimore. The scene required delicate negotiations with the aquarium management over its lighting; they were concerned that too much artificial light would harm or disturb the fish. A consensus was apparently reached, because the scene begins with the ambient light and brilliant colors of a good dream; the fish themselves appear to glow as Warner and Koutsakis walk by them. They pause in front of an octopus, whose writhing purple arms and dark central shadow (what’s in there, you realize, is its
mouth
) are completely hypnotic. Meanwhile the light is changing—the shadows deepen, the octopus and the two humans are marooned together on an island of light. Is this a good dream or a nightmare? And then the wide shot, the camera pulling back to reveal all the fish, pulsing silently in their tanks, and Warner planting a kiss on Koutsakis’s forehead. Amid all this, how could anyone be reassured? The scene feels like a terrifying exposure of the insufficiency of love.

Afterward I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “That was amazing.”

Stark merely nodded.

With my last five minutes, I asked her the question that had been plaguing me since the beginning of our interview: “Do you care if people like your movies?”

She was quiet for a long time. I could hear the ticking of the
wall clock and then O’Hare’s footsteps, coming to shoo me away. Stark seemed to be looking at a surface a few feet in front of my face.

“Yes,” she said finally, “I do.”

And our time was up.