Last night one of my Demo Reel Scenes (One Last Chance) was used in the Women in Film director's workshop. Lilyan Chauvin runs the workshop to teach directors how to direct. She's very good at what she does, and I learn as much as the directors and actors do at these monthly meetings. One thing I've learned is that I don't want to be a director!

We do introductions before the class commences, and although I introduced myself, and although my name was on the bottom of the script pages, no one in the room realized that I wrote the scene. They had three male and one female actor (usually it's very female-heavy -- it is Women in Film after all) so Gina became Gino and Kanisha became Kenny. This was fine -- the scene is supposed to be able to allow these kinds of casting changes.

I was less interested in the reading of the words than the directors' interpretation of them. With this, I was pleased. They both (three if you count Lilyan) caught the emotion and intent of the scene, although the two directors gave the characters slightly different histories. One pair of actors gave the characters much more life than the second pair, and gave the scene a strong emotional punch at the end.

These are the moments for which I write, when actors take my words and invest them with the power of emotion. They transform a sequence of letters into a spear that pierces the audience’s hearts.

After the scenes are performed, Lilyan makes suggestions, and observations and fields questions from the room. It’s clear that a good director would have taken my scene and invested so many different, non-written, character moments. For example, in the scene with two men, she would have had a moment where one (who she interpreted as an addict who has resorted to turning tricks to support his habit) becomes half-conscious and tries to kiss the other (a priest who wants to save the addict). This isn’t written, but when she adds this, it adds a whole level of character meaning that really enriches the scene.

At the end, Lilyan (with my blessing) told the room that I was the writer. Apparently, this is the first time that she’s used a scene that wasn’t part of a script from a produced movie! We had further discussion on my impression of what happened, collaboration, and who expects what.

Some actors want the details of the characters fixed in concrete (without room for interpretation), others don’t. Some people expected me to have a protective “this is the way it should be” attitude, and I hope were pleasantly surprised when I voiced my desire for collaboration, and working with my collaborators to take my script to the next level. We finally ended with a traditional mixer, and people told me that they liked the scene, and one of the directors really liked all the nuances available in it.

I look forward to doing this for real!