Dara Van Dusen was a New Yorker sitting her entrance exam at a Polish film school, with a theme pulled from a hat and a room full of actors who didn’t speak English, when she learned the one thing she still leans on as a director.
Dara talks about the student who told a journalist she just wanted to go home and make a film in English, and the 17 years it took to actually do it, a decade of that spent working as a script supervisor in Norway. She walks through adapting Stewart O’Nan’s novel, a story set in 1870s Wisconsin, as an international co-production shot in Slovakia. She gets candid about growing up in an atheist household and why the book made her wonder if we’ve been too quick to laugh off faith. Dara breaks down the “faith camera” she built with cinematographer Kate McCullough (the two met as roommates their first night at film school) and why it was never allowed to move like a person. She also reflects on the professor who once asked her if she really deserved to be there, and what she’d say to that student now.
Worth your time if you’ve ever made something the room couldn’t agree on and kept going anyway.
