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AE: You have a long background in television and stage as well?
LT: Yeah. My personal background was in television. I had been working in television for a while, and I just did a lot of theater when I was a kid and in college. Where I grew up there was a summer theater, a little place that did musicals in the summer. It was really quite nice, so I spent all of my summers in high school and college working at that summer theater. Acting mostly, but doing a little bit of directing and whatever else people do.

AE: When was it that you first read Mrs. Stevens ? Was it soon before that signing in Seattle?
LT: I think I probably read it a few years earlier. I had read the journals in the mid seventies— Journal of Solitude and House by the Sea —and I really loved those a lot. So, I was a big Sarton fan when I read Mrs. Stevens. But I really didn't see how I was going to make it into a movie. I kept thinking, This is a tough book. It's really hard to make. It's so internal. So I kept thinking it was going to have to rely heavily on the flashbacks for the visual stuff. So I really kind of extended those more than they are in the book.

AE: In the interview sequences, is a lot of what Hilary is saying verbatim from the book?
LT: A lot of it is. I ended up cutting quite a bit of it out because there was a lot. As well as a lot of her day before the interviewers arrived. We shot a lot of it but I ended up cutting it from the film because it didn't really drive things forward. And gives you a different image of her, more sort of doddering, and I didn't like that, so we just left a lot of that out. But the essential part was how to make the intellectual stuff fit with the actuality of the flashbacks and to have all of that weave together well.

AE: You said that people have been asking you why it took 22 years. I read that it was a dream you had from a long time back, but I don't imagine you were working on it for 22 years.
LT: Oh no, I didn't work that whole time. But we didn't really get started a lot—I started in '83 when I met her. And then in '87 I had a script ready, and I found a partner in Los Angeles who had a small company. And we were producing partners for a bit. We signed, actually, Glenda Jackson to the lead in '89, and then the Gulf War wiped out all of our funding, the first Gulf War. So I just put it aside for a little bit and I tried to find some other people.

Because then what happened was that Glenda Jackson got elected to Parliament, so then she was gone. And I started asking a bunch of other people but on one wanted to do it, because it was pre-Ellen. You're post-Ellen, but when we started in '83 no one would really touch it, so there were a lot of people that were really frightened of doing it—both lesbians and straight women were very nervous about it so they kept turning us down left and right.

AE: So, I guess it's kind of like in the movie itself, where you see how the different eras, different climates for her whole story. It seems like you've experienced that with this whole project in terms of how open people were to taking part in it.
LT: Yeah, absolutely. And there's a part that talks about the 1950s and the McCarthy hearings, just briefly, one scene. By the time we finally did get the picture together… When I started doing it there would have been no misunderstanding, because it was pre-Ellen. Because there wasn't much visibility. There was no L Word. We were operating in a whole different era, and people were really nervous about doing a lesbian role.

And now we see certainly many more lesbians in cinema and on television, at least tangentially. If it weren't for The L Word we probably wouldn't see many at all. But fortunately, I guess, we do have that. So essentially what I was hoping to do is create that visibility. But before you have any visibility, that catch 22, you can't get anybody to do it because they're terrified that they're going to ruin their career by taking a particular role. Even some of the more commanding actors were nervous about it. So, we had some nibbles but we never did get very far with anybody until Glenda Jackson, who instantly said yes. She wanted to do it, but she wasn't afraid. She'd done some other roles. She was like, “No problem. I'm doing it.” So that was great.

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