with Rivka Borek as Ari and Joe Gioco as Jacob
In March of 2008, just after I presented my MFA thesis film, “Moon Lady,” at its first festival in San Francisco, I came upon this short story in the New Yorker magazine, “The Region of Unlikeness”: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/03/24/the-region-of-unlikeness
I had one of those moments that is extremely rare when we are busy living normal sorts of lives: working, organizing projects, socializing, and all else. A moment when something calls out to you in a hundred different ways at once, as if it were waiting for you to find it.
It was a few days after my thirty-fourth birthday. I remember going into a kind of trance as I read “The Region of Unlikeness.” The experience of the young protagonist, who was enthralled to the point of muteness by two older male geniuses, had been all too familiar to me. So were the opening thoughts about Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights,” which I had previously taken to be a mantra deciphering what had happened in my own personal life. References to Deleuze, Heidegger, physics and time travel were familiar in another way: they pointed to philosophers and concepts I’d been meaning to study for some time. The story was now giving me the motivation to do so. I continued through my reading trance until the story’s final themeatic note proclaimed that moving through time was about recovering our “true selves.”
What made the story even more comforting was that Rivka wrote in a style that did not feel traditionally “literary” – it even flouted conventions of the contemporary “literary,” to my mind. Yet it went beyond many modern writers with its wit, Renaissance Man style intellectualism, and multi-dimensional humor. Her story expressed values that I could relate to in my own writing.
That year in 2008, I continued to edit my thesis film, “Moon Lady,” and send it to festivals. But the seed of adapting “The Region of Likeness” had already been planted. The plan was triply spurred on by more discoveries: Rivka’s first book, “Atmospheric Disturbances,” highlighted environmental factors that I, too, had begun researching prior to 2008, and the book was going to be published by the company I had most admired and worked for after college, Farrar Straus:
At FSG, I had chosen to remain in a backdoor inventory position (despite some prodding to join other departments) so that I could take film classes after work at the New School and make my very first short film. Yet I always had exuberantly fond feelings for FSG’s people, books, and culture. I remember seeing Tom Wolfe visit the office in his notorious white suit and gold watch on a chain when we were working on his #1 Bestseller, “Man in Full,” reminiscent of his great American novel of the 1980’s, ” “Bonfire of the Vanities.” I remember receiving a first edition copy of “Birthday Letters,” which was the British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes’ first response to his wife Sylvia Plath’s death (he passed several years later). My most encouraging memory was of being one in a room of less than a hundred watching Thomas Friedman, the Pulitizer-Prize winning journalist, present his new book about globalization, “The Lexus and the Olive Tree,” at the turn of the millennia.
It seemed fateful that at the end of 2008, I should contact Ethan Nosowsky, an editor who had worked at FSG, on Facebook. After talking with him, I ended up contacting the office for Rivka Galchen’s agent information. Then I negotiated and worked with Alicia Gordon, at William Morris Endeavor, on and off throughout the following two years (at one point I even got into a slight argument with the notorious Bill Clegg).
I ended up showing my thesis film, “Moon Lady,” at a bunch of film festivals, including Slamdance 2009, where it was invited to open for the feature – “Son of the Sunshine” – that was listed first on Indiewire’s “Top Five Features to Watch” that year. Later in 2009, I began work on a feature script with a Chinese co-writer, Jinying Li, who successfully pitched it for a TV project in 2010 with a well-established Chinese producer named Xu Wen. (I ended up pulling this project because I decided I did not want to do a TV movie for a Chinese audience but rather a film for an American audience).
I finally began pre-production on “The Region of Unlikeness” in 2010 amidst additional freelance writing and editing work, as well as programming for Slamdance in the autumn months (which I continued to do in 2011). Though I’d hoped to shoot “The Region of Unlikeness” in 2010, I did not start production until July of 2011, primarily because we had problems casting the male roles all the way through the final few months.
It was encouraging, throughout, to interact with Alicia Gordon at WME, who generously allowed us to make the film on a small fee. A very capable casting agent in LA, Kelli Lerner, introduced me to Fred Melamed and David Thornton in 2010. Fred Melamed had just done the Coen Brothers’ “A Serious Man” (2009), which had won an Oscar for Best Screenplay. He had gotten accolades on this first protagonist role after having played small roles in Woody Allen’s and other directors’ films for years.
After choosing Fred out of dozens of headshots that Kelli had skillfully plucked for the Jacob character, he agreed to come to a casting space I’d rented in mid-town Manhattan. The most memorable part of our conversation was his describing how a friend of his had put together an extremely elaborate, clandestine adventure simply to make a child happy. I remember hearing how the boy was put in a rowboat, oblivious to the fact that people had been hired to wear costumes and appear at unpredictable moments in a wood along the boat’s journey. Fred’s conversation truly opened my eyes to new possibilities of kindness and creativity. He himself continued to be extremely generous as he suggested that he ask Michael Stuhlbarg, the main actor in “A Serious Man” (the main actor in the clip above), to play the Ilan part in my film. I had seen Stuhlbarg play Hamlet at Shakespeare in the Park just the year before and was probably too stunned to respond. In any case, it turned out he was too busy with “Boardwalk Empire” at that point.
I have to admit that making this film became largely about just that: making the film. And it’s not because I wasn’t serious about adapting the story. It’s very much because during that time period, I was “reorienting” to America and NYC after more than ten years of relative alienation. In 1999, I had assisted people from China, who had been connected to the United Nations and Population Council in NYC, in improving China’s One-Child Policy. Then I had moved to China to work and study from 2000-2002, where I had worked as a freelance journalist, teacher, and assistant to a well-known talk show host for whom I had contacted a representative for George W. Bush during his visit to Beijing. At one point I had also gotten paid to sing and play guitar at a BMW-sponsored concert. And when I returned to the States to do an MFA in Filmmaking at NYU in 2002-2005 (our thesis films would be two-year projects from 2005-2007), I stayed in an international mindset, partially out of culture shock. My closest collaborators at school had been international through the making of my thesis film, “Moon Lady” (filmed in Taiwan bilingually in 2007). Even the feature I’d written and continued to work on through 2010 was set in China and with Chinese collaborators.
Therefore, pre-production and production on “Region” became a major step in returning to the American society that I had been born in and grew up in as I embraced and interacted with that world once again. Reorientation involves disorientation; it can be exciting, and it can be overwhelming. One after another, I was being introduced to people who were at the top of their game, and it became a process of discovering what I knew, what I didn’t know, and what I needed to learn (which was a lot). Though there are many things I love about this film adaptation, when I revisit its flaws, I forgive myself through the reminder that the project necessitated a more sublime form of culture shock and became largely an “introduction” to a new world of creative people. It could not, therefore, be one hundred percent about directing a film, not yet.
Kelli Lerner introduced me to David Thornton, the character I casted for Ilan out of dozens of headshots. Many mystical moments have occurred throughout the casting of my films; in the same way that two girls who I chose for Ari’s character from Kelli’s hundred or so headshots ended up being roommates (yes, literal roommates), David Thornton and Fred Melamed ended up having gone to Yale Drama together. I also had no idea at the time of casting David that he was married to Cyndi Lauper, a musician who has impacted me in ways like none other. “She’s So Unusual,” which came out in 1983 when I was in third grade, is the first rock album I ever owned. Cyndi also started her career at 28 and performed in Russia during the Cold War. These events overlap with my having performed music with Chinese rock musicians in Beijing when I was 28.
Further, David Thornton had played Rachel McAdam’s father in “The Notebook”; coincidentally, this was a book my bosses at Sanford J. Greenberger Literary Agents – Theresa Park and Daniel Mandel – had discovered the year of my very first internship at 21!
I had chosen David based on an older, more obscure clip in which he very passionately played a lawyer. However, he had also just done a very appealing indie film that won Best New York Narrative at Tribeca (2009) called “Here and There”:
My final choice for the lead actress, then-23-year-old Rivka Borek, was someone who had come to an audition at my casting space in NYC. I immediately liked her, as she was soulful, respectful, very truthful and very confident. It turned out later that she had grown up partly in Hong Kong and partly in the US and UK, to artist parents. I certainly don’t think that those are the only reasons I would have felt a connection to her, yet it makes sense that intuitively, there was an opening in our interaction that had stood out among all the live auditions. I was so happy to find out that in recent years, when Rivka did her MFA at one of the top American acting programs, American Conservatory Theatre, she was chosen to play Ophelia in their production of “Hamlet.”
Rivka and I met the actors for a table reading at David and Cyndi’s apartment in the Upper West Side. Though by that age (36), I had become thick-skinned enough to “just say something” – anything, even if it might be sensationalistic or impudent at moments – I was still quite shy. Rivka was shy to the point of having become mute (and/or was perhaps playing up the character) – exactly as I had been at her age, just like in the story. In reverence to that memory, I communed with Rivka in those moments. During the table reading, I remember David, who is very kind and funny, improvising, “The Silence of the Lambs… the Silence of the Lambs,” with a kind of affected autism, as Ilan and Jacob were supposed to be mad geniuses. I remember liking Fred greatly when he took on the Sy Ableman accent from “A Serious Man,” though it seemed later that he did not want to reprise that character; after all, it was not the same film. I remember feeling, in a warm glow of sunlight at that table, that heaven was shining down upon us; I was welcome, I was myself, and I was with artists who loved to create as I did, and they had been recognized.
This is where it gets complicated. I don’t think that at that moment, I was anywhere near ready to “direct” David and Fred as actors. I think there also turned out to be some conflict in negotiating their fees later on, though initially all of this had been agreed upon and settled through Kelli by the time of the table reading.
The truth was that I had always thought of myself as an indie director who worked with unknowns who would be easier to direct in some ways. And I remember in December of 2010 – a month after we had our table reading – feeling frozen with a kind of fear about whether or not I could draw from my actors the performances that I needed. I remember Fred – with whom I exchanged very supportive emails and talked to on the phone sometimes, continuing to meet with him for a few more rehearsals in the city – saying, “Wendy, sometimes we become petrified with fear when working on a project.” It definitely felt like he had read my mind, and that made me feel better.
In the end, I had to make the right choice for our project and budget at that moment, which was to continue working with indie unknown type actors for a little longer. After all, I hadn’t even been involved with the “majority” American world for about ten years at that point – I had gone through culture shock in China, and again in America, and it would take some time for me to get reoriented, as mentioned. Having the responsibility of actually “directing” actors who were in any way known or accustomed to working with top artists in the country was simply too overwhelming, though it had been a very kind and warm welcome.
I ended up being introduced to another Yale Drama graduate – James Lloyd Reynolds, also very supportive and professional – by a new producer named Roweena Mackay, for the part of Ilan. We found Joe Gioco for Jacob through Backstage Magazine all the way in the last one or two months before filming. He had fantastic chemistry with Rivka and was familiar to me like an old friend. He had worked, too, with some of my schoolmates.
That’s all on “Region” for now. I’ll be posting more photos and writing more about the experience as time goes on. But what happened in the following few years, true to the prophecy of the story, was that I returned to the source of my interest in film, which was literature. I did this through teaching Shakespeare, Joyce, and more as an adjunct professor at the School of Visual Arts, then returning to do a second Master’s in Literature at Columbia. I also began to study more about theatre, as my interactions with actors had taught me that this was sorely missing in my education. I later decided, after thinking about some issues in the performances I’d directed, to study beginner ballet – because I realized I needed to learn how to direct conventions of movement. This was something I had not thought enough about until then, and today, studying dance has solved problems and opened my eyes to a whole new world of possibilities. More information on the work done during these phases will appear in other blogs.
