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| ON LOCATION: Stewart says moviemaking
is "a giant jigsaw puzzle." |
| Thad Russell |
LISA STEWART IS EXHAUSTED. The Los Angeles
resident is on month three in North Carolina as executive producer of
the movie Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. For two 13-hour
days, Stewart and her crew have filmed actress Ashley Judd playing a mother
who, in the midst of a breakdown, drives her kids outside into a downpour
and beats them. They will need 132 takes to cover the scene.
“It was hard to watch, and it was hard to choreograph with a 6-year-old,
an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old,” Stewart says later. The mood on
the set intensified when 80-degree temperatures suddenly dropped to around
50, and warm, manufactured rain mixed with a real, ice-cold torrent. For
each take, Stewart, ’86, helped shepherd the kids inside, making
sure their hair was blown dry and their feet stuck in warm water. Just
as importantly, “I would keep talking to their mothers to make sure
they were okay. You don’t want to take advantage.”
That touch of concern in a high-pressure environment is vintage “Stew,”
her friends say. One of them is screenwriter Callie Khouri, best known
for penning Thelma and Louise (1991). Khouri is making her directorial
debut with Divine Secrets, scheduled for release next July, and
it is Stewart’s job to give her a smooth start in her new professional
incarnation.
Khouri recommended Stewart for the assignment, but Warner Bros. and the
project’s producers still put her through four interviews. She is
executive producer, but says she spent more hands-on time during production
than her co-executive producer, who oversaw the film’s budget.
Stewart’s skill lies in overseeing every detail, freeing the director
to focus on the storytelling. During the shooting, she scrutinized forecasts
of the fickle North Carolinian weather to decide if the next day’s
work would be on indoor or outdoor sets. She hired a camera operator and
helicopter pilot from New York after local talent muffed an important
aerial shot. And after every take, she advised Khouri on whether to keep
shooting or move on. “I like making movies,” Stewart says, “because
it’s a giant jigsaw puzzle.”
Stewart spent a decade performing this role for the well-known director
Cameron Crowe, building a career in the process. She worked as his assistant
on the Seattle-based dating film Singles (1992), where she got
her first taste of Hollywood. “I was hanging out with Matt Dillon
and Kyra Sedgwick. It was a lot of fun. Pearl Jam was in the movie. No
one knew them at the time.” Later she was associate producer of Jerry
Maguire (1996). On Crowe’s most recent film, Almost Famous
(2000), which won him an Oscar last March for best original screenplay,
Stewart was co-producer.
“Cameron is a smart, funny, solicitous guy who gave me entrée
to so many parts of the process. It was like going to high school,”
Stewart says. “But it got to the point where I had to know if I could
do something apart from him. His movies are going to get made with or
without me. It’s a little like leaving the nest.”
By summer 2000, it was high time for a break anyway. “I was desperate
to not work,” Stewart says. “I had not not worked in 11 years.”
Stewart’s good friend Jeffrey Carson, ’86, convinced her that
escaping Hollywood’s maw required leaving the country. She flew with
him to Margarita Island, off the coast of Venezuela, to take windsurfing
lessons for a couple of weeks.
Stewart, who still looks like the field hockey and lacrosse player she
was at Stanford, quickly mastered the water sport. As Carson slept on
the beach, she devoured the book Khouri had handed her before she left
town: Rebecca Wells’s Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.
Stewart was impressed by the strong characters—and, as a prospective
producer, a bit cowed by the book’s popularity.
“There’s a rabid fan base out there,” she says. “You
don’t want to disappoint them. But [in a film] you have to make changes.
I just hope people embrace them.”
Stewart finally returned to the producer’s chair in January 2001
after a four-month hiatus. Together on the set, she and Khouri found themselves
hiring lots of women for typically male jobs like grips, camera operators
and camera assistants. Although that hadn’t been their intention,
it seemed appropriate, given the film’s focus on the frayed relations
between a mother and a daughter. “A lot of the guys on the crew joked
that they hadn’t been on shoots where they start and end the day
hugging and kissing the director and the producer,” Stewart says.
One big day-to-day concern was the threat of writers and actors striking.
Though the strikes were averted, the uncertainty forced Stewart and Khouri
to keep a frenzied pace. An added complication was that, in effect, they
were making three films in one. The story of Divine Secrets begins
in the 1930s and ’40s, continues in the ’60s and ends in the
’90s. Ashley Judd plays a teenager in the ’40s and the grown-up
mother in the ’60s. Ellen Burstyn then assumes the role in the present.
Sandra Bullock portrays the grown daughter of the Judd-Burstyn character.
Like the book, the movie switches back and forth between past and present.
The time shifts complicate everything because “you’ve got to
change over the women. They have to go from late teens to early thirties,”
Stewart explains. Period wigs, expensive and risky, require hours of makeup
for each character. And one bad wig can ruin a scene, Stewart points out.
“Wigs’ll kill you. I have sat in a movie [theater] a thousand
times and thought nothing but, ‘Nice wig.’”
But moviemaking wouldn’t be much fun for Stewart if it weren’t
for challenges like tricky hairpieces and losing a lead actor just weeks
before shooting was to begin. (She found another.)
What’s next for Stewart? Another longtime friend, Diana Zock, ’86,
a former Hollywood production supervisor, thinks Stewart should one day
take a turn as a writer and director. After all, she studied creative
writing at Stanford. Stewart isn’t taking that bait just now. She
is waiting until she has a story she feels she must tell.
“Maybe I’ll put my toe in those dangerous waters one day,”
Stewart says. “Right now, I’d like to help somebody else tell
their story.”
Ann Marsh,'88, is a writer living in Los Angeles.
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