From Classmate Hope Anderson

Last April I spent a week directing a black-and-white film noir re-enactment, part of my new documentary, "Under the Hollywood Sign". Because the event I was depicting—the actress Peg Entwistle's 1932 climb to the Hollywoodland Sign, from which she jumped to her death—took place at night, the entire sequence had to be shot between the hours of 7pm and 6am. Worse yet, the schedule had been disrupted by the only rain of an abnormally dry winter. Normally I shoot on video using my own cameras, an arrangement that gives me maximum flexibility. This segment, however, demanded film, which in turn required cameras, lights and a truck, all rented for the week. If we didn't finish by Monday at dawn, there would be no recourse: the insurance policy on the equipment expired at noon.

At around 11pm on the fourth night, I was standing on the street outside my house with Kelly Brand, the actress playing Peg, waiting for the crew to set up the next shot. I was exhausted and unglamorous-looking in my bulky jacket and wool hat. Still, I was taken aback when Kelly's boyfriend pulled up, jumped out of his car and pushed past me toward my Director of Photography, whose hand he pumped enthusiastically. "It's great to meet the director," he said. I was stunned but shouldn't have been: even today, the director is assumed to be male. Kelly actually had told her boyfriend I was a woman, but the minute he saw a man by the camera, he forgot.

There's something deeply subversive about women film directors, which is probably why I arrived at my career in such a belated, roundabout fashion. I started out writing about other people's films, progressed to writing scripts, and finally, at 40, made my first film, a biography of the Thai silk magnate Jim Thompson. So far I've shot three films in four countries, yet until last year I never described myself as a director.

"I'm a writer, " I would say, or "I'm a documentary filmmaker." I would admit that I managed to turn ideas into films without using the word director, as if somehow the films made themselves. (Apparently other people think this is the case, too: a friend of mine, when I told her I was directing a new documentary, said, "I didn't think documentaries had directors. ") It was only when I started production on my latest film, an exploration of the history, architecture, culture and daily life of Beachwood Canyon, in Los Angeles, that I started thinking of myself primarily as a director.

When I moved to Los Angeles in 1989, I was thirty and, as the single mother of a five-year-old son, unable to take on the long hours demanded of production assistants. Instead I went to work as a reader, breaking down and analyzing some of the worst-written screenplays ever to cross the threshold of the Creative Artists Agency. I briefly considered film school, but the idea of spending two years in a program that would prepare me for an assistant's job or the mailroom of CAA struck me as ludicrous. Instead, after several years of writing video box copy, seeing thousands of films and writing scripts that never got optioned, I read some books, took a few seminars on documentary film production and then went to Thailand, France and England to film "Jim Thompson, Silk King ". For the cost of film school, I wound up with a feature-length documentary that went to festivals, won a prize and, along with a related film, was broadcast in Europe. But most importantly it taught me how to make films, which is precisely what film school doesn't.

I've learned by doing, but also from the many mistakes I've made. When I started planning "Under the Hollywood Sign" a year ago, I was able to avoid the financial black hole of licensing other people's footage and songs, as I naively did for "Jim Thompson", by owning all my own photography and hiring a composer to write an original score. As my technical knowledge has increased, I've made better decisions about camera work and interviews, which in turn have saved time and money in the editing room. In acknowledging the obvious—that the act of transposing my ideas onto film and video has made me, first and foremost, a director—I've gained the confidence to move ahead. I'm now planning commercials and music videos, which I hope will lead me to direct feature films. It's been a long journey, but I feel ready.

Hope Anderson '81