Stephanie Turner Wearing Many Hats in First Feature Justine

Don’t let not having the money being the obstacle to getting your film made.
Right. Because you don’t know. I mean, I didn’t. We didn’t have the money when we first started doing our budget and schedule. We didn’t know where all the money was gonna come from. But you just have to keep moving and keep acting as if it’s all gonna fall into place. And you know what? Maybe it won’t. Maybe you’ll need more time. Maybe something will happen. Maybe you’ll meet someone in the process of taking the next step. Oh, I just met with an investor. There are so many unknowns on the negative side, but there are also so many unknowns on the positive side too.

I imagine this is why you took on so many hats as the writer, director, and star. Was that all out of necessity? And would you do it this way again, if you didn’t have to?
Yes, it was a necessity. For a while, I was trying to find someone to direct it. I thought it was going to be too much for me. Over time people would ask, why don’t you direct it? You know the story better than anyone. It was then, I started to entertain the idea of directing it, and I’m so, so happy I did because I now love directing. I had a really great experience directing. It was very challenging because it was my first time doing it. There were so many things I learned, and so many things I’m looking to do it differently the next time. In terms of would I do it again? What I didn’t realize is how many scenes my character was in. I was like, who put Lisa and all these scenes.

She’s in like 80% of the film.
Yeah. When you’re writing something, you don’t think about scene breakdown. I’m just following the characters and making sure that the story and through lines are there and that everything is as concise and meaningful as possible. And I’m not thinking, oh, I better give this character a break. They’ve been in a lot of scenes. So yeah, thiswas a 20-day shoot. There was only one day that I wasn’t in a scene, and knowing how many scenes I was in, I would have prepped a lot differently.

There are challenges when you’re the actor and the director. Heads of departments can’t ask all the questions they need to ask on set because sometimes you’re in the scene. You’re doing something emotional. I did feel I had to be the champion to get the story told. I had to be the person that was going to step in and say that. And so for that reason, I had to kind of be the producer on it.

“…I wanted to have a close connection with the moms. I wanted to make sure that everyone felt comfortable…”

So not only are you juggling so many hats but now you’re also working with children, was there a secret to that?
Just on a practical level, it’s a scheduling issue because there’s a limited number of hours to use the children. It added a little bit more time to our shoot because we had to work around that.  Time is money, and it had to be reflected in our budget. In terms of the kids, I have two kids, and I was also once a nanny. A lot of people before we started would say you’ve got to cut one of these kids. You can’t have this many kids. This is going to be too hard.

That was never a concern for me because I think I have such so much experience dealing with children and working with children that I felt like it’s going to be fine. Being a mom myself, I wanted to have a close connection with the moms. I wanted to make sure that everyone felt comfortable before we even hired the kid. I wanted it to be able to talk to the mom and make sure they knew what the movie was about, how things were going to be on set, and just make sure that everyone knew what they were signing up for. Because to have your child around a bunch of adults and in a work setting, I mean, I know I would want to be really, really comfortable with whoever those people were.

I think that we had great, great kids, great moms, everybody loved each other, everybody got along. And from the beginning, I would tell anybody else who asked me how to work with kids. I would say first go to the moms and tell them if anything makes you uncomfortable if you have any questions, or if you are uneasy about something, please come talk to me directly. If someone is sitting there and they’re uncomfortable with something their child is doing, and they don’t talk about it, it’s just gonna escalate over the course of the shoot.