Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1062452
F O C US DGA QUARTERLY 17 A R I E L L E H E L L E R WA S a theater actress struggling to find nuanced roles when her younger sister gave her a copy of cartoonist Phoebe Gloeckner's unfl inching 2002 graph- ic novel Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures. In lead protagonist Minnie, a 15 year old in 1976 San Francisco who loses her virginity to her mother's boyfriend, then enthusi- astically tape records herself documenting the a air, Heller knew she'd found the part she'd been waiting for. Eventually, she secured the rights to Diary, adapt- ed it into a well-reviewed one act in which she starred as the titular teenage girl. After its O -Broadway run, she asked herself what's next. Turning Diary into a fi lm script seemed natural, but also, she surprised herself to realize the notion that she should direct it, too. "At the time, it wasn't, 'I want to be a director,'" says Heller. "It was, 'I want to direct this.'" To prep herself, she spent five weeks in 2012 at Sun- dance's writing and directing labs. What caught Heller o guard was that she loved everything about directing, from breaking down scenes with actors to hashing out how to make the fi lm look almost like a Polaroid snapshot with fading color with her DP Brandon Trost. "Weirdly, it all felt very natural to me," says Heller, who credits her knowledge of the nuts and bolts of directing to time spent on the sets of her director husband, Jorma Taccone (Pop- star). "Somehow I had a lot of the skills that I didn't know were required for directing. I didn't realize that my life had been leading in that direction." Since then, a hallmark of Heller's budding oeuvre— MARIELLE HELLER IS A STICKLER FOR DETAIL, WHICH IS DRIVEN BY THE INNER LIFE OF HER PROTAGONISTS BY MARGY ROCHLIN Commitment to Character R I S I N G S T A R M PHOTO: BRIAN DAVIS