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Recent Visual History Addition
View more excerpts and interviews in the Visual History Collection via the link on the homepage of www.dga.org.
Director Mary Lou Belli
discusses her work in television directing, how teaching and instruction has enriched
her career, and her Guild involvement in Committees and Negotiations cycles.
Belli on collaborating with the creative team on Girlfriends:
"It always starts with the word and seeing the intent and then adding on to both what I'm bringing to
the characters or eliciting from them and getting most of my original ideas from them. Having watched
previous episodes and going, 'Oh, this is a Tracee Ellis Ross-ism. We'll use one of those,' knowing
Tracee was a master at physical comedy. There was a script I got for Girlfriends I went, 'Oh, she's making
pasta in the kitchen. This is gonna be fun! How is she gonna snap the spaghetti in half?' Just stuff like
that. You just go, 'Oh, Tracee diving over a sofa to try to catch Jill [Marie Jones], because she wants to
look at that driver's license.' It's a great episode. So Girlfriends was a game-changer. And then, you know,
other things followed."
The DGA's Visual History Program website contains hundreds of hours of videotaped interviews with Directors and Director's team members
discussing their careers and reflections on all aspects of the creative process in film, television and other media. These interviews are indexed
for quick retrieval of segments pertaining to specific topics of interest within a particular interview or across the entire collection.
Mary Lou Belli
interviewed by Keesha Sharp
