Written by:
Catherine Plato
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this Issue of Curve:
Vol. 17#7
In 1986, years before The L Word, Ellen, Ani or curve hit the scene, Donna Deitch broke some major ground with her now-iconic tale of lesbian love in the 1950s. One of the few lesbian films of the time that proved its staying power beyond the immediate years following, Desert Hearts set the bar and is still arguably the standard par excellence in lesbian film. At the time though, the then 40-year-old Deitch could never have predicted what her film would come to mean, or if commercial or critical success awaited. “I had no idea,” she says. “I was in the middle of a process. … All I knew … was that I had to finish it and I had to sell it.”
I caught up with Deitch at the W Hotel in her native San Francisco (she now calls Los Angeles home), just before the annual NCLR gala, where Deitch was invited as one of the evening’s speakers. Though she’s a heroine among dykes these days, I had to wonder if Deitch, so early in her career, had any reservations about pouring the time and energy into a film that would likely be ignored by the mainstream and serve an audience too small to justify the effort. Without hesitation, she tells me she did not: “I didn’t have any fears about it. I was making the movie I wanted to see.” When the film debuted at the Telluride Film Festival, though, Deitch admits she was very surprised by its success. “When you make a film and see it for the first time with an audience, if it’s a good experience, it’s a fantastic experience,” she says. “[It’s] a dream in a way.” And when the lights went on afterward, she said it felt like her dream had finally become reality.
After years of working in television—Deitch worked as a director for shows including NYPD Blue and Crossing Jordan—she is thrilled to be getting back to her own projects, which include a Desert Hearts sequel and a film adaptation of her partner Terry Jentz’s true crime memoir, Strange Piece of Paradise. She was especially eager to talk about the Desert Hearts DVD release though, a chance to reconnect with her original viewers and reach new ones. When we spoke, Deitch was still working on perfecting her director’s commentary, carefully finding the balance between organization and a healthy sense of spontaneity and anecdote. “[It’s]the opportunity of a lifetime,” she says. “I love picking [DVD] extras,” she says. “It’s one of my favorite things to do.”
I couldn’t resist asking about the film’s famous love scene, and the courage it must have taken from all parties involved to shoot something so candid, so vulnerable, and so potentially risqué. To my surprise, Deitch says it wasn’t particularly difficult. “I cast [Helen Shaver and Patricia Charbonneau] for the chemistry,” she explains, adding that she wouldn’t conclude the actors’ contracts until she knew the couple had sparks onscreen. It was also shot among the last of 31 days of filming, so by that time the women had grown to know each other fairly well and had become comfortable together. “Confidence, or lack of confidence grows,” she says. “In this case, confidence prevails.”
Both actresses will re-appear in the Desert Hearts sequel, though they won’t necessarily be leads this time around. Instead, they are part of a larger ensemble, and the story takes place in the late 1960s and early 1970s, essentially keeping in real time with the women’s lives: Both the films’ release dates and the story’s settings are approximately 20 years apart. Deitch doesn’t yet know when she’ll begin shooting. Competing with her past is a potentially tall order: “If I have set the bar, then I have in turn set the bar for myself with the sequel.”
In the meantime, Deitch and Jentz will continue work on Strange Piece of Paradise, and plan to begin shooting in the spring of 2008. Speaking of onscreen chemistry, I wonder if Deitch has any reservations about collaborating with her partner. While she does admit to feeling an “extraordinary responsibility” to Jentzs’ work, Deitch says she would feel the same were Jentz just a friend. And besides, the couple already works together regularly. “We’ve collaborated on everything,” she says. “We’ve collaborated on renovations.” [n]
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