Julia Stiles Slid Into ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’ Director Susan Seidelman’s DMs While Editing Her Own Feature Directorial Debut ‘Wish You Were Here’

Photos: Getty Images ; Illustration: Dillen Phelps

Julia Stiles was all of 15 years old when she made her film debut in I Love You, I Love You Not, and within a mere three years she was one of the leads in the teen classic 10 Things I Hate About You, a film so successful that it was only kept from the top of the box office chart by The Matrix. By the following year, she was working with David Mamet (State and Main), after which she found further teen-movie fame with 2001’s Save the Last Dance, and… Well, let’s just say that she’s scarcely stopped working since then. And while she may not have spent the entirety of the interim period saying, “But what I really want to do is direct,” her career has been sprinkled with a few directorial efforts, including the short film Raving and episodes of the series Paloma. 

Now Stiles has finally had the opportunity to make her debut as a writer/director of a feature film, adapting Renée Carlino’s novel Wish You Were Here into a film starring Isabelle Fuhrman, Mena Massoud, Jennifer Grey, and Kelsey Grammer. DECIDER was fortunate enough to be able to catch a few minutes with Stiles during her press blitz for Wish You Were Here (the film), and she regaled us with stories of the origins of the project, the process of putting it together, and her predominant directorial influence while also taking time to look back fondly on the aforementioned 10 Things experience, which she did not hate at all.

DECIDER: You directed a short film in 2007, you did some episodic directing work in 2013… Were you pausing between climbing each directorial rung to steel yourself for writing and directing your first feature film?

JULIA STILES: I know, it’s been awhile. [Laughs.] Honestly, I’ve been wanting to direct a feature for a really long time, even since making those shorts over 10 years ago, but I was always happily pulled into different acting jobs. And I also could never really find the right story to tell until I was sent the book Wish You Were Here.

Had you been familiar with the book prior to it being sent your way?

I wasn’t! But I had been actively looking at magazine articles and best-sellers and all that, had some projects that I tried to get off the ground, but…I think everything was meant to be in terms of Wish You Were Here, because this is a book and a story that has only gotten deeper and more meaningful to me in the five years since we set out to make it. 

How was the process of adapting the book?

So five years ago, the tale end of the 2020 pandemic, this 25-year-old intrepid actress and producer with a lot of chutzpah slid into my DMs on Instagram and said, “I’ve read that you’re interested in directing. What about this book?” She also went through my agents and did it properly. [Laughs.] But I was drawn to the genre — I’m totally a romantic at heart — so I thought a love story with a bit of romantic-comedy elements and levity, but also something that’s deeper, would be good for me. But I was viscerally struck by the book. I laughed, at times I cried, and I think what initially struck me was that the main characters are very young, but the love story is so much deeper and kind of more grown up than they are. And since then, elements of the story have risen to the surface, like the idea that we should be so lucky to be able to connect with another human being and create a lifetime of memories of them. I think also because initially when I was reading it, it was COVID times, and this desire that we all had to really connect with other human beings face to face and in person, as opposed to digitally, really resonated. 

As far as casting the film, you’d obviously worked with Isabelle Fuhrman on the Orphan prequel (Orphan: First Kill), but was that the first place you actually met her, or had you known her prior to that?

That’s where I met her. It was the first project that I did once the restrictions were kind of eased with COVID, but they weren’t really eased. We still had to wear masks every day, and we couldn’t really socialize. So when we were finished shooting, you’d have to come home and be kind of alone in your apartment. And that’s when I was working on the adaptation of Wish You Were Here, and I would watch her on set every day, and she was a 23-year-old playing an 11-year-old girl, and I was, like, “Whoa, this girl is so talented!” And she was also in every single scene, every single day, and that takes a lot of stamina, which I also knew was necessary for Wish You Were Here. So I immediately thought of her. And pretty soon we had a script!

Who do you consider your directorial influences?

Susan Seidelman is a huge one. I actually also slid into Susan Seidelman’s DMs. [Laughs.] I said, “I’m a huge, huge fan of yours. Can I send you my director’s cut, and can you give me some notes?” But Desperately Seeking Susan was such a seminal movie for me growing up. And then I used it as a reference for Wish You Were Here in terms of design. Like, the production design and the costumes and the color palate of the cinematographer so much that I told her how influential it was for me. And the movie really holds up. I watched it over and over again in pre-production, and I would send annoying emails at midnight to my design team with screenshots of what I wanted to imitate.

Well, I will say in particular that the Mexican restaurant really stands out in terms of its look and design.

Thank you! Yeah, in the book it’s actually a greasy-spoon diner. And Renée Carlino, the novelist, was really, really generous with me and trusted me with her book, the adaptation, in that I promised that I wanted to keep the spirit of the book and the dialogue and the characters and the emotion that she had created. But there was a lot of distilling that I had to do for the sake of a movie. So the Mexican restaurant… I just thought a greasy-spoon diner, we’ve seen it in movies so much, and I wanted something a little more comical, but still the effect that she was going for in the book – which is what I tried to maintain with some humor – is that it’s just a dead-end job that’s kind of humiliating and not something that she really wants to do for the rest of her life. 

To avoid spoilers, I’ll just ask this: how did you go about staging the scene where they’re on the boat?

Thank you, because I am trying to keep the surprise…and you did! Okay, so that was one of the root things that I had to distill. One of the pivotal moments that I found so compelling was when Adam says to Charlotte in the hospital, “I can’t spend my last days in this institution, in this hospital. I have to get out into the world.” And in the book, they go all over the world. They go on private jets, they go to France, they do lots of things, and it’s kind of a whirlwind. And it’s powerful in the book, but for the sake of a movie, I didn’t want to be… [Hesitates.] I wanted to pick one location that was very important and just being able to land with the characters and have them be together. So I chose the sailboat. And actually, what is the sort of departure from the novel – that I won’t give away! – is something that I thought of, like, three weeks before we started shooting, after living with the script for five years, because I needed to simplify some of the scenes on the boat. And I think it kind of makes the movie. It was one of those…happy surprises!

I know I have to start wrapping up, but looking back at your career, do you have a favorite project that you’ve worked on over the years that didn’t get the love you thought it deserved?

Well, one of my favorite projects that’s kind of niche that occasionally people will tell me they love… It’s hard to tell the success of movies these days, but it’s a comedy that I did called It’s a Disaster, with America Ferrera and David Cross and the writer/director Todd Berger. He actually wrote a sequel to it, and it was such a fun experience that the whole cast is dying to do the sequel. But it was a smaller indie movie, and it ended up streaming, and people find it.

Lastly, as far as 10 Things I Hate About You, it’s one of those films that still resonates to this day. Are you ever surprised by just how well it holds up and how many people are still finding it even now?

Yeah! I’m surprised, and I’m also grateful. It means so much to me. The other day, two women came up to me and were very sincerely talking about how much that movie meant to them…and that’s what you want as a performer. And especially because that was one of my first gigs, and I was an auditioning teenager who was still trying to figure out who she is and facing lots of criticism and rejection, as any auditioning actor is, and I gravitated towards that character and that movie so much. So then decades later, for people to still like it and care about it is, like, a dream. 

I’ve got a 19-year-old daughter, and she became a Letters to Cleo fan after watching the film. So it definitely still has an effect.

Oh, really? That’s amazing. Amazing! 

Will Harris (@NonStopPop) has a longstanding history of doing long-form interviews with random pop culture figures for the A.V. Club, Vulture, and a variety of other outlets, including Variety. He also collaborated on Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!, a book with David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker. (And don’t call him Shirley.)