You’re trained not to be too pushy”: Julia Stiles had to unlearn being a “people pleaser

“I’m a romantic at heart,” says Julia Stiles. But anyone familiar with the actress’ most indelible roles, from the flinty Kat Stratford of 1999’s “10 Things I Hate About You” to the vengeful Lumen Pierce on “Dexter,” would know that her romantic streak has been leaning a little dark for decades now. So perhaps it’s inevitable that when, after years of searching for the right project for her directorial debut, she gravitated to novelist Renee Carlino’s wry tearjerker, “Wish You Were Here.” 

Stiles, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Carlino, described the wistful love-at-first-sight tale with a heartbreaking time limit as being “about the fragility of human life.” The movie is “more mature than just the age of the characters,” (played by “Orphan” star Isabelle Fuhrman and “Aladdin’s” Mena Massoud), Stiles said.

During our “Salon Talks” conversation, Stiles shared the new experience of stepping into the director’s chair, after decades of being an actress since her teens. “It’s so ingrained in me to want to do what the director says or make sure that everybody’s happy and make sure that everybody likes me,” Stiles said. But stepping into her role as director, she realized, “I also have to be the leader, instead of just waiting for somebody to say, ‘That’s a good idea.'”

And she knew exactly the mindset she wanted to bring to her set. “All the directors that I really loved working with,” she recalled, “were very calm on set and very kind, even though now I know they must’ve been insanely stressed out.”

Stiles, who calls “Wish You Were Here” a story with an “old soul,” launched her own career as one of Hollywood’s youngest old souls. “I was 17 years old, and I would always get ‘You’re too serious. You need to be sexier. You’re too intellectual, lighten up,” she recalls. Her now classic performance in “10 Things I Hate About You” was the break she’d been waiting for, a chance to harness that serious, intellectual energy — and all within a crowd-pleasing romance.

Over two and a half decades later, Stiles sees the industry opening up in new ways for women behind the camera. “The cynical side of me is like, oh, it’s changing because it’s become commercially successful and it’s a selling point, but that’s okay. ‘Barbie’ can make a bazillion dollars and that opens the door for a lot of other women to direct films too, so that’s fine.” 

Stiles also opened up about collaborating with her old friend and fellow Y2K icon, musician Vanessa Carlton, on the movie, as well as being humbled by the Jumbotron at a Knicks game. And as for what’s next for her, Stiles says, “I’m just happy being able to be a working actress and now a director . . . This honestly has been a career-long goal of mine.”

Watch our “Salon Talks” here, or read it below to hear more about “Wish You Were Here,” the impact of “Hustlers” on her career, and creating chemistry on set.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

This movie is the “Aladdin”-“Orphan” love story I didn’t know we needed. You’ve wanted to direct for a long time and were waiting, what was it about this project?

It has been a long time since I had the feeling that I wanted to direct. I haven’t really been waiting, I’ve been actively looking for the right story. There were some projects that I tried to get off the ground that didn’t go, but I was certainly looking for the right story, knowing that as a director you’re devoting much more time to any given project. 

Five years ago, the actress that’s in the movie playing the best friend Helen, her name’s Gabby Kono, slid into my Instagram DMs and then contacted my agents properly and she said, “I heard you want to direct. What do you think of this book?” I read it and I had a really visceral response to it. I laughed at moments and then I cried at moments and I could so see it as a movie and I just knew that it would be the right project for me.

Initially, the thing that drew me to it – I mean I’m a romantic at heart and I love a good love story – but I felt like the love story was more mature than just the age of the characters. They’re a very young couple, but the love story is so much deeper than that and has more of an old soul. In the five years since we set out to make it, the movie’s story has only gotten deeper and more meaningful I think. It’s kind of grown and taken on a life of its own. It’s a lot about the fragility of human life.

What I liked about it is that most of these young love stories focus on love at first sight, or the first date, or the initial falling in love with somebody, but because these characters play out this storytelling fantasy – they play this game together where they imagine themselves as an older couple looking back on their lives – it’s really a meditation on [how] we should be so lucky to find somebody that we connect with and create a lifetime of memories with them.

It’s a story about what could be and what is — it’s past, present and future all coexisting — and the lives we live at the same time. Was that something that appealed to you about it as well?

Yeah, there were elements of the book that I seized on and I was really drawn to, and I pulled those out and kind of highlighted them. I kept saying to Mary Elizabeth Williams Renée Carlino, I want to keep the spirit of your book, the dialogue, the characters, all the heart that you put into this — but there’s a lot that also needs to be distilled for the sake of a movie. 

One of the elements was — I think because I have kids — the connection with [the lead characters] is almost childlike. They play games together, they tell stories together. Adam, after we‘ve found out that he’s in the hospital and it’s not really looking good, says, “I can’t spend the last days of my life here. However long that’s going to be, I have to go out into the world.” In the book, they actually do travel the world together, but that’s too much for a film. I wanted to pick one place that was really special and land with the characters and just watch their interaction together. That was an example of something that’s a departure from the book, but still maintains the spirit of it.

How did you as a director build chemistry and create such a strong rapport among the cast? It’s a special thing and it doesn’t happen all the time.

I was really lucky. I also would like to think that I picked the right people. You said the “Aladdin”/“Orphan” love story [earlier], Mena Massoud was in “Aladdin,” and Isabelle Fuhrman was in “Orphan,” and I played her mother in the sequel, “Orphan: First Kill.” 

When we were filming that, it was the height of COVID — once we could go back to work — and so you couldn’t really socialize with anybody. During all the downtime you were by yourself. I’d go home from set and I’d be in my apartment and I was working on the adaptation of “Wish You Were Here” and watching her on set. I was like, “Oh my God, she’s 23 years old playing an eleven-year-old girl. This girl is amazing.” She’s an amazing actress. I also saw that she had the stamina to be in every single scene, every single day, which I also needed for “Wish You Were Here.”

I had seen Mena’s work from afar in “Aladdin” and also his TV show. I thought they would be a good match, but you never know until you actually get on set. I was so lucky that their chemistry was really, really great together.

There’s also the whole story of female friendship in it too. There’s [Furhman’s character] Charlotte and her best friend, and we have the classic rom-com elements of the mother and the best friend pressuring her to go on a dating app and find the right guy, and those are the moments of levity in the movie. The chemistry between the two [actresses], you never know if they’re going to actually like each other and be friends, and they — I swear — hit it off. I get jealous sometimes that they have so much fun together and I am too old to be a part of that.

Speaking of female friendship, your good friend Vanessa Carlton co-wrote the score. Tell me how that came about.

I’m so grateful that she composed the original score for the movie with her husband John McCauley, who’s in a band called Deer Tick. It just brought the movie to life. 

I’ve known her since high school. We didn’t really become friends until we were in our 20s. We were at a performing arts school where she was a ballerina, I was an actress. We didn’t really cross paths, but in our 20s she had the hit “A Thousand Miles” come out, and I had movies, I think it was “10 Things I Hate About You,” or “Save the Last Dance,” or both that came out. We were becoming successful in our careers very young and gravitated toward each other going, “What is this?” And, “Wow, this is something that we’ve worked so hard towards and is really wonderful, but it’s also really scary and nobody else really understands it.” Then we stayed friends through our 20s and now both have families.

She’s always wanted to score a film and so when I had the opportunity, I was like, “Do you want to score my movie?” And she said, “Yes.” It’s got her amazing piano compositions with John McCauley, who has a more masculine energy. The two of them together, it’s just perfect, especially because they’re a couple too, in a movie about a couple.

One of the things I’ve read you talking about a lot with this film was that you had to learn to stop apologizing. That is a hard lesson for anyone to learn, it’s certainly hard for women. How do you do it?

It was my script supervisor who said it to me at one point. It was early on in filming, day two or something. She didn’t really mean apologizing like actually saying “Sorry,” it’s the way that we couch our opinions. Instead of just saying, “I need the cup to be white,” I would say all the reasons why I thought white would be a good idea. She was like, “You’re the director.” 

I felt it in my bones, it was a protective instinct, I was like, “Oh, this is my movie. I am working with all these people and I am respectful of them and I want their opinions and ideas and to collaborate, but I also have to be the leader and I have to be front-footed about it instead of just waiting for somebody to say, ‘That’s a good idea.’”

Also, I think as an actress for so many years, decades of being an actress where you are a people pleaser, it’s ingrained in me. I didn’t realize it too, I thought I was over that. It’s so ingrained in me to want to do what the director says, or make sure that everybody’s happy and make sure that everybody likes me. You’re trained not to be too pushy, I guess, which can get in the way of being assertive. 

You were in a movie that Heather Graham directed, Anna Kendrick recently had a film come out, a lot of women who have been in front of the camera for a long time are now moving behind it. You’ve talked about how there’s a lot of lip service paid to women in roles of leadership in Hollywood. Do you feel that that’s changing now? 

I do think it’s changing a lot now, and I think that the change in film is also trickling into other areas of entertainment. I was just saying the other day [while] doing press for this movie, “Oh, I’m noticing there’s a lot more female photographers.” I think it is changing. The cynical side of me is like, oh, it’s changing because it’s become commercially successful and it’s a selling point, but that’s okay. “Barbie” can make a bazillion dollars and that opens the door for a lot of other women to direct films too, so that’s fine. I do think it’s changing a lot. Maybe I’m noticing more that actresses are having more of an opportunity to step in front of the camera, but that’s okay.

Coming into this role as a director, you must have been drawing on all of the directing you’ve experienced in your life. As an actor, were you tucking away experiences and saying, “I’m going to do that, I’m never going to do that,”?

Yes. I’ve worked with a lot of great directors, and so I did soak up many examples. I think all the directors that I really loved working with, they had a common thread, which is that they were very calm on set and very kind, even though now I know they must’ve been insanely stressed out. 

I remember talking to a few of them. Rodrigo García is a director that I love, who I worked with as an actress, but also produced a short that I made as a director. I called him and I was like, “Wow, you really hid it very well, all the behind-the-scenes stress that you must have been dealing with.” 

Then in terms of the bad ones, of course, I definitely tried to set a tone. I think I even made an announcement during a tech scout that all of the jobs on set are important. You can’t make a movie alone, so we all need to be respectful of each other and each other’s time. Some departments compete over how much time they have, and I would always, if it got a little tense, be like, “Everybody’s job is important. Everybody gets their time.”

When I look at your career, you’ve had this burst of activity early in your life — you go to college, you do smaller projects, you step away a lot, and then “Hustlers” comes along. That is a movie that is female-led, female-directed. I wonder about the impact that that film had on your career, both in front of and behind the camera.

So much. That was the first time that I really put myself out there and pursued a film. I had gone through a period as an actress after the big initial success where I was doing a lot of indie movies that would go to festivals, but nobody really saw. It was “Hustlers” where I started to be more thoughtful and strategic about, “Okay, what do I really want to do?” That script was amazing and I really wanted to work with all the actresses in it and Lorene Scafaria, the director. I watched her as a female director navigate that set with such grace that I was so happy to be there and be a part of that movie. I also got to watch her as an example of a director in charge of a lot of people.

Again, so grateful. The “Bourne” franchise was a huge part of my adult life. I didn’t expect to be in four movies. My character was killed off in the first one initially, and then they recut it so that she survived. Also, I was really proud of that franchise because it was cool and it paved the way for a different kind of action movie, especially for the female characters. Same thing with Dexter, so grateful for all these opportunities.

I try to keep it all in perspective. It’s great to have fans, period, but I maybe distance myself from paying too much attention to it. For instance, the lead actor from “Wish You Were Here” invited me to a Knicks game. We’re sitting courtside and it’s this amazing experience and all the basketball players, you can hear them talking and you can hear the ref talking, and it’s so exciting and people want to take pictures and it’s so amazing. “Oh, this is so wonderful.” And the woman behind me asked for a photo. We take a photo and then a little bit later she goes, “Well, I guess they forgot to put you on the Jumbotron.” It’s like the minute your head explodes, you can come crashing down.

I’m just happy being able to be a working actress and now a director. This honestly has been a career-long goal of mine. There were many, many years when even after I found “Wish You Were Here” and we were trying to make it, I thought, “I don’t know if we’re ever going to pull it off.” Indie movies are hard to get off the ground. Then we had the SAG strike, which delayed our movie even more, and I kept thinking, “Oh my God, all this work is going to amount to nothing if we don’t actually make the movie.” And here we are.

I have to ask about “10 Things I Hate About You.” You have said that that was the first role that you really, really wanted. What was it about that character?

I was 17 years old and I had been auditioning as a teenager in New York for commercials and TV shows. The romantic comedy trend, the teen movie trend was really taking off and I would always get like, “You’re too serious. You need to be sexier. You’re too intellectual, lighten up,” or whatever the criticism was that any actor’s going to get, but as a teenager, you really take it to heart and you’re just trying to figure out who you are.

Then I read “10 Things I Hate About You” and Kat as a character was this feisty, outspoken teenager who didn’t give a s**t. She just didn’t care. She’s outspoken and feisty and didn’t care about other people’s opinions, and it was a hilarious script. I loved it and I gravitated towards it, was so happy to be cast in it, went out to LA to screen test for it a few times and ended up making the movie. Now, decades later, that people still talk about it is really affirming that I was on the right track.

Obviously part of your life is still in LA, is Hollywood based. With everything going on with the fires, how are you? How are the people you care about in the industry and your friends? What are you seeing and hearing from the people you care about?

I mean, it’s absolutely devastating, and even from a distance, it’s really scary. The people that I know who are actually living in LA and on the ground, it’s terrifying, and luckily they’re okay. I think Jennifer Grey, who was in our movie, lost her house. Most of my friends, I think [haven’t lost] their houses, but had to evacuate. No matter what, it’s just terrifying because of the air and everything. People in gridlock traffic, having to abandon their cars and get away from a fire that’s moving really fast. It’s really scary. 

Then it’s also surreal and challenging to be trying to promote a film on top of that or in the wake of that, because a lot of the people that I am working with through the distribution company, Lionsgate, are in LA. How do you call somebody and say, “What’s the plan this week,” when they might’ve lost their house?