Kimberley Peirce – the thinking woman’s director

I had the chance at the Sydney Film Festival to attend a Q&A session with Kimberley Peirce, the director of Boys Don’t Cry, about her new film Stop-Loss.

I guess the thing I love most about her filmmaking is that she’s so good at exploring raw human emotion, and her films have an authentic edge to them . She’s also excellent at getting the most from actors who have never shown their potential before. What Pierce did for Hilary Swank and Chloe Sevigny in Boys Don’t Cry I think she did for Ryan Phillipe and Abbie Cornish in Stop-Loss.

Peirce talked about the process of making the film, how it evolved from IM-ing her brother in Iraq, to a documentary featuring actual war footage filmed by soldiers, through to a fiction film.

She ultimately decided on making it a fiction film because documentaries are “then” and fiction films are “now”. It makes everything so much more immediate, and the story was an amalgamation of real-life stories and experiences.

This was the same approach she used in Boys Don’t Cry, where she took evidence from real-life but made a character-driven story, rather than just a re-hashing of facts and transcripts. What I got from Peirce was a sense of her being a very cerebral filmmaker, always thinking about the implications and effects of each shot or each story point.

So she’s got the ethics and research skills of a documentarian and the gift of a storyteller. It makes for damn powerful filmmaking. And she’s pretty cute too