 |
|
|
|
25
NEW FACES |
||
 |
"I started out as an achiever and ended up the class clown," says Jessica Sharzer, explaining the "weird, winding road" that lead her from the Ph.D. program in Slavic languages and literature at U.C. Berkeley to screenwriting and film directing.
Sharzer was all set for a career in academia until she took a summer film course at New York Film Academy. Realizing then that she was "not meant for academia," Sharzer left Berkeley and enrolled in NYU Film School. Her career change paid off when, in 2002, she won the school’s prestigious Wasserman Award for her graduate thesis film, The Wormhole. The story of a young boy’s yearning to find a wormhole in the space-time continuum so he can travel through time and prevent the drowning death of his older brother, the film finds emotion and truth within a child’s world while sidestepping obvious sentimentality.
The win at NYU registered Sharzer on the industry radar. She was the recipient of the POWER UP 2002 grant and made Fly Cherry. She signed with Jason Spitz at Endeavor, moved to L.A. and took meetings. "I was considered for a couple of $10-million to $15-million films," she says, "but I thought the scripts sucked. I would pitch a take on them that required a rewrite, and these companies didn’t want to hear that. Then I thought, I don’t want my career to end over one movie. I have an opportunity to do something good if I am patient."
So Sharzer, who credits her work as a documentary editor with sharpening her directing skills, began developing and pitching original material, and just one year after the NYU win she has three projects set up. The first, Pretty Lies, is an original "New England Gothic tale of revenge and loss of innocence" that Sharzer will direct with Dorothy Berwin (The Safety of Objects) producing. And then there’s Speak, a drama based on a book by Laurie Halse Anderson that Sharzer will direct for Showtime.
And finally, Sharzer’s Russian literature background will be put to good use with a project she has set up with producer Kevin Misher (The Scorpion King): an adaptation of Turgenev’s 1860 novel First Love. "Russian literature is this amazing and unexplored wellspring of material for movies," Sharzer says. "Because old Russian novels were serialized, they are inherently cinematic. They were written with cliffhangers, and there’s so much passion and violence!" – Scott Macaulay