I kept reading references to Jill Soloways Directors Guru in interviews about her new film Afternoon Delight, so I set out to investigate. Turns out many directors whose names you know are speaking a new language of storytelling thanks to Joan Scheckels advice.
It's about being in feeling, Jill Soloway tells me. And now we're getting weird.
I'm on a three-way Skype call with writer, director and comedian Soloway and Joan Scheckel, who Soloway has shouted out in recent interviews for playing some fundamental part in getting Soloways first feature film, Afternoon Delight, to the big screen (and the Best Director award at Sundance this year). Delight is about a stay-at-home mom (Kathryn Hahn) having a life crisis of sorts, who invites a sex worker (Juno Temple) into the home of her husband (How I Met Your Mother's Josh Radnor) and son (Sawyer Ever) in an attempt to solve everyone's problems.
The first few weeks I was in Joan's workshop, I was asking, what the fuck is this?"
But back to this "Directors Guru" stuff. Our call is on a Sunday afternoon and Soloway and Scheckel are in their respective sun-filled spaces in Silverlake, LA at the beginning of what I was not prepared to be a three-hour conversation. Officially, we have 40 minutes to talk about what, exactly, a director's guru does.
It gets conceptual very quickly.
It feels like we're operating at the beginning of a revolution of what it feels like to engage with content, goes Soloway. To me, it's about allowing the feminine to come into power over the next 100 years. Ok, that's super getting into weird.
Scheckel ensures that artists are connected with every bit of the process, from the screenwriting to the marketing.
I just love the inner life, what can I say? says Scheckel.
Directors, writers, cinematographers, actors, choreographers take Scheckel's labs and workshops that can last from a few hours to a few months, and in which Scheckel, a former actress and trained opera singer, facilitates the process of bringing a story to life: ensuring that artists are connected with every bit of the process, from the screenwriting to the marketing.
In the lab, I will simply say practical things like, soften your jaw. And that is confronting. We're at a point in our culture where the simple feels radical.
The being in feeling and the healing the divided feminine talk: it's sounding very LA and, frankly, a little off-putting. I flashback to the time a yoga sage from whom I was supposedly learning the art of meditation yelled mid-meditation: if you are moving right now, you have not been meditating at home and you will not pass the course! (I dropped out before I could fail.)
I'm speaking as if I'm in a cult, Soloway says, intuiting the urgency. The first few weeks I was in Joan's workshop, I was asking, what the fuck is this? I was so angry. I just wanted to run. One guy did: he fainted and he never came back.
Scheckel hoots. She's sitting in front of a plain wall at home, wearing a faded T-shirt, no makeup, her casual curls piled around her alabaster face.
I feel sometimes like we're teetering towards a creative Monsanto. Where everything has to be whatever the last success was."
Why were you scared? she says, knowing the answer already.
It took Soloway three weeks to shift. The comedic writer who wrote for Six Feet Under and United States of Tara was taking a break from the workshop in the bathroom, where great things often happen, and she realized, I'm in the presence of a master. This woman is like Stanislavsky or Adler.
"We're working to shift what content feels like when you receive it.
Scheckel studied at NYU and acted on stage for decades. She gave it up to get behind the scenes and develop some sort of technique that will somehow renavigate the unwholesome direction she believes we're toying with.
I feel sometimes like we're teetering towards a creative Monsanto. Where everything has to be whatever the last success was. We have to shift our own thinking as the makers. Who are we writing for? How am I to touch that person? We have to respect the story.
Our industry is struggling. Why should someone go to the movies? We're working to shift what content feels like when you receive it.
For Afternoon Delight, It wasn't that Joan was standing next to me on the set, it's that she taught me a way to be present in my body so that I can be open to feeling, says Soloway. And for me to understand that my role as a director was to photograph feeling.
Of the 76 films that have been completed through Scheckel's labs, 74 have been released. They've been nominated over 600 times, won over 300 awards and have collectively earned 1.2 billion dollars.
Okay, okay. So how does she do this?
To get a little practical, Scheckel says. I might do something simple like, say, relax your jaw. Is she relaxing her jaw, Jill?
I'm smiling, nervous, irritated, realizing that my Sunday afternoon plans for 40 minutes from now probably won't unfold. All of which makes it difficult to relax. My. Jaw.
So first, we drop into the body. Then we do investigative work to think about what does the film mean. Then we look at the screenplay structure: how are the structural actions of the story revealing the meaning? In music, if a composer is writing about the ocean, you have to have a very gentle, lapping passage, then you have to have a crashing, more animated passage, then a deeper more resonant passage. A composer has to figure out how to do this through rhythm and so does a filmmaker.
Cultish, weird or utterly logical: it's working.
You have to build what the thing means through its actions.
Of the 76 films that have been completed through Scheckel's labs, 74 have been released. They&#
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I kept reading references to Jill Soloways Directors Guru in interviews about her new film Afternoon Delight, so I set out to investigate. Turns out many directors whose names you know are speaking a new language of storytelling thanks to Joan Scheckels advice. 
