By Zona Marie Tan
Emmy-nominated producer Meg LeFauve, one of the two international advisors at this week’s IndiVision Project Lab, has found the experience intense and unique.
“What’s great about this particular lab that I love is that it’s acting, performance, script, it’s directing coming from Susanne [Bier]… it’s coming from all different directions but we’re all working towards the same thing,” explains LeFauve. “It’s an intense experience for the writers, and it’s incredibly unique.”
LeFauve spoke to INSIDEFILM yesterday at the Strickland House in Vaucluse where six teams of scriptwriter-directors are attending Screen Australia’s IndiVision Project Lab. She also compares IndiVision to her previous experience at two other labs.
“In Sundance, it’s all writers giving writers notes,” she says. “In another lab, Cinestory, it’s producers who give you notes. But this lab is very interesting because this is the first lab I’ve been to… I’ve never experience this technique before and it’s good.”
LeFauve, who has worked with Academy Award-winning actress Jodie Foster for 10 years, was also impressed by the other IndiVision mentors. “They are really about rigor and discipline, and getting down to the deep core concept. Everyone is working at a very high level here.”
As for the participants, LeFauve relates that she is having an incredible and positive experience with them.
“We’re doing some pretty deep, focused work,” she says. “The way I work is to go to the core concept because a lot of people tend to give a notes unwittingly on symptoms. Writers can sometimes be resistant to that because it can be very frightening. But they’ve all been pretty brave at letting go of their preconceptions of the script and what they have.”
Along with her years of working with Jodie Foster producing films like The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, Nell and The Baby Dance, LeFauve also brings to the lab her teaching experience at the UCLA’s School of Film and Television.
“All of those things gave me a kind of toolbox to understand that different writers need different things,” explains LeFauve. “It’s also my responsibility not to project my own story to theirs, because then it’s not true to them.”
“My hope is at the end, they might have their head cracked out a little bit, but they feel excited by the cracking. It’s not about devastating anybody, but about making them excited about all the new possibilities.”
The 2008/09 IndiVision Project Lab began on Monday December 8 and will run until Sunday December 14.