The Oscar-winning actor Ellen Burstyn is to direct her first feature-length film at the age of 80, reports Deadline.
Burstyn will take charge of the cameras on the character piece Bathing Flo, about a New Yorker who is offered the chance to house-sit free of rent providing he looks after the property owner’s elderly mother. The film’s director will also star as title character Flo.
Burstyn said she had been inspired to make the move into directing by a radical shift in attitudes towards female filmmakers in Hollywood. “A long time ago in the 70s, when AFI initiated a directing workshop for women, I was in the first one,” she told Deadline. “I made a nice little film and thought I should direct, but I was so busy acting, and every time I’d bring it up, it was something that was always sort of discouraged for women. It’s easier now, and when they sent me this Bathing Flo script to act in, I began picturing scenes I just loved. And they loved the way I pictured it, and I just thought, ‘Why am I not directing this?’
“Back in the 70s, the idea of a woman directing was pretty unheard of,” Burstyn added. “When I brought Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore to John Calley at Warner Bros, he asked me then if I wanted to direct it. I said I didn’t feel I was ready to act and direct at the same time. AFI made me more confident, but somehow it never came together and I never got asked again the way that John asked me. And I never found something I really felt I wanted to direct, until now.”
Burstyn won the best actress Oscar for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Martin Scorsese’s 1974 comedy drama about a recent widow traversing the US south-west with her young son in search of a better life. She has been nominated for acting Academy Awards a further five times, most recently for Darren Aronofsky’s harrowing 2000 drama Requiem for a Dream.
Burstyn told Deadline she was confident in her ability to direct thanks to her work at the famous New York-based Actors Studio, where she is artistic director. “I’ve taught actors for 40 years, and I became a still photographer and had showings of my work at galleries, and between working with actors the way I have and the still camera and making movies, it isn’t really all that daunting to me,” she said. “I’m really turned on by the whole experience.”
The screenplay for Bathing Flo has been written by actor and first-time screenwriter Lauren Lake. The film will now be presented to financiers and does not yet have a start date for shooting.
