Monday Musings

I am off to Amsterdam this week to work on a show I’ve been a part of for ten years.  The creative team is great and I come in every few months to talk characters and story.  It’s one of my favorite consulting jobs!

The great thing about traveling so much for my work is meeting so many fantastically talented people.

I had the great privilege of meeting Jeanne Moreau several times.  I was very sad to hear of her passing. She was the President/Patron of a European script development workshop I’ve been working with on and off for over fifteen years.  The program has a rotating roster of advisors, who work one-on-one with the workshop participants.

She was a writer, director, and producer and always had insightful things to say about scripts.  Her powerful presence on screen lit up the cinema.

Moreau’s charisma, intelligence, sexuality and star quality created a new space in postwar French cinema for female stars who were not merely beautiful but commandingly intelligent and complex, and in her way made possible the very different careers of Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche, Marion Cotillard and Isabelle Huppert. To call her an icon would be to make her too passive and inert. She was rather a great screen actor.  The Guardian

A successful stage actress in Paris, Ms. Moreau had a pouty, downturned mouth and circles under her eyes, and she was not generally considered photogenic. Making a score of mostly forgettable films from 1949 to 1957, she received the standard starlet treatment by makeup artists. It was Malle who, casting her in his first feature film, “Elevator to the Gallows,” shot her in natural light without heavy makeup, letting her hauntingly expressive face work its magic. The New York Times

She will be missed.

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