INTERVIEW: Finding love over the course of several birthdays in ‘All I Wish’
Photo: Sharon Stone stars as Senna Berges in the comedy film All I Wish, a Paladin / Universal Pictures Home Entertainment release. Photo courtesy of Paladin / Universal Pictures Home Entertainment / Provided by KWPR with permission.
Susan Walter is quite happy to have written and directed her first feature, All I Wish, which stars Sharon Stone, Tony Goldwyn, Famke Janssen and Ellen Burstyn. It was a daunting process that found Walter scrambling to find proper funding, but the years of dedication to get the movie made have paid off. All I Wish is now playing in theaters and on video on demand and digital HD.
The journey for Walter began with another romantic comedy that heavily influenced her script.
“Well, for me, one of my all-time favorite movies across all genres is When Harry Met Sally, and I felt like it’s so rare and wonderful to see a love story that takes place over a long period of time,” Walter said in a recent phone interview. “So I sort of wanted to honor and build on my experience of watching that film and seeing two characters find themselves and find each other over really decades, so it started with that.”
The filmmaker knew she needed a modern-day hook, so she chose birthdays for All I Wish. Stone’s character finds love and success over the course of many birthdays later in her life. For Walter, the frame of celebrating one’s birthday allowed her to touch upon many issues, both serious and comedic.
“I picked birthdays because birthdays are fraught with expectations,” she said. “Birthdays are a time you reflect on where you’ve been over the last many years. Have you met your goals? Are you where you think you should be, or where your friends are? And there can be some self-loathing in that, in that you feel that you’re behind, or if you had set goals for yourself, and you still haven’t met them. So I thought it would be interesting because it’s a moment that is sort of fraught with emotion, and it gave me a way to sort of extend the movie over many years as opposed to a traditional romantic comedy where they meet and fall in love it feels like almost instantaneously.”
Walter wrote the script many years ago. At the time, she was pregnant with her daughter, who is now 13. She did not foresee directing the movie because of the many meetings involved. She simply wanted to write the story and hand it over to another director.
A producer kept the project for seven or eight years, trying to find the right director for the story. “Directors came and went,” Walter said. “There was definitely interest in the script from directors, and they wanted to develop it a little bit more and customize it to their own tastes. But ultimately none of them stuck, so after seven or eight years of this, I finally said, ‘Enough.’ I knew I always wanted to direct it. I’m going to do it no matter what that means. The script didn’t change that much, but the technology did. Digital cinema became the new standard. I was able to do more for less, so it seemed like the right moment to step in and direct it myself. But it was not easy.”
One of Walter’s strongest supporters throughout the filming process was her central star, Stone, a legendary actor perhaps best known for Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Casino, The Mighty and The Muse. She is an Academy Award nominee and Golden Globe winner.
“Sharon is literally the most generous human being I’ve ever met, not just as an actor on the set,” Walter said. “She’s also generous with her time outside of the set. She knew that I was a first-time filmmaker and that I was hitting my head against the wall trying to get financing, trying to get talent attached.”
Walter said the hook for Stone was the character on the page. The actor responded to the role, and the writing was perhaps an indicator that this filmmaker was serious about making a quality film.
“When she signed on, she signed on 110 percent,” Walter said. “That meant opening up her home, where we could do rehearsals, and I could meet the actors. She picked up the phone when I needed her to. If another actor’s agent wasn’t calling us back, she would call herself. She just powerfully stepped into a leadership role, and her generous spirit just shone through literally on every level until even this moment. She’s doing the press largely by herself, just an incredible human being. I think people don’t really understand what an incredibly generous person she is.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
All I Wish is now playing in theaters and on VOD and digital HD. Click here for more information.
