Indie Director Screens Film at HFA

Cecilia M. Miniucchi. a graduate of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, is the anti-Hollywood director that so many independent filmmakers aspire to be. A critically lauded documentary filmmaker, Miniucchi screened her debut feature film “Expired” at the Harvard Film Archive (HFA) last weekend. Despite her first-time role as writer and director, Miniucchi reveals her technical and spiritual divergence from mainstream film and her acute cultural consciousness.

A love story with the soul of a documentary, “Expired” follows two parking enforcement officers through Miniucchi’s vision of a real-life relationship. The characters­—Samantha Morton plays a meek meter maid and Jason Patric is her embittered leading man­—both battle loneliness, alienation, and abuse that comes from ticketed drivers and from each other.

“We tried to make an honest film,” Miniucchi said in a question and answer session following the screening. “The point was that even if the relationship can be so hellish or apparently so unhealthy...it is still worthwhile for people to interact and to come out of their own shells. Because there’s always something for them to learn. It is a trip within yourself every time you are in a relationship.”

Miniucchi herself has had a tumultuous relationship with Hollywood. After an embezzlement scandal killed a big-budget project, she turned back to capture her own interests through a documentary lens.

“I just did something a little easier,” said Miniucchi. “So I made documentaries about film and art and contemporary and classical music.”

These documentaries dealt with a range of artistic personalities, including author Charles Bukowski, singer Selena, and performance artist Hermann Nitsch. After probing the artistic legacies of these subjects, Miniucchi applied her knowledge of real life to the script and direction of “Exposed,” shooting with low-budget, Super 35 film and not shying away from the inherent ugliness and imperfections of her characters.

Miniucchi envisioned each scene of the film as a continuous take. “That would give the actors more freedom of movement and it would be more natural, more suitable to the material that we were trying to film.”

Miniucchi points to director Robert Altman as a major influence in her style of camerawork. After filming a lecture Altman delivered at Harvard while she was a student, Miniucchi turned the material into a short documentary.

“I remember him standing here and explaining to us how he would use the camera throughout his films,” said Miniucchi. “Using it as if it were your own eye. Your eye that never stops. I guess that stuck in my mind. I cannot think of shooting a film without moving the camera.”

The naturalness of her material, Miniucchi said, comes from just observing life, love, and abuse. The result was an honest, character-driven love story that never would have happened in Hollywood.

When it came to casting the female protagonist, Miniucchi had only independent actress Morton in mind.

“I couldn’t find anybody in Hollywood playing a character like this that you would believe that was an everyday kind of person. Because all the actresses they are very chiseled and beautiful.”

Although such flawed personalities don’t exist for Miniucchi in Hollywood, she sees them everywhere else.

“I think there are people like this all over the place. I think that we are like that ourselves. I think that each one of us has a good side, and an angrier side, and we just shift them around in more or less excessive ways.”

Because these are “real” characters, Miniucchi stressed her belief that the audience should relate to their struggles.

“The emotional yo-yo that the audience goes through reflects or should reflect the emotional yo-yo that this relationship puts these characters through,” she said.

“You automatically should empathize with anybody that behaves like that. Because again it’s a different way of feeling despair. It’s a different way of reacting to loneliness or disappointment in self-defeating situations.”

Miniucchi’s empathy for her characters also translates into compassion for her actors. She created a double-role for supporting actress Teri Garr (Academy Award Nominee for “Tootsie”), who is battling multiple sclerosis.

“That was one of the reasons why I gave her this part,” said Miniucchi. “When she started feeling sick the Hollywood system kind of wrote her off and pushed her away. Her agent dropped her and her manager dropped her. You know, the typical Hollywood story.”

But despite her best efforts, Miniucchi still had to deal with some of the otherworldly nuttiness of Hollywood when it came to procuring the parking attendant vehicles for the film.

“It was almost impossible,” said Miniucchi. “We were actually shooting the film and had not gotten the carts yet. And then Mr. Harvey Weinstein finally took pity on us. He had some sitting in his garage somehow. The strange stories of Hollywood. So we just borrowed them, no charge. It was very nice. He’s a nice man.”

­—Staff writer Mollie K. Wright can be reached at mkwright@fas.harvard.edu.