[EXCLUSIVE] 'She Sings to the Stars': Jennifer Corcoran talks about writing and directing her first movie

“She Sings to the Stars” is a story about how the lives of two men changed after spending time with a Native American grandmother, who lives alone. In an exclusive interview with International Business Times, Australia writer and director Jennifer Corcoran talked about her approach to the movie and the challenges she faced.

Corcoran described her experience as “ exhilarating, gruelling, mystifying and demanding. A thirteen-ring circus.” She, however, will not consider doing anything else. Her first movie is the first in a cycle of women centric films.

“Innate feminine voices are too often missing in the story-telling world of film,” she said. “I think it is a time when women all over the planet are beginning to come forward with their own voice, one which seems to have been quiet for a very long time.”

“One of the voices that plays through ‘She Sings to the Stars’ is 'what does it mean to listen'?” Corcoran said. “Can we stop long enough to actually listen to each other, and perhaps more importantly, to listen to something deep within ourselves? The desert offers a silence, a mystery that engages the film-goer in a way that will, hopefully, inspire. I find a quiet in the desert that thunderously begs you to listen.”

The movie was filmed in northern New Mexico. The house of the protagonist, grandmother Mabel, was actually an abandoned house owned by a rancher. A volcanic plug called Cabezon Peak in the Rio Puerco Valley can be seen from this house. The interior of the house was built in an old warehouse in a timber yard outside Santa Fe. The movie was also filmed at an abandoned gas station called “The Big Chief” which belongs to the Zia Pueblo tribe.

Making the movie came with its set of challenges. The director was told that she hadn’t made a feature film and was asked to begin with making short videos. “It reminded me of being 18 again, ‘You can't have the job because you have no job experience,’” the director said.

Corcoran also had to home school three of her children. “Home schooling three children is actually more complex than working with a film crew in the middle of nowhere,” she joked.

Being a woman directing her first feature also made things difficult. “Not a lot of women make features, do they?” the director was apparently asked many times. Corcoran feels that it is time to change the notion that “women don’t make feature films.”