When the writer and director Lisa Krueger was 19, she fled to Paris and lived there for five years. What was she escaping? Freedom. Namely, the kind engendered by being raised in Berkeley, Calif., a university town famous for its love of radical politics, social experimentation and A-to-Z religions.
“I was soothed and relieved to live amongst such rational people,” said Krueger, who found the rigidity of French culture the perfect antidote to America’s prizing of individuality. “Here, anything is possible, you can completely invent yourself, be whoever you want. But as a result, there’s no anchor, no roots. It’s like your identity is up for grabs.”
So far, Krueger, 39, has made only two movies, but the longing for structure is a central theme in both. Indeed, some of the most touching moments in her 1996 indie debut “Manny and Lo” involve watching how the lives of two underage orphan runaways (Scarlett Johannsen and Aleska Palladino) are enriched when they kidnap a discipline-driven woman (Mary Kay Place) and the three become a makeshift family.
As for Joline (Heather Graham), the nightclub manager heroine of Krueger’s latest film, “Committed,” she finds comfort in structure too. But her quest — to save an unraveling marriage by hunting down her wayward photojournalist husband, Carl (Luke Wilson) — comes at the expense of her happiness and, eventually, her own sanity.
During Joline’s journey, which takes her from New York to a particularly barren, sandswept corner of El Paso, Texas, she relies on a battery of New Age tracking devices that seem a mixture of spiritual intuition and delirious improvisation. Once her stakeout is set up in El Paso, her good-natured sense of purpose draws unlikely fans and well-wishers, including her husband’s new girlfriend (Patricia Velasquez).
In this way, “Committed” is a tale of post-feminist romance, an almost anti-“First Wives Club,” in which a jettisoned woman does not feel victimized or vengeful, merely emboldened to save her confused spouse.
“I know `it’s better to give than receive’ is one of the oldest notions in the world,” she said. “But I feel like we’ve relegated that idea to the furthest back burner. We’re very intent on getting what we deserve, getting what’s ours. I see the pendulum swinging the other way. Because this endless getting, getting, getting is an empty goal.”
Finding a leading lady who had comic timing and a flighty charisma and could keep the audience invested in her fanciful mission turned out to be one of Krueger’s trickiest tasks. She estimated that she admired, but had to write off, 90 percent of the actresses she considered because they did not seem to have what the role required.
“Look at somebody like Ashley Judd, you can always see the wheels turning,” Krueger said. “Blind faith is a hard thing to pull off. I needed someone who would not think, just do.”
In the wide-eyed Heather Graham, Krueger found herself the perfect protagonist. Winningly optimistic and driven almost entirely by intuition, there is something wholly believable about Graham’s Joline, particularly as she incessantly practices her mystical rituals, some of which Graham invented under Krueger’s guidance.
“She’d say, `Do some stuff with your hands,”‘ Graham said. “And I’d, like, move my hands in a circle twice, then make a square. Then she’d say: `No, I don’t like that. Try patting twice.’ I’d try again. Then she’d go: `OK! Good!”‘
“Incredibly approachable, supportive, a warm, loving person, but at the same time tough, really demanding,” is how Graham categorized Krueger’s style as a writer-director. When it comes to the idiosyncrasies of the creative process, Krueger has probably seen it all. During the early ’90s, after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, she found work as a script supervisor for Abel Ferrara, Jim Jarmusch and James Ivory, independent directors with highly divergent approaches.
By definition, the script supervisor’s job is about keeping account of a movie’s continuity and dialogue. The way Jarmusch describes it, though, Krueger’s specialty was also quirk management.
Jarmusch was often amazed by how Krueger kept track of the lines his eclectic ensemble casts were encouraged to ad-lib, as well as the scenes he would be filming and the type of footage he would need for editing. “It was like having another eye,” he said. “She really understood how we were working.”
“She really has everybody on her team because she’s so incredibly diplomatic and endearing,” said Tom Krueger. Krueger is Krueger’s younger brother and was the director of photography on “Committed” and “Manny and Lo” as well as “Best Offer,” an award-winning short film Krueger wrote and directed in 1990 that featured art direction by a third Krueger, brother Matthew. That Catharine Krueger, the eldest of the four siblings, has temporarily suspended her photojournalism career while she raises her family in Texas must bring some comfort to the Krueger progenitors.
“For all of our parents’ splendor and faults, we are here to document it,” said Tom Krueger, a writer and director whose work, like his sister’s, is laced with autobiographical touches. “We have so much raw material to choose from — and not all of it puts them in the best light. If they only knew they were going to have four artists, two of them filmmakers to fully explore all of it on the silver screen.”
Krueger was born in St. Louis, but by the time she was 10 and the family was living in northern California, divorce and upheaval had turned the Krueger clan into a two-city household. “I grew up in the first wave of parents discovering themselves,” Krueger said about the split that sent her psychiatrist mother packing to Berkeley while her orthopedic surgeon father remained in Lucas Valley; both went on to remarry and build second families.
“In a way, I advocate this, but it left me with certain question marks about what bonds and institutions really mean. `Manny and Lo,’ in a lot of ways, is about not knowing what family is. `Committed’ is about, `What does it mean to be married to someone?”‘
When she made her exodus to Paris’ 11th arrondissement she began studying cinema at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, teaching English at the University of Paris and endlessly analyzing film, albeit in a language that was not her own.
“It was a very exciting time, a real hotbed of critical thought,” said Krueger, who has no delusions about the contributions she made to the debates held by her then-boyfriend, the French film theoretician Raymond Bellour, and his equally cerebral friends.
“I was just this little pipsqueak, offering my opinions in bad French,” Krueger said. “Now that I’m their age, I look back and think they must have been unbelievably patient.”
Where’s the bitterness and frustration that’s the specialty of her ilk? “Well, I’ve been lucky,” she said with a smile. “I haven’t hit any walls yet. Or at least ones that are perceivable to me.”
“But I may get rageful some day,” she added, apologetically.
