By Terry Roethlien
Photos by Ernesto Gonzales

One of the locations for James Ryan's low budget independent film, The Young Girl and the Monsoon, still haunts him. "It was my apartment," he says. "Those beds were my beds. The sheets they were making love on were my sheets. I still have the same apartment so when I go home it's very strange."

Flesh, blood and tears are all evident in this, the independent film Ryan wrote and directed in 1999. Adapting his play that was originally produced off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons, Ryan has made a bittersweet comedy about a divorced New York photo journalist and the angst-ridden relationships he has with his daughter, girlfriend and best friend.

A prolific playwright as well as an actor and teacher (he has had eight plays produced in New York venues such as Circle Repertory and the O'Neill Theater Center, and others staged in Los Angeles, Berkeley and Minneapolis), the 42 year old Ryan has a passion for intimate, character-based screenplays with characters who aren't afraid to show their feelings. "I have always loved films where the characters are really fleshed out," he says. "That's the type of film that really excites me."

The reason Ryan started out in theater is obvious. "I love theater because there the writer is king. Actually it is the script. Everybody works in service of it, including the writer. But later on, when I got into movies, I found that respect wasn't there. It was very frustrating." With characteristic wit, Ryan adds, "David Mamet said, "Screen writing and moviemaking is a collaborative art. But they didn't tell you, it's a collaborative art--bend over." Do you know what I mean? In a certain way that's true."

Just over six feet tall, with blue eyes and slightly thinning hair, Ryan spent six unsatisfying years in Hollywood writing screenplays that were never produced before he decided to go independent. "When I was in Hollywood it was like what I wanted to do artistically didn't fit in," says Ryan. "I was going to meetings and lying to myself in public all the time to get a job because I had a kid to support. But I found I could only do that so long before I just started to crumble," he adds.

Ryan has one daughter from a marriage that lasted from 1980 until 1991. A Long Island native, Ryan began his theatrical career as an actor in the Williamstown Theater Festival at Williams College. Upon returning to New York, he pursued acting for about five years, taking roles in over thirty Off Broadway productions and in the films Falling In Love, Five Corners and Joe Vs. the Volcano.

According to Ryan, the guilt and obsession that plague his lead character, Hank, are reflective of the guilt he suffered over not being with his daughter in the early 90s while he bounced between coasts, looking for screenwriting work.

"Previously, a lot of my plays were political, but with this one I started to move towards the more personal," he says. "I can deal with that now. Earlier on, I couldn't and I find it more interesting."

Ryan says that with Monsoon he also began to write about women. In the past, plays like the 1986 Ensemble Studio Theatre's production of Dennis (about the murder of civil rights activist Allard Lowenstein by Dennis Sweeney) and the 1988 Alice's Fourth Floor production of South Pacific Snow (about the H Bomb tests on the Bikini Atoll) were political pieces with mainly male characters.

The filmmaker says about half of the film draws on his own life. "I don't have a beautiful girlfriend like Milli Avital, that's just a complete male fantasy. But my daughter did go through some craziness when I divorced and the film heightens that. I've had so many parents come up to me after seeing the film and say, "Oh my God, did you get my kid." Ryan is right at home with one of Ireland's greatest writers, Oscar Wilde, whose wry theatrical commentaries on the foibles of human relationships garnered accolades and recriminations in his day. Ryan's uncle, William Flaherty restored Wilde's old house in Dublin, because he claims the family line runs all the way back to the controversial Irish scribe. "We were there three years ago," says Ryan. "My cousin got married at Luttrellstown Castle in Dublin and we had a big party at Oscar Wilde's house."

His paternal grandparents came to the States from Tipperary during the Depression but soon returned after seeing how bad things were. His father then attended school in Ireland until he was eight years old, when the family returned to the States. As a boy, Ryan used to spend summers in Thurles, Tipperary and his mother's family hails from Connemara, Co. Galway. Although Ryan will not vouch for his dan's alleged literary lineage, his first-generation Hibernian roots are evident in his love of storytelling and the lengths to which he will go to bring his work to life.

Ryan, who wrote, directed and produced his character-driven relationship film for "well under a million dollars," believes his effort truly deserves that much-bandied-about "independent" label.

"So much about filmmaking is marketing and I've become very cynical about it," says Ryan. "There is what people call the "indywood" film now, which is basically a film that's marketed as being independent, when in fact there's major studio money behind it somehow."

After Ryan's 1997 stage version of The Young Girl and the Monsoon received a favorable review in the New York Times, some well-known Hollywood producers (he won't mention names) called up and asked him to develop the work into a screenplay. Ryan had already lost the rights to two other adapted plays that went unproduced, so he decided to take his chances and decline the offer. "I literally said on the phone to a producer, a very big Hollywood producer, "No, I'm gonna do this on my own," says Ryan. "She paused and said, 'Well, we'll continue this project in about two weeks' as if I was going to come out of my delusion, but I didn't."

Reconceiving the piece required losing about 50% of the original play, says Ryan, but using a camera allowed him to reveal much more about the private life of the characters. Three of the principal actors Ryan chose-Tarry Kinney, Mill Avital and Diane Venora-were all accomplished theater actors. Sixteen year-old film and television actress Ellen Muth was chosen from among four hundred actresses to play the 13-year-old daughter and eventually won the Best Actress Award at the American Film Institute of Los Angeles International Film Festival last year.

The entire feature was then shot in New York City in 24 days. Ryan calls the experience "utterly independent." The finished film is peopled with richly wrought characters who can evoke deep pathos as well as hearty laughter. The volatile, tragicomic tone of the film is set by the guilt and angst Hank (Kinney) feels over his treatment of his daughter, Constance (Muth), who is caught in the crossfire of a messy divorce.

"I would say the characters I like go the full range and they are emotional characters," says Ryan, clad in a black leather jacket. "They tend to be very emotional about a lot of things. At the same time if I don't get laughs I feel really bad, so what I like to do is set up the laughs and then come in for the kill." After Hank dumps his girlfriend, Erin (Avital), she makes a brief but revealing speech about the lack of depth to her life, a theme all the characters echo. As the metaphor of the monsoon in the title suggests, each character undergoes a whirlwind experience of irreparable loss and then straggles to overcome that loss and find connection with others.

"The sense of loss the characters endure is a sign of the times in which we live," says Ryan. "As we become involved in a much more virtual environment, an urban environment, this leads to more and more isolation. We're all suffering in those ways and we're all trying to figure out how to have a meeting of the souls in an environment that fights that."

Noted photojournalist Hank disenchanted with his career--declares that the "exposed life is not the examined life," another theme within the film. Explains Ryan, "In a virtual environment, where entertainment has overtaken reality and people don't want to feel--the passionate man is considered suspect --people are insensitive to not examining their own life. They think if they just expose it, as in a lot of entertainment, it has been examined. In fact, that's not true."

Moviegoers have compared Ryan to another talented director. "They call me the Catholic Woody Alien," he says. "I find that interesting. The modern neurosis, the cityscape, and the people in it who are literate and of a certain class," are all reminiscent of that classic New York filmmaker's style. "But I don't always write that stuff. This time that's what the story required." Monsoon began garnering praise and interest immediately, first at the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival and then at the annual Indie Film Market. As evidenced at his screening at the Avignon/New York Film Festival. the film has been greeted with guffaws and applause. Large studio distributors such as Sony Pictures Classics as well as smaller ones like Phaedra Cinema have been bidding on Monsoon.

Although certain festivals were indispensable in navigating the byzantine sale process. Ryan discovered that many others did not seem committed to nurturing the genuine independent spirit. "I was shocked to find out what festivals are really about. They're much more a launching pad for marketing campaigns for mini-major- distributors who have films and want to launch them somehow.

About the time Ryan returned to New York to make his own film, he also began teaching playwriting at the New School and scrcenwriting in his own private workshop. He has also written two books about screenwriting Screenwriting fro the Heart: The Technique of the Character Centered Screenplay (Billboard) being the most recent to fill a void in the field. "I felt like maybe I could contribute something that hadn't been in the books already," he says. I felt that because of my theatre and acting background, I had a little bit of a different approach. They're not many books out there on character.

Ryan recently took on a lucrative screenwriting job, which pays about four times what a year of teaching does. If he has to relinquish teaching, Kyan says it would be hard to give up his association with students. "The only way to be a good teacher is to love them on some level, so you go through this anxiety when you lose them--this grief. So maybe it's time to move on. I dent know." Or continue making pictures. His next project, based in Cuba. Miami and New York, won't be guile as indie. He's been offered considerably more funding this time around, and he hopes to tie in distribution before beginning production. "It seems like the next challenge for me. I just don't want to be stuck with a film and have to spend a year or two selling it. We hear of all these great stories of people making sudden sales but in reality that's not how it happens. "

Although independents fared quite well at the Oscars this year. Ryan feels that some of those films won't stand the test of time because their characters are not fully fleshed out. He calls Kimberly Pierce's Boy's Don't Cry" a concept film about a woman who dresses like a man and Sam Mendes' American Beauty a cartoon in many ways." He feels these filmmakers illustrate a general society tend toward exposing surfaces but examining little else. "There's a huge cultural shift and transition going on and they are speaking about that, but my concern is it tends to lead to an affected, mannered cinema and that tends to be less lasting. So what do you do as an artist." You've got to speak about the times; you have to be in the times and at the same time you want to write something that's lasting. Its a struggle.'