My conversation with the filmmaker whose credits include The Keeping Room, Miss Stevens, Fast Color, and I’m Your Woman.

Julia Hart is a dynamic filmmaker whose writing-directing credits include Miss Stevens (2016), Fast Color (2018), and I’m Your Woman (2020), as well as Stargirl (2022) and Hollywood Stargirl (2024) for Disney+.

I interviewed Julia in 2013 to talk about her Black List script The Keeping Room which was produced in 2014. Here is that interview in its entirety.

: Let’s start with this. You majored in English at Columbia University, then worked as a high school English teacher. Did you see teaching as something you would do as a career or was teaching something you perceived as a stop along the way?

: I definitely started teaching right out of college because it was very important to me to get a job. At first I thought it would be a compliment to a writing career, but then I ended up falling in love with teaching and I did it for eight years. About two years ago though I started to feel the writing itch again. I ended up quitting my job in June and now I’m writing full‑time.

: Did you learn anything about writing or yourself as a writer through your experiences as a teacher?