Donna Deitch, director of the groundbreaking Desert Hearts and this year’s Outfest Achievement Award winner, discusses her career, life, and future

BY CHRIS FREEMAN

In Hollywood, everyone knows you don't miss meetings with your agent. That is, if you've gone Hollywood. Donna Deitch and I had so much fun talking at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in Beverly Hills that she completely forgot her agent. You gotta love her for that: her passion, her commitment to what she believes in, and her love of storytelling.

Being an independent filmmaker is not the easiest career path a person can take. Raising money, even if it is a small amount in Hollywood terms, and putting it all together can be daunting. But success—and making a landmark film—is an outstanding achievement. Donna Deitch is being recognized this month at the 26th Outfest, Los Angeles’ long-running LGBT film festival, for her work, most notably the 1986 lesbian classic Desert Hearts.

Deitch started out as a documentary student at UCLA in the early ‘70s, when “I got bitten by the bug to make a dramatic film about what was of utmost importance to me, which was a coming out story. Someone gave me a copy of Jane Rule’s novel Desert of the Heart. I read it—seven times in a row. It was speaking to me.” Deitch wrote to Rule, and the two struck up a friendship that lasted the rest of Rule’s lifetime. At Rule’s recent memorial service, Deitch read the early correspondence between them. “It got a lot of laughs—it was a letter of passion, trust, intuition.” After that initial positive contact, Deitch “wrote a screenplay and decided I would raise money the way people raise money for Broadway shows. I would have parties, so I wrote to potential investors. I gathered all these names, and I reached out to a few celebrities I thought would help: Gloria Steinem, Lily Tomlin, Stockard Channing.”

In a couple of years, she had raised almost a million dollars. Deitch knew she “wanted to make a romantic film, so I chose an archetypal storyline. I wanted the audience to root for the women to get together the way they would root for Cary Grant to get the girl. I wanted the satisfaction of that.” She also knew that this was a “revolutionary approach in what it would be to have a positive, very connected, very intimate story. It just hadn’t happened before, and I wanted to see it.”

One thing viewers saw was an intense sex scene between the two lead female characters. “I watched dozens of films with big sex scenes to figure out why they didn’t work. I began to see that they were often lacking in emotional intimacy. You don’t have to have that to have sexual heat—but if you don’t have it, you have to replace it with something else. The originality of the scene is important—don’t just show what we’ve seen a million times.”

 A recent film Deitch loved is Brokeback Mountain. “The sex in Brokeback was appropriate for the characters. It was completely motivated. I read the story when it was first published. I thought, ‘Oh God, would I love to make this film.’ But Ang Lee made such a great film. It just was a sort of perfection.”

Deitch is an Emmy-winning television director, a career that began with Oprah Winfrey’s mini-series The Women of Brewster Place (1989). She’s deeply involved politically and artistically. She has just gone to Zambia with Gloria Steinem for Equality Now, an organization that “works for changing rights for women all over the world through changing laws. Last year, my partner Terri Jentz and I went to Nairobi and met activists who are trying to end female genital mutilation. I’ll be filming in Zambia because that’s what I do—my video camera is something I never leave home without, and I’ll be back in time for Outfest.” The Outfest Achievement Award presentation will welcome Deitch back to the U.S., and then she’ll get back to work, including writing a series of Desert Hearts sequels and making a film based on Jentz’s true crime memoir, Strange Piece of Paradise.

When Jentz was in the midst of writing her memoir, she and Deitch met National Book Award-winner Paul Monette at his Hollywood Hills home. Monette told them, “‘every day, I try to be more truthful than the day before.’” For Deitch and Jentz, it was “amazing to get this advice from Paul Monette, a man who was dying. There’s a lesson in that for any artist. Paul became such an accomplished writer in telling his truth. When you think what it must feel like to be sitting at your desk telling your truth, it must be elevating.” Telling truth through the stories she believes in is what Deitch does, which is quite an achievement indeed. Her agent understands that, right?