NY Glam:<\/strong> How long have you been making films and\nvideos?<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Abby: I made my first\nfilm, \u201cThe Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of\u201d, back in high school. It was a\ndocumentary about The Dream Act and undocumented immigration. I was a part of a\nstudent-run group a few of us started called \u201cThe Dream Team,\u201d and we used my\n17-minute film to introduce ourselves and our mission when we would speak to\nparishes, schools, and various groups about Dreamers. This was back in 2006, so\nThe Dream Act was just starting to get national attention. It was the first\ntime I realized how powerful of a tool film could be. I still remember when we\ndid a presentation to the teachers at my high school and teachers were walking\nout of my film because they disagreed with the politics. Some of my classmates\nstood outside with signs yelling at their undocumented classmates, teammates,\nfriends telling them to go home to Mexico. I hear they are still showing it at\nmy high school\u2019s Amnesty International meetings 14 years later, which is great\nbut also devastating because not much has changed for the Dreamers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n NY Glam:<\/strong> What film was your directorial\ndebut? <\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I spent most of my early\nprofessional life directing theater and acting. \u201cEat Your Heart Out\u201d is my\ndirectorial debut. I wanted to make a short movie, so I started at the ground\nlevel and figured it out. I\u2019m proud of it!<\/p>\n\n\n\n NY Glam:<\/strong> What is your recent film about? <\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cEat Your\nHeart Out\u201d is a magical realism fairytale about a woman who tries to retrieve her heart\ndays before she is married, only to find out her ex cut it up with a butter\nknife and hid parts of it around the city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n NY Glam:<\/strong> How did you go about casting for\nthe film?<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Graham\nBeckel (Brokeback Mountain, LA Confidential) has been a teacher and mentor of\nmine for years. Charley Koontz (Community, CSI: Cyber) has been one of my best\nfriends for over a decade. I always wanted to work with both of them and was\nhonored when they agreed to come on. I\u2019m an actor, so my co-writer, Julia\nLederer, and I wrote the main role of Wallace for me to play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n NY Glam:<\/strong> What was the most important\nlesson you had to learn that has had a positive effect on your film? How did\nthat lesson happen?<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I repeated\nthe adage, \u201cHow do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time,\u201d to stave off panic\nattacks and keep myself moving forward as I learned each stage of making a\nshort film. When I got lost in the bigness of it all, I just made simple tasks\nand knocked them out one at a time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAsk for\nwhat you want\u201d also got me a lot of what I wanted.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n NY Glam:<\/strong> Tell<\/strong> us a bit about the other films\nyou\u2019ve made and your other projects.<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cGo Ahead, Grab Time by the Throat\u201d is my latest short film and oh man is it a weird one. I call the genre \u201cDocu-Fiction Inverted Rom-Com\u201d. In my real life, I got engaged and broke up on the same day. I filmed the proposal\/break up on my phone and then used that real-life footage as the basis of the film. My very generous ex-fiancee agreed to re-enact scenes from our break-up for the film. It\u2019s an exploration of ritualism, exhibitionism, and voyeurism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n NY Glam:<\/strong> What role have film festivals\nplayed in your life so far?<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s been a\nwide range of experiences from the ultra-glamorous to DIY family-sized\nscreenings. I love it all. There are so many talented filmmakers out there.\nRight now, it\u2019s a matter of navigating festivals in the time of Covid and\nseeing the creative ways the festivals will handle the pandemic. I\u2019m here for\nall of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n NY Glam:<\/strong> Is it harder to get started\nor to keep going? What was the particular thing that you had to conquer to do\neither?<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I think the\nhardest stage is 30% of the way into a project. Getting excited about an idea\nis easy. Rolling with momentum is easy. Pushing through the stage of \u201coh god,\nthis idea actually sucks, and this is too hard, and what\u2019s the point and this,\nand this is going to cost more than I make, and who will want to work on this\nwith me?\u201d is a slog. The thing that pushed me through was my loyalty to my\ncollaborators and their generosity to me. I looked around to the good people\nthat agreed to come on board, and someone always had an answer that restarted\nthe engine.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n NY Glam:<\/strong> How has your style evolved?<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n My style is\na response to my idea and the resources I have to make a movie. My skills,\ntechniques, and perspective as a filmmaker has grown, but these are just in service\nto the story I am curious about and the resources I have to make the project.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n NY Glam:<\/strong> What has been your personal key\nto success? <\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I ask great\npeople to collaborate.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n NY Glam:<\/strong> What are you thinking about doing next?<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Right now I\nam developing a feature horror film set in a women\u2019s prison based off of my\nexperiences teaching theater and acting in prisons in Chicago and New York City\nfor the last five years. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Exclusive interview with Abby Pierce – Filmmaker Abby Pierce is a director, writer, actor, and teaching artist. She has been teaching theater with incarcerated communities for the past five years with the women of EPIC at Cook County Jail and she currently teaches at Riker\u2019s Island with Drama Club. She recently directed the Jeff-nominated theater […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8595,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-film"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nyglamour.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nyglamour.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nyglamour.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nyglamour.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nyglamour.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8594"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nyglamour.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8594\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19261,"href":"https:\/\/nyglamour.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8594\/revisions\/19261"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nyglamour.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nyglamour.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nyglamour.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nyglamour.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/nyglamour.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/EYHO-STILL1-1024x640.png\")
Still from Eat Your Heart Out – (Director\u00a0of Photography – Jason Chiu <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n