Sian Heder’s Hill to Die On

Sian Heder’s directorial debut Tallulah sold to Netflix before even premiering at Sundance—one of the festival’s first major acquisitions. Starring Ellen Page and Allison Janney, the film centers on a young woman, Tallulah (Page), who’s unexpectedly thrust into motherhood after taking a baby from an incapable parent. When she confides in her ex-boyfriend’s mother, Margo (Janney), the women form a unique bond. A writer and producer on Orange is the New Black, Heder is no stranger to tackling female relationships, or to the Netflix family either.

Paste sat down to talk with her at the Nantucket Film Festival, where she was honored with a “New Voices in Screenwriting” award. With the success of her feature and the excitement around OITNB, it’s clear that Heder is in fact one to watch.

Paste: You started off acting—how did you get into writing?
Sian Heder: I started becoming a writer because I was so tired when I was bartending of telling people that I was an actress. They give you this kind of pity face and “How’s it going?” One night I was working at this Hollywood spot called Les Deux and these two guys were at the bar and they said, “What do you do?” I said, “I’m a writer.” They said, “What do you write?” I said, “Movies,” and [one guy] said, “What are you working on?” I said, “I can’t really talk about it.” [Laughs.] This really bizarre story had just happened to my neighbor and I just told him the story as though it was the screenplay I was working on. He said, “Do you have a treatment? I’m a producer here’s my card.” I call him up the next day. Two weeks later I get a call and he says, “Hey, I’d love to take this out with you and pitch it.”

Paste: Did you send him a treatment yet?
Heder: I didn’t even know what a treatment was! I’m calling all my writer friends, What is a treatment? I wrote this five-page treatment overnight and we went out and we pitched this thing.

Paste: It’s so LA!
Heder: It’s hilarious and bullshit artist LA style. So nothing came of pitching it out but I thought, “I need to write this screenplay because obviously there’s something here.” I wrote the script and it was the first time I sat down and wrote a screenplay.

Paste: Did you read like Save The Cat or anything?
Heder: I didn’t read a damn thing! I literally just wrote the story. I finished it and I sent it to Zach Quinto, one of my oldest friends. He read it and he called me, “You’re a writer.” At that point, I had to learn to write. I felt like, as an actor, in writing you get to be every single one of your characters. It really fulfills that part of you. Then I used mentorships from older writers I really respected, the AFI DWW program, the Film Independent Labs. I did the Nantucket Screenwriters Colony. I was always a part of writers groups. I wouldn’t say I taught myself to write because I used the teachers around me.

Paste: Consistently, my female friends and I find it hard to find a mentor. How to you approach them? Do you walk up to them and say, “I love your work?”
Heder: I think it’s tricky. In my early 20s, I had a lot of older male mentors and the line got blurry. There was always a point where I felt like, Oh no, is this going to go South? But then there were people that, even if those lines were blurry, they were reading my work and giving me genuine feedback and it was up to me to be very clear that what I was looking for was guidance and not to be someone’s arm candy in Hollywood. There were also just great storytellers that I knew, other writers that were coming up with me, whose work I really respected that helped me find my voice.

The first show I worked on was Men of a Certain Age. Mike Royce and Ray Romano, those two guys made me a better writer. Then I went to work on Orange is the New Black and Jenji Kohan and every writer in that room was incredibly talented and incredibly creative. Being in a TV writers’ room, you’ll come up with what you think is the most brilliant idea in the world. You’ll take it back in the room and people will go, “That sucks. Throw it out. Start over.” There are always more ideas. The creative well is endless and bottomless and you can always re-invent. Something better may come of it. That was really helpful in directing my own work. Even on set I wasn’t precious.

Paste: Watching Orange is the New Black, this season there are some big issues you’re coming up against. Have there been particular moments where, on the opposite end, you’ve fought for something that you think is right?
Heder: We’ve had epic battles in the writers’ room. Each season you have ideas of where you want the show to go. There are big personalities in a writers’ room and everybody has strong opinions. We always call it: Is this your hill to die on?

Paste: What were some of your hills to die on?
Heder: I wrote the transgender episode [“Lesbian Request Denied”] first season.
Paste: Thank you for doing that.
Heder: Yeah, I think [Sophia] was really important to me. There could have been a tendency, because she’s a big personality, to marginalize her in a way or make her a side character and I felt like I was always fighting for Sophia—her story with her wife, her child—to be front and center on the show. Crazy Eyes was a character I was always fighting for. I wrote the episode second season [“A Whole Other Hole”] where it’s revealed that Lorna is completely full of shit and is actually stalking the guy.
Paste: That’s such a good episode.
Heder: I was assigned to write her flashback episode and it was going to be this sort of meet-cute love story of how she met Christopher and when I went off and looked at it on my own I thought, “This woman feels completely full of shit to me. Wouldn’t it be fun if everything is a lie?” In prison nobody has the internet, nobody can Google you—you can be whoever you want to be. What if she had made everything up?

Paste: See, I thought that was something you decided at the beginning of the show.
Heder: No, I went and watched everything with her, read everything with her, and I thought, “This is not ringing true.” That would have been my hill to die on. I brought that into the writers’ room and I was like, “Guys, this is what I want to do with Lorna.”
Paste: What did they say?
Heder: They loved it! Had they not loved it—fthat would have been one where I would have thrown myself on the ground.