Daydreamer: A Conversation with Sara Driver
![Daydreamer: A Conversation with Sara Driver](https://s3.amazonaws.com/criterion-production/editorial_content_posts/hero/8541-/6hG28OtMno08FyqZsmN8s8JA8JAvCD_original.jpg)
Since the early 1980s, when she emerged from the downtown New York arts scene, filmmaker Sara Driver has honed her gift for finding a sense of the hypnagogic and phantasmagoric in the rhythms of everyday life. Now regarded as a landmark of independent cinema, her work draws on everything from ancient mythology and classical fairy tales to American B movies and the French cinéma fantastique. When I visited her recently at her studio, she explained her artistic sensibility by telling me, “I’ve always been a daydreamer. I’ve always loved fantasy. I’m not really good with reality.”
Like many of the artists who got their start in the same cultural milieu, Driver grew up on the outskirts of the city, in suburban New Jersey. After high school, she studied theater and classics before pursuing a master’s degree in film at New York University alongside such peers as Jim Jarmusch and Spike Lee. It was there that she began collaborating with Jarmusch, producing his first feature, Permanent Vacation (1980), and Stranger Than Paradise (1984). In between those films, she made her directorial debut with You Are Not I (1981), an eerie and expressionistic adaptation of a Paul Bowles story about a woman who escapes a mental hospital, stumbles upon a deadly accident, and gets mistaken for one of the survivors. Produced on a shoestring budget, You Are Not I was made with a remarkable group of collaborators—including Jarmusch, who cowrote the script and shot the film; photographer Nan Goldin; writer Lucy Sante; and actor Suzanne Fletcher. It was followed by Sleepwalk (1986), which tells the story of a woman (Fletcher) whose life takes a turn for the uncanny after she is hired to translate an ancient Chinese manuscript, and When Pigs Fly (1993), an elegiac portrait of a down-and-out jazz musician (Alfred Molina) haunted by a pair of ghosts (one of whom is played by Marianne Faithfull) after he comes into possession of an old rocking chair. Alongside her fiction films, Driver has made several documentaries that celebrate the New York she has come to know over the past forty years, including The Bowery and Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
With a retrospective of her work now playing on the Criterion Channel, Driver talked with me during my studio visit about how she has navigated being an artist in the city and how her dreams and collaborations have brought her films to life.
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