Independents Day: Ry Russo-Young

"I like to surround myself with people who are interesting, people who I am intrigued by," says 27-year-old filmmaker Ry Russo-Young on her tendency to turn to "friends of friends" when casting her films. By using non-professional actors (some of whom are former classmates from Russo-Young's days at Saint Ann's School) and loose, somewhat improvised scripts, there's a hazy verité that pervades 2007's Orphans and her most recent film, You Wont Miss Me. The movie stars Stella Schnabel (Saint Ann's '01, daughter of artist Julian Schnabel) and recently buzzed through the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. "I never made this delineated decision, 'I'm going to make a feature movie and Stella is going to star in it,'" says Russo-Young. "Stella told me she had started acting, and we decided to just shoot some stuff as an experiment."

So Russo-Young and Schnabel sat down, came up with a character Schnabel would play, "Shelly" -- a 20-something struggling actress recently released from a mental institution -- and filmed a four-hour interview in which Shelly talked about "life, love, sex and everything."

Russo-Young thought the interview was fascinating, showed it to a few filmmaker friends who concurred and from there she started crafting an outline for a film. The film follows Shelly as she glides from a psychiatrist's office to coke-fueled parties in tiny Brooklyn apartments; from awkward theater auditions to a Virgins concert in Atlantic City. By keeping her actors in the dark, withholding certain information ("to get a more authentic performance") and using sometimes rambling dialogue, Russo-Young creates an eerily voyeuristic quality about You Wont Miss Me -- the result is a character study in urban isolation. "One of the ideas is that Shelly can't tell fiction from reality," Russo-Young says, "So I wanted the film to be confusing."

Styling by Zandile Blay

Hair by Frederic Boudet for Bryan Bantry Inc.

Top by Alexandre Herchcovitch and vintage ring from Screaming Mimi's.

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