A thorny story set in New York City at a private school for girls and in the world outside its exclusive walls.

I’ve been asked several times about the title, what it means, Write When You Get Work.

It’s a directive: Call me if you get a job. Let me know if you make some money. It’s a farewell that comes with a challenge.

If you say it to someone as they walk away, it’s got promise of accomplishment but likelihood of failure in its delivery. It’s a poke in the ribs.

It was how my dad always said goodbye when I was a kid. Whether I was headed to college or off to the park, my dad would give a wave and say, “Write when you get work.”

For years, when I was a kid, I didn’t know what it meant, only that he thought it was funny. He never bothered to explain it but, as I got older, I figured it out.

And that gradual slide into understanding what’s being said to you is like the pleasure of watching a movie -- not a proof or essay, but a story that brings problems and funny ideas and the threat of disappointment. When it works, it’s a heartfelt sleight of hand.

Write When You Get Work, the movie, is a love story and a portrait of New York, a city where people live and walk in unexpected combinations, in their own heads but together.

The characters in the movie love each other, have lost each other, crowd and taunt each other, and evolve in wavy lines.

We built a cast of strangers, some of them with enormous experience and several making their feature debut. We shot on Super16 on the Upper East Side and in the Bronx, under the Throgs Neck Bridge in a waterfront neighborhood called Locust Point. We worked with the kind of improvised navigation that drives the plot of the movie itself.

Robert Elswit, our Oscar-winning cinematographer, and I had worked together before, in vastly different contexts. This movie gave us a chance to work together again for which I’m deeply grateful.

We jumped on the subway, we hailed real cabs, we stole shots on the sidewalks out in front of delis. We made last-ditch pleas for perfect locations. We pulled some rabbits out of hats.

Stacy Cochran

Writer/Director

Stacy Cochran is a director, screenwriter and producer based in New York City. She made her feature debut with Columbia TriStar title My New Gun starring Diane Lane and James LeGros. It was shot on 35mm film by Oscar-nominated cinematographer Ed Lachman, ASC. It premiered in Director's Fortnight at Cannes and earned an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best First Feature. Subsequent projects as writer-director include Touchstone/Interscope title Boys starring Winona Ryder, the half-hour film Richard Lester! about the director which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival (now on Criterion Channel) and Drop Back Ten which premiered in Dramatic Competition at Sundance. After a production hiatus, she wrote and directed Write When You Get Work starring Emily Mortimer, Finn Wittrock and Rachel Keller. Shot on Super16mm film by Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Elswit, ASC, the movie premiered in Narrative Competition at SXSW, was released in theaters and is now streaming on AmazonPrime. She’s currently immersed in several projects including Year on Ice, a fictional feature inspired by Gerald Eskenazi’s book on the 1969-70 NHL season in New York. As the Arthur Levitt Artist-in-Residence at Williams College, she has taught screenwriting and directing in Williamstown, Massachusetts where she also served as head of the Program Advisory committee at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art/MASS MoCA in North Adams. She has a BA in Political Science from Williams, and an MFA in Film from Columbia University.

Stacy Cochran: Waking Back up in the Movie Business; TALKHOUSE.