'Grace of My Heart' and the Case for Personal Filmmaking Inside the Studio System

IndieWire has brought together four people behind *Grace of My Heart* — writer/director Allison Anders, star Illeana Douglas, producer Daniel Hassid, and music producer and composer Larry Klein — to look back at the film. The framing IndieWire puts on that conversation is that the movie stands as a model of personal filmmaking inside the studio system, and that it looks better with every passing year. The first of those claims is the more interesting one, because it describes a working arrangement rather than a result: a director with a distinct voice making a film inside a machine built for other priorities. The second is the kind of thing publications say about films they have decided to champion, and it is also the kind of thing audiences routinely take back ten years later. What the assembled group actually offers is a record of who had to be in the room for a film like this to get made — including a composer and music producer, whose presence among the four says something about how central music was to the enterprise.