Stacy Cochran

Stacy Cochran is an American film director, screenwriter and producer based in New York City. She is best known for her films My New Gun and Boys (1996).

Personal life Cochran was born in Passaic, New Jersey. She graduated from Williams College as a Political Science major, and earned her MFA in film from Columbia University. Cochran received the Arthur Levitt Artist-in-Residence at Williams College in 2002. She was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) from 2006-2014 and was head of its Program Advisory committee.

My New Gun, with a score by Pat Irwin, continued to play at festivals including the Toronto Film Festival where it was seen by The New Yorker critics Michael Sragow and Terrence Rafferty. Rafferty's review stated that “Cochran’s isn’t a satirist’s world, or a cartoonist’s, or a fairy-tale teller’s; it’s more like a novelist’s. Yet the sort of liberation that ‘My New Gun’ proposes, and embodies, is the product of a true filmmaker's vision.” Hal Hinson of The Washington Post described it as "Stacy Cochran's coolly funny, immaculately modulated first feature." Janet Maslin of The New York Times stated, “‘My New Gun’ is a delectably wry slice of suburban life, imagined by Ms. Cochran and played with perfect bewilderment by the enormously appealing Ms. Lane.” Manohla Dargis of The Village Voice wrote, “In ‘My New Gun,’ director Stacy Cochran doesn't fetishize sidearms. A restless signifier, the gun is passed back and forth between Debbie and Skippy like a hot potato. It's a symbolic exchange as telling as it is funny. In ‘My New Gun,’ the .38 in question is both a rod and a piece, male and female, a sign of just how fluid gender roles can be.” thumb

Boys (1996) Following the success of My New Gun, Cochran was approached to develop a feature film based on Twenty Minutes, a short story by James Salter about a woman who falls off her horse and lies dying in a meadow. She reconceived the eight-page story as a dark but comic riff on the tale of Snow White, and won Salter’s approval to move forward with the film.

Interscope Pictures signed on to produce the resulting Boys, and attached Winona Ryder and Lukas Haas to play the lead roles. The movie’s two leads were separated from Cochran during filming, despite her being the movie’s writer/director, and the film was subsequently subjected to an unexpectedly extensive editing process.

Cochran described the evolution of the project in Tod Lippy's Projections 11: New York Film-makers on New York Film-making, noting “that the thing that was mostly lost from Boys, in the end, was its sense of humor about itself.”

Drop Back Ten (2000) After Richard Lester!, Cochran wrote the screenplay that became Drop Back Ten. The film is about an unemployed writer who, after writing a book on the NFL, is hired to write a magazine profile of a young actor. Drop Back Ten hinges on the writer’s realization that there’s an ugliness beneath the exterior of the actor he comes to know, and the film deals with the ethical gray area inhabited by all of its characters. The movie premiered in Dramatic Competition at Sundance in 2000. Cochran herself was unable to attend, as her third daughter was born in New York on the same day as the premiere. She has stated her 18-year hiatus after Drop Back Ten was due to having three children. As with all her previous movies, Cochran collaborated with casting director Todd Thaler. Online publication Hammer to Nail wrote of the premiere: "With 'Write When You Get Work', we have a delectable mix of a romantic comedy and a heist thriller, set against the backdrop of enormous privilege, the whole served up with more than a dollop of astute social criticism. It’s beautiful storytelling, and a refreshing break from the crushing sameness of so many blockbusters of our era."

Write When You Get Work received the Tito's Handmade Vodka Award at the Asbury Park Music & Film Festival, and the New York Showcase Award at the Harlem International Film Festival. Its first draft was written several years ago, originally titled Love Story of Thieves.

Films

1990: Another Damaging Day 1992: My New Gun 1996: Boys 1998: Richard Lester! 2000: Drop Back Ten 2018: Write When You Get Work 2020 Heartbeat of Squirrels (Short Film) – Nominated for Best Short Film at Oldenburg Film Festival 2022 Year on Ice (Unreleased)