Authors Interviewing Characters: Patricia Leavy, author of The Location Shoot

October 10, 2023 | By Women Writers Women Books | Reply More

Authors Interviewing Characters: Patricia Leavy, author of The Location Shoot

“Leavy is a master storyteller, skillfully weaving together a narrative that keeps us engaged from start to finish. . . it’s a must-read for anyone looking for a thought-provoking and entertaining exploration of love, relationships, and self-discovery. Highly recommended!”
—Readers’ Favorite, 5-star review

“A tour de force! Much more than a romance, this novel celebrates the romance of life itself.”
—Laurel Richardson, award-winning author of Lone Twin

THE LOCATION SHOOT

Controversial filmmaker Jean Mercier is shooting a film on location in Sweden. While spending the summer creating his latest work of cinematic art, he lives in a nearby inn with his lead actors, including Finn Forrester, a legendary Hollywood movie star. Mercier also invites his friend Ella Sinclair—a beautiful, bohemian-spirited American philosopher known for her provocative writing—to stay with them for the summer. When Ella arrives, Finn is instantly enchanted by her, and soon they fall madly in love.

Finn wants to plan a life together, but Ella harbors fears and convinces him to wait until the film wraps to decide their future. In a case of life imitating art, the film this group is creating explores “the big questions” and prompts the stars to reflect on the crossroads they face in their own lives. How will their experiences on location affect them when they return home? The answers won’t come until months later, when the cast and crew reconvene on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival—but their revelation will make for one unforgettable night.

Patricia Leavy interviews Ella Sinclair

PL: You are a philosopher, widely known for your provocative musings on sexual politics and your fearless writing. Your first book was unforgettably titled, My Boyfriend or My Vibrator? Woman’s New Existential Crisis. Dare I ask, how did you come up with that title?

ES: It was my first book and I wanted to make a splash. I was dating some guy. I’ll be diplomatic and just say, we didn’t have any chemistry, which he wasn’t willing to acknowledge, so I ended it. He was feeling a bit wounded, male ego and all, and on his way out the door, he screamed, “You better not write about me in your book!”

I guess we get something from every relationship. He wasn’t a great lover, but in that moment, he inspired the title for my debut book. I had no idea it would become a best seller, but to this day, I imagine him walking past a bookstore and seeing it displayed in the window.

PL: As a philosopher, what fascinates you?

ES: I’m interested in what brings human beings pleasure and what that experience is like. I have a theory that there are only four things human beings experience in their wholeness: sex, art, food, and nature. Culture can get in the way and influence, obscure, and subvert our experience of these things, and in fact, it usually does.

Yet there is at least the possibility, the potentiality that we may experience them with a oneness that doesn’t exist elsewhere. It’s why these things have the power to bring us tremendous pleasure like nothing else—they make us feel the splendor of being alive. When they are good and when we’re truly free and open to the experience, these things feed our souls, awaken our senses, and propel us to states of calm and ecstasy.

PL: What about love?

ES: Love means so many different things and is experienced in innumerable ways. How do we define it without limiting it? There’s a materiality or physicality to the topics I’ve selected that’s impossible to have with an abstract concept like love.

PL: And in your own life? It’s no secret you and Hollywood mega-star Finn Forrester fell in love on the set of a Jean Mercier film.

ES: Yes, we’re madly in love. I wasn’t looking for it or expecting it. I don’t even know how or why it happened. I guess that’s how it works with love. At least that’s what we’re figuring out.

PL: So, do you think love defies reason?

ES: Funny you should ask that. Our dear friend Albie Hughes, who costarred with Finn, told us that true love is the greatest gift in the world and one mustn’t squander it or be foolish enough to think it will simply wait until it obliges our schedules. From him we’ve learned that when you get hit by lightning, you surrender to it. All the details, the little things you don’t know about each other, get sorted out over time. There’s no replacing that inexplicable, inconvenient, all-encompassing feeling of love. I guess it’s true that the artists—the poets, the novelists, the filmmakers—have always known better: true love has no reason.”

PL: You and Finn met on the set of a Jean Mercier film. Rumor has it, you’re a longtime friend of the eccentric filmmaker. He has a bit of a reputation for how he treats women in his personal life. What do you think about that?

ES: People want simple answers, but life is complex. Jean’s created some of the greatest, most interesting, sensitive, and provocative roles for women in the history of cinema. There’s a reason so many actresses are dying to work with him. And yet, he can be quite a piece of shit to women in his own life. Tell me, which is better: the male director who never casts women or does so only in clichéd, trivial ways but may be a hell of a good guy in private, or the man who creates professional opportunities for women that wouldn’t otherwise exist and gives the collective imaginary new, powerful representations of women, but uses up women in his personal life as if they were pieces of gum he was chewing until the flavor runs out?

When these are the choices, what’s the answer? How do we define morality? Who’s a good guy? Who’s a bad guy? What matters, life or art? How are they related? What’s public and what’s private? Despite what many claim, it’s rarely as simple as we might wish. Life is textured. As for me, I adore Jean as a friend and as an artist, but you’d never catch me in bed with him.

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About the Author

Patricia Leavy, PhD, is an award-winning, best-selling author. She has published more than forty books; her work has been translated into many languages, and she has received more than forty book honors. She has also received career awards from the New England Sociological Association, the American Creativity Association, the American Educational Research Association, the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, and the National Art Education Association. In 2018, she was honored by the National Women’s Hall of Fame and SUNY-New Paltz established the “Patricia Leavy Award for Art and Social Justice.” When she’s not writing, she loves reading, watching movies, visiting museums, cooking, and traveling.