I want to be invited to Vera Farmiga’s house when she does one of the burnings described in this piece from The Guardian. It seems that Farmiga burns the scripts she gets that she doesn’t like that have crappy female characters on her front lawn. I imagine it has a big singed spot.

She’s been on the radar since Debra Granik’s 2004 film Down to the Bone and hit the big time last year with her Oscar nomination for Up in the Air. She appears this week in Source Code a big budget film that almost got relegated to the front lawn bonfire but then she decided against it.

But the best news is that she is no longer “asking permission [to play the roles I wanted to play]” and took control herself and stars in and directed Higher Ground which debuted at Sundance and will play Tribeca next month.

Here are her thoughts on women and blockbusters:

I’m least challenged or inspired by those stories…I’ve gravitated towards independent cinema because you have to work harder in studio scripts to flesh out characters, particularly female ones. They are not as sharply edged, they tend to be quite watery. They are not renderings of women as I know them.

Cannot wait to see her in scripts that escape her bonfire and also to see what she directs next.

Vera Farmiga: ‘I demand a lot from myself’ (The Guardian)