Interview with Jacqueline Christy - Director of ‘Magic Hour’

Editor's note: Jacqueline Christy's debut feature "Magic Hour" premiered at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in February 2025. This heartfelt and genuine comedy-drama follows a woman who secretly enrolls in film school while balancing family responsibilities. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

ALI EL-SADANY: Thank you for taking the time to speak with me about "Magic Hour." There's this unique vulnerability that comes with making a film that, while fictionalized, draws from your own journey. What made you feel ready to tell this story?

JACQUELINE CHRISTY: Thank you so much for having me. This is inspired by true events, because I did go to the NYU graduate film program in my 40s, and I was reclaiming a long-lost dream, which is kind of what our character does. So on that level, what makes me feel qualified to tell the story is I kind of lived it on some level. Just that one little part of the story – the film school part is true. Everything else, I made up.

But on the interior life of the character, I feel that I relate to her too, not just the plot and the story. She's an exaggeration, but she is the externalization of all my insecurities. You probably noticed – she's a mess, especially at the beginning. I'm hoping that the audience will see themselves in that insecure part we all have, that self-doubting voice asking: Does anyone care? Is it too late? Is my dream too crazy? I definitely felt like I put a lot of myself into that character.

ALI EL-SADANY: What brought you to filmmaking? What crafted this vision, this path for you?

JACQUELINE CHRISTY: I've done theater my whole life. I have a theater space in downtown New York that I started a long time ago, and I basically produced and developed the work of other writers and directors and artists. I was a little living in the shadows. I don't want to say I was empowered, but I didn't quite have the courage to put myself out there. It was easier to support other people's work.

So I think that character, Harriet, does that too, a little bit. She supports everybody else, but she kind of pulls her own voice back. I think the way I came to this is I was like, "Well, you know, live once. My turn to write my own script, it's my turn to direct that script." And to just have a little bit more confidence that maybe people relate to this, or maybe it'll be something entertaining.

I wanted to write about a woman finding her voice – not a Wonder Woman, just a very ordinary person with a lot of issues doing it anyway, from where they are, not from the perfect version of themselves, but from the ordinary, messed-up version, saying "I'm going to live my dream anyway."

ALI EL-SADANY: What parts of Harriet do you see yourself in? What parts of her scare you? What parts of her do you admire?

JACQUELINE CHRISTY: I definitely put a lot of my insecurities in there. I think I exaggerated them, hopefully. The original title for this was "Doormat," and my mentor of a long time, Jose Rivera, who's also executive producer on this, he was like, "I would never see a movie called 'Doormat'." But it was useful, because it was clear to me from the beginning, she's a doormat, and by the end, hopefully, I don't want to give it away, but she evolves.

In film school, there is something about being older than most of the other people in my class. I love my class – shout out to my class. They became like my family, but at first I didn't fit in. I'm not going to go to a party in Brooklyn at four in the morning, if I even get invited, by the way. And if you don't go, you don't get invited to anything else. So I was like, "Oh, I don't belong, I'm too old for this class."

But I will say by the end, I was the co-class president, so I found my way in there. One of the things about that is this – if you work really hard on not just your own movies, but everybody else's in film school, they don't care how old you are. They want you to be on time, work hard, have a good attitude, and they're like, "Come on and be on my set."

And a sense of humor really helps, because you find yourself in ridiculous situations when you live your dream. The humor that Harriet has, like, "I can't believe I'm lying on a dirty sidewalk doing this film" – that really happened. And if you're just serious about it, it's not gonna work. But if you have this slight twinkle in your eye, like, "This is hilarious," if you have a sense of humor about the crazy, I think that is definitely how I get through life. It's all a little crazy. Life is kind of funny and a strange adventure. So having a sense of humor gets me through almost anything.

ALI EL-SADANY: In your director's statement, you mentioned that "no reality can live up to the imagined perfection of a dream." Can you expand on how your relationship with pursuing your dream evolved through making this movie?

JACQUELINE CHRISTY: When I wrote this, I thought, okay, a different story would have her saying, "And now I'm going to film school," and she goes off into the sunset. This is very much about once you put a dream to the test and try to live it, it's not a dream anymore. It's reality, and then you have to deal with reality.

Beyond the reality of just the difficulty of film school, I think the deeper thing for me, and maybe for a lot of us, is all the reasons that you procrastinated in the first place and put it aside and said, "Oh, I'm too old, it's too late, it's too crazy. Nobody cares." Whatever insecurities were keeping you away from your dream, they come up in your face, and you have to face them, because now you're living your dream. And you have to say, "Maybe no one cares about what I have to say. I'm going to say it anyway. Maybe it is a crazy dream. I'm going to live it anyway."

So you have to actually confront all the reasons why you pushed aside that dream and get through them. And it's interesting how all those demons that seem so scary, they diminish a little when you keep going and let the people around you support you. You're like, "Oh, actually, you can get through this."

ALI EL-SADANY: The film challenges this idea that kindness equals weakness in the arts. Where does that perspective come from in your experience?

JACQUELINE CHRISTY: I think there's leadership that's mean, and there's leadership that's nice, and I really wanted to advocate for what I feel is the transformative power of kindness in leadership. You can be told you need to be killer of the hunt, it's a dog-eat-dog world – all these things we are told, that you have to be tough to be a director.

And I'm like, "You know what? No, you don't have to do it that way. You don't have to change your personality to be a strong leader. You can dig into your kindness and collaborative nature, and that's actually more powerful."

People might say kindness equals weakness, but I would say it's completely opposite – if you're truly kind, really listen to people, they give you everything. The actors feel comfortable giving, opening their hearts. My crew gave me everything they had on an indie movie. It's not a one-person operation. If anything, my whole job was just to be there to allow people to blossom or support them, make sure they knew that I really cared about their artistic input.

I couldn't have just had one vision and be like, "Do my vision." Instead, it was, "Okay, I think we're trying to do this. But what do you have? What do you have? What do you have?" And then bring it all together. So it's really all about just welcoming other voices and then encouraging them and being grateful that they show up and bring their talent. That's the biggest part of filmmaking, and it's also the most rewarding, because I have deep love and gratitude for every single person who worked on this movie.