The Female Member

A FEW minutes into my interview with Marianna Palka in an Edinburgh hotel, a waiter saunters over and starts flirting with her. He wants to know whether she is an actress, a line so tired we find ourselves waiting, eyes rolling skywards, for the one about whether she comes here often.

Palka doesn't, despite hailing from Glasgow, but she is an actress. She's a director, too, and at 26 was the youngest filmmaker at this year's Sundance Festival, where her feature debut (she wrote it, directed it, and stars in it) was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize and went on to win her the New Director's Award at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in June.

Palka won't, however, divulge the name of this film to the waiter. "Sometimes, depending on the person, I just can't say its title," she whispers after he has gone. Palka is tall, athletic and blonde, with a wide smile and a patchwork accent sewn somewhere between Lanarkshire and LA, where she has lived for the past six years. "That guy coming over was so appropriate. It's this sexist stuff that is in our faces all the time. I never realised that being a woman filmmaker really meant anything until Sundance, where I was referred to as a 'girl' filmmaker. They would never describe a young male director as a 'boy'. I just didn't think about it until I walked into that festival and there were all these men."

She describes her experience at Sundance as "like being shot out of a cannon", and it was only when she got there that she realised what she had managed. "Only seven per cent of directors are women, yet women make up 52% of the world," she says. "We've got a wee way to go."

The name of Palka's film is Good Dick, which explains her reticence to blurt it out to strangers. It's about a damaged young woman's addiction to soft porn, and it's very weird and rather beautiful. Palka plays the lead, while her real-life partner Jason Ritter is her gently persistent love interest, the lonesome video store clerk from whom she rents the films. It's an unpredictable romantic comedy (though the laughs and romance are rare) about how sexual affection can change a person, a kind of feminist take on the slacker movie. Palka shot it in west LA and it's an astonishingly assured debut. "I use that video shop and I was standing in there one day thinking: 'What would rock these guys' worlds?' I thought if a girl came in and rented from the erotica section every day, that would probably do it."

That was three years ago. Palka made the film for just half a million dollars, working with a small, tight-knit crew. She even set up her own production company, which she runs with Ritter. "There is a level of audacity associated with it all," she admits. "But it would have felt a hell of a lot more complicated getting someone else to direct it or act it. It was such a specific story and the characters were so delicate, it could have gone to a really bad place. I knew how it had to be done."

Palka wrote the lead for herself and the part of the video clerk for Ritter, whom she met nine years ago at school in New York. "It was very easy," she says, when I ask what it was like directing herself and her boyfriend in what are some pretty raw, difficult scenes. "Our producers let me do whatever I wanted, which was ridiculous seeing as I'd never made a feature film."

Palka left Glasgow at 17 and has lived in the States ever since. Growing up around the city's West End, she was obsessed with James Dean, wanted to be him in fact, and felt that heading to New York would be the best way to go about it. She sounds like she was a precocious child, unsurprising for someone who has an award-winning film under her belt by her mid-twenties.

Her Polish parents ran a wholesale bag company, Ralka Bags, in Glasgow. "They were funny shaped bags that kids would buy for school for £1.50," says Palka. She wasn't allowed to watch television, and was brought up on a strict diet of European arthouse cinema. "Years after Live Aid happened, my parents watched a video of it and phoned all their friends saying: 'Have you heard about this?'"

She cites Polish directors such as Krzysztof Kieslowski (Three Colours trilogy) and Andrej Wajda (Oscar nominated this year for Katyn) as major influences, but Scottish film was on the menu in Maryhill too. "We watched Gregory's Girl a lot," says Palka. "Peter Mullan and Ken Loach, too. I saw My Name Is Joe when I was 16 and it changed my life." She was so moved, in fact, that she wrote to Mullan, thanking him. To her great surprise, he wrote back.

"He was very nice," she says. "He taught me that there is no hierarchy in film, which I took to LA, where people don't even look at the waiter when they order." From Mullan she learnt to treat everyone on set the same, a lesson she rigorously practised while making Good Dick.

What does she make of Hollywood? "It's a very separate existence, and I don't think the world should be like that," she muses. "It's sometimes bizarre to me that I live there. No one takes the bus except poor Hispanic people and if you suggest catching one, people look at you as though you've said: 'Let's take a plane to Mars.'" Palka, for the record, takes the bus and is considering making a documentary on the subject.

She misses home and returns twice a year. "I'm proud of the films and the people who come out of there," she says. "Every time I come back, I start thinking about coming home permanently. But I suppose I can go back and forth. The world is small now, isn't it? You can do whatever you want." Coming from Palka, I believe it.

Good Dick is released October 3 www.gooddickthefilm.com