Michelle Lovretta
Newmarket
May 26, 2008 05:01 PM
Simone Joseph, Staff Writer
When Michelle Lovretta was four, she wrote poetry; full stanzas and rhyming couplets.
“I was very bad at everything else,” she says.
She had to dictate her work to her mother before she could write on her own.
At 11, she won a poetry and art competition called Shankar’s International Children’s Competition.
Ms Lovretta’s writing came easily from within. She would feel a pattern, a cadence, and then she would go to her mother and say: “I need to write something.”
Ms Lovretta was born in Agincourt but moved to Newmarket just before Grade 2. She was stubbornly confident about her work.
“I hated being edited. I hated if my mother tried changing anything.”
She went to Dallas with her family in her early childhood and came back with cowboy boots and an accent. In Dallas, she was asked: “Do you have a polar bear or an igloo?”
Back in Canada, she was asked, “Do you have horses or know cowboys?”
While Ms Lovretta loved writing as a hobby, she never thought it could turn into a career.
She did not like studying English the formal, conventional way.
“Clinically dissecting works never appealed to me,” she now says.
Ms Lovretta loved biology, robotics and was thinking of being a zookeeper.
In Grade 11, she kept thinking of brand new ridiculous careers to go into.
The career-finding tests she took said she should be working outdoors.
Some of her favourite classes were in the sciences, but she was hopeless in math, receiving a mark of 14 per cent on a mid-term exam.
“I hated math, math hated me back,” she said.
Her mother told her she was speaking nonsense when she mentioned the careers she was considering, including obscure science jobs such as a beekeeper.
“Don’t care about impressing us. Do what you love,” her mother said.
This is what she needed to hear.
“I needed someone to give me permission to look at something potentially hopeless,” Ms Lovretta said.
Taking writers craft in Dan de Souza’s class at Sacred Heart Catholic High School was a turning point for her.
She received criticism in a communal setting for the first time, getting comments from other students. Mr. de Souza explained the potential paths in a writing career. Up until then, when Ms Lovretta thought of writing, she borrowed from someone else’s plan, thinking she would write and have a separate professional career.
She thought she could follow the same kind of path as renowned writer John Grisham did, being a lawyer first and then writing about lawyers.
But Mr. de Souza planted a seed in her brain that maybe a writing career on its own was in her future. It took time to take root and she was scared.
Ms Lovretta had considered writing to be a hobby and thought it was arrogant to pursue it.
“I did not want to be rejected,” she said.
Another major influence? Her aunt Bea Tinney worked for a film distributor in Canada and used to give her tubes filled with posters.
Lying on her bed, Ms Lovretta would think of stories for these posters of people producing stories for real. Following high school, she went on to attend the University of Windsor’s creative writing program.
She loved watching movies more than watching TV, so it is no surprise when she went to a movie with a friend one day, she turned to her friend during a movie trailer and said, “I am going to school tomorrow and I am switching to film”.
Ms Lovretta switched to a three-year film course at York University, now explaining, “I am given to impulsive moments that have been unconsciously pre-thought out.”
Ms Lovretta is truly an amalgamation of her parents.
She got her ambition and work ethic from her father, Michael, and some of her storytelling talent from her mother, Roberta.
Her mother “told the best stories”, Ms Lovretta said, many of which were about growing up.
As a child, she remembers feeling like she could not wait until she grew up and had stories to tell of her own.
“I am interested in the human psyche of the character, how we impact each other when we hit against each other,” Ms Lovretta said.
Her father went to the Ontario College of Arts where he pursued fine arts, got interested in graphic arts and became a businessman.
Ms Lovretta has two older sisters — Laura and Lianne.
She has parents who acknowledged her talent, supporting her whenever they could and looking for places to enter writing competitions.
Halfway through her term at York University, she approached film teacher Amnon Buckbinder and asked his opinion on leaving school without a degree.
He told her it is about your ability, your drive, what you have learned, not the degree you have.
But Ms Lovretta, then in her early 20s, is from a family that is big on formal education.
“The idea you do not need a degree was wonderful and scary,” she said.
She worked on writing a script that ended up being turned into a feature film, The Fishing Trip, produced by Camelia Frieberg and directed by Mr. Buckbinder, her film teacher.
“I slept and ate that script,” she says.
She worked on this script for the rest of the term.
She was thinking of leaving school and felt this abyss of fear, which felt like failure.
She worried she would be unemployed.
Then, she received an envelope, a contract to buy the film.
“I was a kid from Newmarket. It was a mystery how to enter the field. I was too stupid and naive to know the odds.
“I was not fully aware of the crazy, unlikely thing I was trying to pursue. Ignorance is bliss,” she said.
The Fishing Trip garnered a Genie Award nomination for best supporting actress, was on the Cannes Film Festival short list in 1999, opened the Toronto Film Festival and was nominated for two Geminis.
Ms Lovretta started writing her second script, but was impatient.
She wanted to be self-supporting by 30 and if she did not become a self-supporting writer by 30, this was a hobby and not meant to be, she told herself.
She moved to North York with her family, living down the street from the Norman Jewison Canadian Film Centre, where her former teacher, Mr. Buckbinder, was a resident.
She was accepted to do three months of full-time learning there.
Mr. Buckbinder recommended she do TV since he thought she was too impatient to do movies.
The Fishing Trip was the longest thing she had ever done.
Before that, she had only worked on school essays.
She started coming to Texas three years ago.
She came to Texas for three months to check it out and met her husband, Chris Carothers.
Ms Lovretta, now 34, has many writing credits to her name, including executive producer of a TV show called Instant Star and a TV documentary, To Be Fat Like Me, which involved a physically fit teenager donning a fat suit as part of a film project to experience the hardships facing overweight high school students.
She was also one of the writers on Relic Hunter, in which Tia Carrere starred as a university professor and black belt who globetrots after lost, stolen and rumoured-of artifacts and antiquities.