Jane Anderson is the director of the upcoming film The Prize Winner of Defiance Ohio. The film stars Julianne Moore and Woody Harrelson as a couple in the 50's and 60's with ten children trying desperately to make ends meet.

The story is based on an actual family and was adapted for the screen by Anderson from the memoirs of Terry "Tuffy" Ryan, one of the daughters featured in the film. Julianne Moore plays Evelyn Ryan, a woman prodigious in the skilled contesting of the era. Ryan was often challenged with coming up with clever limericks for a commercial to help the family survive another month. Harrelson's portrayal of Kelly Ryan as a drunken father to the children is nuanced and effective.

Read on to learn of Woody and lady directors, Robert Zemeckis' choice to avoid a gaggle of kids, and the Oscar chances of The Prize Winner of Defiance Ohio.

Question: The Prize Winner of Defiance Ohio has Oscar written all over it.

Jane Anderson: Who knows, there are so many good films that come out in the fall.

Question: Only two women ever nominated for best director and none have ever won.

Jane: Don't hex it! I'd love a nom. Girls can win for best screenplay though, that's considered okay. Jane Campion was nominated...

Question: And Sofia Coppola. The Piano and Lost in Translation. She probably would have won if not for the third Lord of the Rings. And now with North Country it might be two female nominations this year.

Jane: She's (Niki Caro) a beautiful director. I hope we both get noms. I've been nominated for bunches of Emmy's and won once, but once you sit through the show a couple times you realize the cliché, it's an honor to be nominated, is so... just to make that cut. Because then it's up to politics and fate.

I hate saying which is best, because how can you compare Lord of the Rings to Lost in Translation? Every movie out there speaks to different people. Every filmmaker hates the season because if you're not nominated you hate it, if you are you're an emotional wreck. No one in the audience is enjoying themselves. Three quarters of the people are pissed off, I just love it.

Question: What would the difference be between Emmy and Oscar?

Jane: Oh, huge. You don't get the respect from the community without a big feature film.

Question: Let's get into the film. Can you talk about Julianne Moore, had you seen her in Far From Heaven (another '50s housewife role)?

Jane: No because both the characters in Far From Heaven and The Hours are very different from Evelyn Ryan. I think the reason she's done so many roles in the '50s is because by nature the '50s was an era that was rich in stories about women. It was World War II. All the women were on their own, and then they had to get back in the house. Then in the '60s everyone went raging out.

What I love about this story, was I'd never seen a piece of literature that deali with a housewife in the '50s that didn't go stark raving mad. If you look at The Hours, the part Julianne plays is a woman who ran away, therefore her child grew up to be emotionally damaged and jumped out of a window. Evelyn Ryan, she holds it together. She's heroic. She was a very intelligent woman, spirited, and had the potential to be anything in this world.

She consciously chose not to fall into despair. She knew she had to get every one of those kids out of that house intact. I've never seen a character like that. It's a hard character to write and to play because you're walking the line between optimism and realism. Optimists we tend to dismiss as people who are in denial or naïve, but she was neither of those. But it didn't destroy her. Terry Ryan who wrote the memoir is very much like her mom, she's smart and funny and nothing fazes her. Everything to her has the potential to delight, that's a very Buddhist way of looking at life. It's one of the hardest things to do. It's a lot easier and a lot more fun to walk around being pissed off.

Question: Laura Dern was incredible in her fifteen minutes…

Jane: Just a little cameo, but her light. All those ladies you could dismiss as hokey, but they weren't. They were smart. Terry said something interesting, there were hundreds of these groups (of women contesters) all over the country and they all had really wacky names. Really corny. She said she suspects they gave themselves these corny names so no one would bother them. So no one would feel threatened. The other thing about these groups is they were competing with each other but they supported each other.

Question: We spoke to Woody and evidently he needed some convincing to join the cast?

Jane: I went to the wilds of Maui! He said, "Well Jane, you'll have to come and visit me." Really it was gaining his trust so he knew I had the best intentions for the character. On the page my scripts are lean; I don't like to put tons of descriptives because I think it gets in the way of the actors. I think Kelly is such a tricky part, when you read him on the page he looks like a jerk. But it was my intention and Woody's intention to make sure you saw the other side of him. He loves chick directors now, he says he's only going to work with women from now on.

Question: His character isn't a bad guy, he's does some bad things.

Jane: He was the opposite of Evelyn. We have two choices in our life, a crappy thing happens to you, you have the choice to view that as a positive or as something that will define you for the rest of your life. And he allowed that to beat him down. Evelyn saw everything as an opportunity to enhance her life. I don't admire Kelly for that but my heart breaks for him. Woody really did a beautiful job. He was the eleventh child.

Traditionally the villains are all bad and it doesn't interest me anymore because I think villains become that way because of a horrible hurt. Especially now, we create more villains by perceiving. Black and white thinking is so dangerous. I think we're going to see more films dealing with an Eastern philosophy. That's what happens in a culture.

Question: The art always responds…

Jane: What's interesting is Spielberg who invented the friendly alien (E.T.) twenty years ago did the evil alien (War of the Worlds) this summer and that shows how our country feels right now. Even though it was about aliens I thought he brilliantly portrayed what happens when a society gets paranoid and falls apart. My film is about seeking out the light in a dark situation.

Question: What about coming to the book, adapting the screenplay, how did you get involved?

Jane: Robert Zemeckis bought the rights and called me to adapt it for him to direct. I said absolutely. I had read the book independently and fell in love with it. I worked on the screenplay for two years and went off and directed my other film in the meantime because I couldn't solve it, I couldn't get it. Finally I got it.

When we finished Zemeckis said "I think we've got it, but I'm not going to direct it, I don't want to deal with all those kids." He was in the middle of Polar Express and his fascination was with pushing the envelope technically. He was going to have someone else direct it and I asked if I could and he said go ahead. It was one of the kindest turns anyone in the business has done for me, I'm infinitely grateful.

Question: What was working with a major studio like versus HBO?

Jane: To me there was no difference artistically. I was making feature films for HBO. There's a little more fear, studios are more fearful because they don't have a guaranteed audience. I had Zemeckis to back me up and the reason this film got made was because he was there watching my back, being the intermediary with the studios. I was dealing with a lot of fear, but everybody's caught up now.

Question: Can you tell me what The Wife is about?

Jane: It's a novel by Meg Wolitzer, New York, I'm going back to urban New York. It's about the wife of a famous novelist on the level of a Phillip Roth. A giant of literature and a bastard. They've been married many years she's subsumed her own literary career to his and now she's going to do something about it. It's with New Line and we're starting soon.