RIDING LIFE

Eight years after leaving the seminary, Cornelia Durye Moore explores themes of family, home, and redemption in the San Juan Islands

By Cheryl Cowan

“I hope you like cats!” These are the first words you are likely to hear from Cornelia Duryée Moore when you walk into her home. Her friends call her Corrie. As a storyteller, she draws heavily on her personal experiences, as well as an almost spiritual devotion to film.

Moore’s first feature length The Dark Horse is the story of Dana, a Seattle ballet teacher who returns home to Orcas Island to help with her father’s illness. In the process she binds her parents and siblings together in a common struggle to save the family farm.

“I’m very moved by families losing their land,” she says. “It’s happening all over America.” As if to underscore the point, she was able to use the film’s main location, a plot of nearly 200 acres, because it was owned by a family putting their home on the market. “It just was heartbreaking, because their kids had grown up there, and they had no home anymore. That’s just a primal human experience of being thrown out of Eden. It’s in all of us, that sadness and that longing for home.”

The Dark Horse deals with challenging subjects, such as Alzheimer’s disease, autism, sibling rivalry, financial loss, and the main character’s personal plight of re-finding herself while dealing with the problems of her family around her. Within the struggles, there is ubiquitous hope, spirit, and perseverance.

Moore says there are bits and pieces of her loved ones in all the characters, although none them are exact representations of anyone specific. The character who most closely resembles an actual person in her life is the father figure, Fiach. Like Fiach, Moore’s father was an inventor who struggled for 8 years with Alzheimer’s, and received constant love and care giving from her mother. “The love story between Fiach and Gwen is very much my parents’ love story,” she says.

“One day Madeleine L’Engle handed her a stack of her un-produced plays and said, ‘I want you to turn these into screenplays for me… and you’re the only living playwright that I trust.”

There were moments during shooting that Moore says were emotional for her to watch, including some of the main character’s inner changes. “The theme of not being able to do something you love, and trying to find something else that will still feed you, that’s totally mine.”

Moore was herself a professional dancer and actor from the age of 18. Later in life, she was suddenly injured and couldn’t dance any longer, so she progressed into choreography, and did theatre work. She and her husband, Terry, are two of the co-founders of the Seattle Shakespeare Festival, now called the Seattle Shakespeare Company.

“That was my real training as both a producer and a performer, even though I had professional training in New York, and that’s where I honed my directing skills too,” she says. She also started a company called Leap of Faith Productions, where she did fringe theatre, new plays, and continued honing her skills working with actors.

“I love working with actors, it’s my favorite thing except breathing!” she adds. “And I love match making, which is what [casting] is. Setting up talent with directors and making that happen.”

The shift from theatre to film began in 1999 and involved her godmother, writer Madeleine L’Engle. Moore worked as L’Engle’s personal assistant for 8 years in New York City in her twenties. One day L’Engle handed Moore a stack of her un-produced plays, never seen before, and said, “I want you to turn these into screenplays for me. I want to make them into movies… and you’re the only living playwright that I trust.”

Moore immediately dropped out of the seminary where she was studying to become a minister, and started screenwriting school, then later film school. “You have to be called to do this, like a call to the priesthood. I believe this is a high calling. And it’s very hard, and having been on both sides of the camera, I know how much harder it is to be crew than to be talent.”

Principal photography on her first feature film as a director came 8 years after her discussions with L’Engle. The Dark Horse had a five-week shooting schedule in May and June of 2006, with three of those weeks on Orcas Island.

“I love everybody on Orcas Island so much,” she says. Not only was the farm location generously donated by the family for three full weeks of shooting, but four other locations were donated as well by other families, ” because they understood the theme of the movie. They were all so sad about the big places going away, divided up into smaller places. It’s hard on the water supply. A lot of people were moved and touched by the story.”

Cornelia Durye Moore behind the camera

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CREW BOX: The Dark Horse
http://www.thedarkhorsemovie.com/
Writer/Director: Cornelia Duryée Moore
Producer: Larry Estes
Director of Photography: Neil Holcomb
Editor: Ben Dobyns