The Work Is The Language

After a sold-out Dances With Films screening, Eve Annenberg’s documentary brings the women behind Juilliard’s legend into focus.

The sold-out screening at Dances With Films had the feel of a reunion without the name tags. Not a red-carpet event so much as a room full of people who still believe in craft — the kind that gets passed down in corrections, not compliments. The film was The Work… A Conversation, directed by Eve Annenberg, and it offers a quiet correction of its own: audiences know Juilliard’s graduates by name, but rarely the women who shaped them.

Annenberg’s documentary centers on three teachers and administrators whose influence on modern acting stretches across decades and continents: Eve Shapiro, a beloved Juilliard acting teacher; Elizabeth Smith, trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama and a former RADA instructor who later taught at Juilliard; and Margot Harley, John Houseman’s right hand and the force behind The Acting Company. Their students include Patti LuPone, Kevin Kline, Laura Linney, Bradley Whitford, Wendell Pierce, Lorraine Toussaint, Michael Beach, Alan Rickman, Robin Williams, Adam Driver, Anthony Mackie, and many more.

The film wasn’t supposed to be a feature. “OMG yes,” Annenberg says, asked whether the project diverged from her original plan. “I thought this was a twenty minute short! A Christmas card for Eve Shapiro, my wonderful mentor at Juilliard and beyond.” She imagined a snapshot of Shapiro and her two best friends — “all some degree of British, all having arrived in New York in or before the swinging sixties, about being young, driven, and gay in the big city.” Then reality asserted itself. “Boy was I wrong! First of all, for women who live and breathe theater, they don’t really talk about ‘their feelings.’ They were obsessed with the same themes that have always obsessed them: work.”

That fixation becomes the documentary’s spine. Rather than forcing confession or nostalgia, Annenberg lets these women speak in the language they’ve always trusted: rigor, discipline, the daily practice of making someone better. The film becomes less a history of Juilliard than a portrait of tutelage — how an artistic lineage is built and how it endures.

Annenberg’s entry point was personal and pandemic-specific. “Oh, well, it was the pandemic and I thought about Eve,” she says. Shapiro was living in a “cavernous Upper West Side apartment,” and Annenberg checked in when few people were going anywhere. While helping put things in order, she noticed something that startled her: Shapiro was getting daily calls from Smith and Harley. “I hadn’t even known they were friends!” Annenberg admits she’d been terrified of Smith for years. “Even decades past Juilliard I was so scared… that if she was ringing my cell phone I would rush to the sink and brush my teeth before picking up.” Yet what she witnessed was tenderness — a trio of older women, fiercely attuned to one another.

The shoot came together quickly. “So I called Wolfgang Held (now ASC!!!) and Joe Foley and Branislav Bala and set up the fastest shoot I have ever set up,” she says. “Because… we were all in masks and everything was fraught and time seemed of the essence.” Then the film faced its hardest turn. Shapiro was 90 when cameras rolled. “And the week we shot, she became aphasic,” Annenberg says. “She simply could not speak with her usual indelible quality.” It’s the kind of moment a lesser documentary would sensationalize. Here, it becomes a structural necessity: former students speak for her, carrying the history she can’t fully articulate.

The chorus of alumni gives the film its emotional voltage — not just the famous names, but the specificity of what they remember. Annenberg says her biggest surprise was Patti LuPone. “I was nervous to meet and interview her. And then I was blown away by her absolute truth telling… her sharing that she was traumatized by her early training and how she felt.” The film doesn’t prosecute Juilliard, but it doesn’t sanitize it either. What emerges is a portrait of excellence with a cost: the devotion, the humiliation, the lasting lessons people carry like scars and talismans.

Annenberg nearly walked away from the project. “I’d been at the film for about two years and I was about to give up,” she says. Then she sent a small trailer to Tim Monich, a former Juilliard teacher and “Dialect Coach to the Stars.” Monich, she recalls, called “screaming” with enthusiasm and pushed her toward a more experienced editor. That led her to Scott Brock, Additional Editor on Killers of the Flower Moon and The Irishman, who ultimately cut the film.

If The Work… A Conversation sounds like it’s only for actors, it isn’t. Annenberg recalls an early audience in a small town — “no actors in it” — that voted it Best Documentary Feature. One couple told her, “We just came because we are so damn old. And they’re old, and they’re still firing on all cylinders!” It’s a line that captures the film’s strange power: it’s about performance, but it’s also about endurance.

Asked where she wants the film to land, Annenberg is blunt. “This is, for better or worse, a ‘legacy’ film,” she says. It highlights people “who may otherwise not have been seen on the big screen.” In a culture that loves the myth of raw talent, Annenberg’s documentary insists on something less romantic and more true: behind every famous actor is a room, a teacher, and the work — relentless, unglamorous, and finally given its due.