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       Eating that will only make you hungry.

       Fruit has more calories than chocolate.

       I guarantee those nuts will taste better if you eat just one.

       Anything you eat after six o’clock turns right to fat.

      No, Anna decided, she wasn’t going to do it. No couch. No snacks. Since Pinter, Chinski and Harms let her go five weeks ago, she’d spent the bulk of her time couching and snacking. Surfing the Web, actually. Presumably looking for jobs, but not really. Occasionally looking for love. Mostly just reading stuff. The day began with the refreshing of three tabs: The Daily Beast, New York magazine, and Gawker. From there, a kaleidoscope of options opened up, like snowmelt cutting innumerable channels down the side of a mountain. Hours later, she could end up anywhere: Deadline Hollywood, Art Fag City, or just somebody’s Tumblr, reading about that new underwear that prevents cameltoe. Meanwhile, she couldn’t help but notice, the things she always said she would do once she finally left Pinter weren’t getting done. They’d been crushed by freedom. Her freedom. The sheer quantity of time at her disposal and the weighty responsibility of her own untapped potential made doing any one thing impossible.

      She woke up in the mornings already exhausted by the possibilities. And, of course, the question arose of whether it was depression or merely situational. Leslie didn’t think it was depression. Leslie’s own postpartum depression had been serious, life-threatening. She knew all about the drugs and the research, the ins and outs of serotonin uptake, the interaction effects of different kinds of therapy, and she’d discussed all these things with Anna. Admittedly, Anna was kind of into the idea of it being depression. Then none of it would be her fault. She remembered something about her gap insurance covering mental health, and, of course, there would be the reassuring routine of regular appointments someplace uptown, which would get her out of the house. But gap insurance probably covered only a few months of sessions. Plus the medicine made you fat, didn’t it? It destroyed your sex drive. One was faced with a miserable choice between sad, sexed up, and thin or fat, sexless, and happy. Of course, Anna was already fat, definitely sexless, and probably sad. But taking the drugs would rob her of hope. They would slap a cruel ceiling on her Aspirational Future. If she could never be thin, and would always be sexless, how could she ever be happy? It was a thicket of catch-22 situations. But if the two hours she had spent in the future, working on late bloomers, had taught her anything, it was that living in hope is a beautiful thing. There was no better feeling. In fact, the feeling was even better than the doing, because when she stopped to think about it, Anna had to admit she didn’t much like to write. Ergo the unwritten thesis. And the thought of writing an entire book, ass-to-chair, day after day, sounded lonely. Worse than lonely, actually. It sounded fucking miserable. But being on the cusp of writing a book—or, better still, having already written a book—was something else. She’d gotten such a charge picturing herself telling Leslie, changing her Facebook status, moderating her lively new blog on LateBloomers.com as she crowdsourced suggestions for Late Bloomers, Volume II …

      Without quite realizing it, Anna was surfing. She had sorted the Amazon comments for Stråtchuk’s Late Bloomers so that the one-star reviews came up first, and a link in one of those comments had led her to another website about late bloomers, which was called Kurinji, after (the header announced) a rare Indian shrub that takes up to twelve years to bloom. Now Anna started reading the home page Q&A with Paul Gilman, a filmmaker from Los Angeles, who, at age forty-six(!), had become an impresario of the microcinema scene before going on to bigger and better things. Anna read through his bio and—no surprise—learned that the first forty-five years of Gilman’s life had been noticeably devoid of promise: a ho-hum upbringing in the exurbs of Kansas City (he didn’t even bother to clarify which one), a so-so college career, a drift from one forgettable white-collar job to another, an unsurprising failure to start a family. Now Gilman had a house in Brentwood. He had recently married a young actress (they’d met during his fellowship at Cannes) and was expecting twins.

      K: You are known for your improvisational style.

      GILMAN: I never use scripts. A script only imposes moral constraints on the actor. What I’m interested in is the uninhibited id. I take the actors and put them in a box. Then it’s up to them to break out of the box. Sometimes literally.

      K: Up until recently, you didn’t exactly work with actors in the technical sense.

      GILMAN: Right. Nonprofessionals.

      K: How did you find them?

      GILMAN: Craigslist. I would put up an ad for actors, no experience needed. I didn’t care about age or size or race. I didn’t ask for headshots. This was back when I still lived in Kansas City. It’s not like Los Angeles, where you put something like that out and—

      K: Everyone’s straight from the Formica factory.

      GILMAN (laughs): Right. These were real people. Actuaries. Teachers. Cooks. Whatever. People who needed the extra cash. I paid fifty a session. Sometimes I’d go to their house. Sometimes I’d tell them to meet me somewhere. The pay phone in front of the Cash America pawn. Or the loading dock behind the rug warehouse downtown. I’d drive over with my camera and see them waiting for me on the street. Then I’d drive around the block a couple of times, figuring out how they’d fit into the scene. After that, I’d make up a story on the spot.

      K: Both Calista at the Cum ’n’ Go and Rurik, Rurik, Traffic Cop have this really visceral, really frenetic quality. How did you edit those movies?

      GILMAN: I edited all of my films in-camera.

      K: Just record, then stop?

      GILMAN: Exactly. Stop or pause. It is what it is. And since I’d never met the actors before, anything could happen. My one rule is that while I’m shooting, I won’t talk. This one woman I hired, she worked at the hospital and came to meet me straight from work, still in her scrubs. I told her, “Here’s the story: you’re an EMT and you just responded to a call about a car accident that involved your husband. His back was broken in two places. He sustained internal injuries and the doctors have no idea whether he’s going to live. You leave the hospital. You’re on your way back to your car and you can’t remember where you left it. You’re lost in the parking lot”—we were in a parking lot—“and you call your mother on your cell to tell her what happened. Action!”

      K: This sounds like Clean Rite Meltdown.

      GILMAN: It ended up that way—

      K: Spoiler alert.

      GILMAN (laughs): Right. The woman wouldn’t do the scene. She wouldn’t do any of it. She just started screaming at me that she didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about. Her face right up in the camera, calling me every kind of name. Went on about how she knew “the scam I was running” and her boyfriend had my license plate number, blah blah. Amazing stuff. The whole movie turned out to be just that one continuous shot of her face—

      K: Clean Rite showed at Sundance?

      GILMAN: It did. It’s in MoMA’s permanent collection now.

      K: You’ve certainly come a long way. Can you say something about working with Johnny Depp?

      GILMAN: Johnny is just an amazingly brilliant guy. Amazingly brilliant.

      K: Any last words for aspiring filmmakers?

      GILMAN: Get a camera. Let the rest take care of itself.

      When Anna finished reading, she noticed it was dark. It was dark and now she was hungry. She got herself a bag of rice cakes and a tub of salsa and went back to the computer, where she searched Gilman on IMDb, and read the Variety reviews for Calista at the Cum ’n’ Go and Rurik, Rurik, Traffic Cop and Clean Rite Meltdown. When the rice cakes were gone, Anna switched to vegetable chips (baked, not fried) and googled Gilman’s wife for no reason. And when her roommate, Brie, came home from kickball practice, it was well after six and Anna’s food was turning into fat. She was watching Can’t

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