Reginald Harkema, Leo-nominated director of A Girl Is A Girl (also up for best picture) looks upon the honor with ‘begrudging enthusiasm.’

‘The Leos are upsetting to me because editing didn’t get a nomination,’ he says. ‘My film was all about acting and editing and neither the actors nor the editing got nominations.’

Both editing and acting came heavily into play in preparation of the script, which concerns one man’s search for love. The script for A Girl Is A Girl, Harkema says, ‘went through a number of drafts, but always with the intention of keeping it very loose, because we wanted to work with actors in rehearsal.’

The month immediately ahead of shooting was dedicated to rehearsals, during which time the actors improvised around the script.

‘It helped them understand their characters. We’d give every actor an objective, not tell the other actors what those objectives were and then have them improvise around their objective. We’d take notes and critique what they did in the improvisation and maybe take a line [from the improvisation and incorporate it into the script]. We started to get an idea of what the characters were all about and it gave us a starting place to jump off from.’

With the script thus ‘enhanced,’ improvisation also came into play while filming, with, for example, an extra unexpectedly coming up to bum a cigarette from an actor ‘and the actors were so well prepared that they just rolled with it.’

Harkema, who has been a film editor for the last decade, found this improvising gave him material that he could work with. ‘Improvisation is the point where drama most approaches documentary – and the foundation of documentary is editing.’

Harkema is currently at work on Bang, a digital video feature collaboration with two other directors, Carl Bessai and James Dunnison, that involves each shooting his own digital feature with intersecting characters. ‘Each of us is doing a video feature of each character – and we cast it and concentrate on that character in our digital feature. We all contribute ideas.’

This experimental feature gives Harkema a welcome opportunity to play around with structures. ‘I approach it like I’m making a bad movie, because then I can try out anything I want, because I won’t be disappointed.’