Paula: I bet you had to eat a lot of shit to get where you are.
Julie: It was my choice. Nobody forced me.
Paula: Still can't be easy though.
Julie: Everybody eats shit. It's just a question of degree.
Paula: Or how much you can take.

The feature debut of writer and director Patrick Stettner, The business of strangers is a taut drama about a successful businesswoman and her new assistant stuck overnight in an airport hotel, locked into a subtle game of control and manipulation. A bristling fugue on power infused with a dark humor, the film stars Stockard Channing, Julia Stiles and Frederick Weller. With tightly drawn characters and textured performances, the film explores the constantly shifting balance of power between the middle-aged executive and the headstrong young woman, as they strive to gain the upper hand over the course of the night.

On her way from the airport to a high stakes presentation, corporate climber Julie Styron (Stockard Channing) gets a call on her mobile phone that her firm's C.E.O. is flying in for an unexpected meeting with her. Anticipating the worst, she immediately sets up a preemptive meeting with headhunter Nick Harris (Frederick Weller) to line up her next position. After wrapping up a botched presentation, Julie furiously dismisses her new technical assistant, young company underling Paula Murphy (Julia Stiles), who arrived late from the airport with Julie's presentation materials. When Julie returns to the airport hotel to unwind, she runs into Paula at the hotel bar. Over a conciliatory drink, Paula swiftly turns the tables on Julie; playing off of the career woman's earlier actions, Paula coolly calls into question the choices Julie has made in life.

As the night progresses, the two women get to know each other, in the spa, on the dance floor, and over drinks in Julie's executive suite. When Nick shows up at Julie's room for a friendly nightcap, their game takes a dark turn, and he becomes the unsuspecting pawn in their complex battle of power, authority and wits.

An IFC Films release of an i5 Films production, The business of strangers was written and directed by Patrick Stettner. Produced by Susan Stover and Robert Nathan of i5, the film was executive produced by i5's Scott McGehee and David Siegel, with Ramsey Fong as an associate producer. Shot by Teodoro Maniaci and edited by Keiko Deguchi, the production was designed by Dina Goldman, with Alexander Lasarenko serving as composer and Eugene Gearty acting as sound designer.

Robert: You're ready to run this company and you're going to do a great job. Are you okay? This is supposed to be good news.
Julie: Yes. I'm very happy.
Robert: You should celebrate.
Julie: I will.
Robert: What are you going to do?
Julie: I'll think of something

Writer and director Patrick Stettner wrote his feature debut The business of strangers on the heels of his well-received short film "Flux," which served as his thesis while studying at Columbia University. Based on a short story by Alison Baker, starring Allison Janney, "Flux" is a finely observed story of a middle-aged woman who gains a new perspective on her own mortality after an unusual encounter with a strange man. The short gave Stettner the opportunity to demonstrate his faculty for insightful characterization, even within the confines of a brisk, fourteen minutes.

Rather than retread the same ground for his next project, Stettner wanted to create an intimate story about a middle-aged woman experiencing a very different sort of revelatory encounter. With The business of strangers, Stettner follows Julie Styron as she breaks through the glass ceiling and confronts the choices she's made throughout her career over the course of an intense evening with a young woman.

In writing the script, Stettner drew inspiration from the corporate culture he had encountered as a temp in New York City. Says Stettner, "One of the few advantages of being a temp is that you are invisible -- persona non grata -- a witness to conversations not usually afforded the rest of the permanent staff. This gave me the opportunity to observe the subtle rituals and complex games of power in the business arena." In particular, Stettner was intrigued by the older female executives and wanted to consider without judgment the choices they had made in order to succeed in such a competitive context. Stettner says, "I was curious about the personal and psychological trials these trailblazers had to endure, working in an environment that was, at times, openly hostile. It's a story not many films explore, but one that women of a certain generation experienced."

More interested in developing a story about the personal dynamics of power than an extension of boardroom rivalry, Stettner carefully crafted a character to serve as a counterpoint to Julie -- Paula Murphy -- adding layers to the subtle power dialectic between the two women. In writing Paula's character, Stettner created another strong willed woman who could challenge Julie on a more intimate level -- someone who was not Julie's equal in the company hierarchy, but who could nonetheless manipulate their interactions based on her own cunning.

At the same time, Stettner wanted to explore how a woman of Paula's generation -- a generation that has benefited from the older generation's pioneering work -- might react to a woman like Julie Styron, who must seem something of an anachronism to the younger set.

Says Stettner, "I was very interested in exploring how power was a central theme for the characters: power manifested through gender, economics, class, youth and sexual prowess... [to explore] each characters' ability to control the situation and how they perceived their authority in relation to one another. Each character had different tools at their disposal -- psychological and otherwise -- to restore their power when the other seemed to gain the edge."

Nick: How'd it go?
Julie: Just fine. I've just been made Chief Executive Officer.
Nick: No shit? Congrats. Hey, we can leverage this for that Pacific Net job.
Julie: I thought you said they were about to go belly up.
Nick: With all due respect, I wasn't talking to CEO material before.

Enhancing the story with the barbs of black comedy, Stettner introduced the character of Nick Harris, Julie's uneasy ally in the jockeying of rank in the corporate world. As with the other two characters, Stettner sought to balance the headhunter's flaws with his more sympathetic qualities, to add to the uncertainty of Julie and Paula's questionable actions against him.

Explains Stettner, "I wanted there to be some suspense with the Nick character; I wanted people to be unsure about whether he could've been involved with what Paula accuses him of, or whether he was, in fact, a victim, himself. I wanted people to be ambivalent about what [Julie and Paula] are doing to him. Yes, Nick is a little unsavory, but is he truly innocent? What is he capable of? That was a fine line I wanted to play with -- the ambiguity where we as an audience are forced to look at our own responses to moral questions based on how we react to the characters and their actions."

Paula: I hate how the hotel windows never open. They don't want you to breathe real air.
Julie: Or jump.

Finally, Stettner chose the perfect setting, the ubiquitous airport hotel, for the surreal evening of revelation and confrontation, a location where the characters felt insulated from the outside world. Stettner explains, " For me, airport hotels are a strange no man's land, a transitory island, contained and controlled in a biosphere of sorts. It's a place where travelers have the illusion of total anonymity with the confidence that any social contact is only momentary, allowing them to do things they normally wouldn't."

In writing the script for The business of strangers, Stettner worked closely with producer Susan Stover who had produced his short. Impressed by the filmmaker's visual style and flair for storytelling, Stover was firmly committed to producing Stettner's next endeavor. In the process of pursuing a few other projects with Stover, the writer/director mentioned his story idea for The business of strangers to Stover in 1999.

Says Stover, "It really is a story about the power struggle between two different generations. It isn't simply that Paula takes for granted the opportunities Julie's generation has created for her. In fact, it is as a result of Julie's trailblazing that Paula now has a fuller range of choices, including the freedom to question why Julie fought so hard and sacrificed so much for a career that ultimately does not seem to make her particularly happy. Instead of being appreciative of Julie's victories, Paula holds a mirror up to what normally would be her mentor and makes Julie question her choices."

A 1998 Silverman fellow at Sundance, Stover presented the script herself to the lab's director, Michelle Satter, who read it and promptly invited Stettner to workshop the script during the 1999 session. At the lab, Stettner met Scott McGehee and David Siegel, who were there with a script of their own. McGehee and Siegel, along with partner Robert Nathan, were announcing their formation of an independent production and finance company i5 Films that year at the film festival, which immediately follows the lab. A few months later, after a reading of the script in Los Angeles, the partners invited Stettner and Stover to their headquarters in San Francisco to discuss making the film. By then, i5 Films was commencing production on its inaugural slate of films.

When the filmmakers met with the i5 partners, however, it was truly a meeting of the minds, both in terms of the creative aspects of the project as well as the practical ones. The filmmakers were impressed by i5's commitment to the production value of the film, especially in their resolve to stand by the project during the critical casting process. Even though they had offers to make the film with a large studio, Stettner and Stover were quickly convinced that making the film with i5 would insure its completion as the film they had originally conceptualized. Upon deciding to work with i5, Nathan came on board as a producer, with McGehee and Siegel as executive producers.

Comments Nathan, "Since our formation in 1999, i5 has produced three films in two years, including this one, and we're becoming known for our ability to maximize the production value of our films. We're always looking for projects of this caliber that we can finance and produce. As filmmakers, we are not only looking to provide financing for a project, but we also want to feel we can bring something creative to it."

Julie: Fuck you, you privileged little brat. I've seen a thousand girls just like you. Rich families, all the opportunities, and you throw it all away. You put on this act, disaffected, obnoxious, talented but undiscovered. You know what? You all end up with your sensitive husbands, pregnant, coming back, pleading for a job and making my coffee.

Says Nathan, "It's very easy to look at the story and come away with an overly simplified sociopolitical interpretation of what's going on, but Patrick undermines these easy interpretations throughout the film, and instead emphasizes the complexity of the characters. Even the seemingly transparent character of Nick is a good illustration of this. He appears easy to peg at first. Ultimately, though, you're not sure where you stand with Nick; you're not sure whether to be sympathetic because he was taken advantage of or angry because he still might have been capable of such acts. On the other hand, you are not entirely certain of the degree to which Julie and Paula are aware of Nick's guilt or innocence. Again, the easy interpretations are undermined, and, in the end, we are left with a very personal story about the lives of these characters."