The following interview is part of the six-part series profiling the 2007 Atlanta Film Festival Screenplay Competition winners. Here screenwriter Jennifer Deaton speaks about her feature Pentimenti, a look at how three individuals all deal with the loss of one woman they love.

"I think I've always been a writer, you know a kid scribbling stories in spiral notebooks and so forth," Jennifer Deaton starts. "But I remember one moment distinctly in my acting class at Northwestern-- we were working on (Samuel Beckett), and my teacher said that as a person I had too much faith to really 'get' Beckett or something like that, and this comment kind of irritated me cuz I guess I wasn't all that interested in 'getting' Beckett after all.

"It struck me that I'd much rather be putting my own thoughts into other people's mouths than trying to voice something I didn't believe in or care about. I stayed an acting major because I learned so much about drama and character and human behavior and conflict, but I was also able to plug into the school's Creative Writing for the Media Program which propelled me in the direction of Los Angeles and screenwriting.

"My journey with Pentimenti has definitely been a long process. The idea first came to me when I was working in my very first job as an exec assistant in Hollywood, which is to say, I was crying a lot at work! There was this fire escape that I would escape to for a breath of fresh sanity, and it was one of my lunch breaks on that fire escape that the idea just came to me. I scribbled out the premise on a single piece of paper. It just came to me that quickly--in 1994. I wasn't sure whether the story was supposed to be a novel or a screenplay, but since I was working with screenplays all day long, I figured writing it as a novel would be a break from my 'dayjob.' So I took a few, five, years to write it as a novel late nights and early mornings and finished it but basically put it on a shelf for a few years and got distracted paying the bills by working in film development.

"When I turned my focus again to writing, I wrote other scripts, got an agent, and thought maybe I should see what the story looks like as a screenplay. So as an experiment, I whipped out an adaptation of the novel, and it got selected for the Outfest Lab which was a tremendous morale boost, working in the penthouse suite of the Chateau Marmont with the other writers and mentors. I am equally excited to have this opportunity to work with other writers and mentors in Atlanta, and at the Margaret Mitchell House and 14th Street Playhouse no less. Growing up in Stone Mountain, this part of Atlanta always held a kind of glamorous mystique for me...

"As for what Pentimenti is about thematically, it seems to be about different things for different people. I see it as a story of a woman trying to be known after her death, that the individuals - even her own spouse, mother, or friend - couldn't know her wholly because of their own limitations or prejudices. So after her death, these three very different people are forced to come together and complete the picture for each other, and that process enables them to come to terms with their grief and with the mistakes they may have made and find peace.

"You could also see it this way - that each of the three people has some fear of being known too - the mother is ashamed of her daughter's sexuality and doesn't want to be known as a 'failure' of a mother; Joe is afraid of being known by a woman because the one time he did love--Annie--it hurt too much. And in a similar way, Naomi is afraid of being known by God because as a gay woman she associates the spiritual side of herself with the pain of religious rejection. So it's Annie's courage, after her death at least, to make herself known as a daughter, a lover, a woman of faith that enables them all to face their fears.

"On a more personal level, I look back at the time in my life when I first started writing (Pentimenti), and I realize that unconsciously I was consoling myself in the writing. My parents and I had a very difficult time for several years when I came out to them, a very difficult time. I think in retrospect the writing was a place for me to express this grief through another character and also to consider the alternative: As Annie never risked being real with her parents in life, she lost them anyway. As hard as being real with my parents was, I knew it was the better choice.

"I am really looking forward to this weekend as an opportunity to roll up my sleeves and take the script to the next level, then finally to stop writing it. I dream of being on a set where a team of creative people is working together to make it happen. I dream of hearing actors embody the characters, of seeing them on a screen thirty feet high."

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