Julia Stiles

My grandmother took me to a lot of theater. I was exposed to performance quite a bit - everything from Broadway to off-Broadway and dance and music as well. I was very lucky that way. It was a very rich childhood.

I'd worked at a small town newspaper, and I was thinking of all the strange stories that I had seen float through the newsroom in my time there that were dismissed as kind of amusing curiosities. Somehow from that I got to this idea of an eccentric alcoholic who built a lighthouse in the woods.