Brit Marling Feature in C Magazine 

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A sun-drenched afternoon at the Descanso Gardens with Brit Marling unearths the filmmaker’s many natural talents.

Brit Marling often talks about her films like an expectant mother. Her old pals from Georgetown (filmmakers Zal Batmanglij and Mike Cahill) are her “family,” the scripts they dream up together are the “blueprints of the house” and soon enough, “it’s ready to enter the world.” At the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, she was, if you will, pregnant with twins;

Another Earth and Sound of My Voice were both eventually picked up by Fox Searchlight pictures. It was a moment that would forever divide her life into two very succinct periods: life before she was famous and everything after.

In case there is any doubt, she is solidly in the second phase. For one thing, casting directors now call the 29-year-old actress offering roles as if they were passed hors d’oeuvres—the case with the upcoming film The Green Blade Rises. Next month, she also stars in the Robert Redford-produced political thriller The Company You Keep. But, hers is not the kind of fleeting, tabloid-fueled fame where paparazzi can be found loitering outside of her new “grown-up” house in Los Feliz, either. (If they did, they’d bear witness to back issues of The New York Times piling up in the driveway. Marling has spent the past month filming Posthumous with co-star Jack Huston in Berlin, a city she describes as “a teenager with awkward rebellious energy.”) No, despite her disarming good looks that rightly warrant outside curiosity, Marling is not that simple. In most critic’s circles, she’s already a role model in Hollywood’s new all-around category of women who write, direct and star in their own productions—à la Lena Dunham (Tiny Furniture, “Girls”) or Tina Fey (“30 Rock,” “SNL”).

In the year since I last spoke with Marling at a coffee shop in Silverlake, a lot has changed… and a lot hasn’t. She describes what life has been like with familiar enthusiasm: “Wonderful, magical, incredible, amazing, beautiful, interesting, awesome, fascinating.” It’s hard to forget Marling’s positivity and ability to expound on almost anything: posing hypothetical questions, answering them, debating theories about life’s mysteries. When I recall some passages from our first interview, she feels that we’ve “time-traveled together.” On the idea of starting her own production company, she feels as though she has: “Now they [production companies] are like the iCloud. They’re so ethereal…who knows, maybe someday we’ll [Batmanglij and Cahill] make it more tangible. I think that would be such tremendous fun.” Before she begins filming Tom Bailey’s The Grace That Keeps This World with James Franco, she’s “really grateful” to be going back to where it all began: presenting her newest film, The East, at Sundance. She wrote and stars in the anarchist thriller alongside Alexander Skarsgård and Ellen Page. Having secured financing and distribution for the film through Fox Searchlight (with Scott Free producing), Marling was happy to hand over some jurisdiction to immerse herself in the character. “I think you get to be too close to it [the film] at some point, and Searchlight was able to help us see things we couldn’t see. It’s hard to see the forest through the trees kind of thing.” And that’s just where Marling stands today: in a clearing in the thick of it all.