Director Maria Maggenti's new movie...

I interviewed director Maria Maggenti for the current issue of LA's Frontiers Magazine. If you live in LA, I encourage you to pick up a copy and check out that and other articles in the magazine which has been greatly improved over the past year under editor Alex Cho.
Since many of you are not in LA, I've done and cut-and-paste of the article for you to enjoy:

Sexual Revolution
Men? Women? Both? With Puccini for Beginners writer-director Maria Maggenti, it’s all fair game
BY GREG HERNANDEZ

Maria Maggenti hasn’t lost her flair for romance.
The writer-director of the queer classic The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love has had to wait more than a decade to have her second movie completed and released. But the long wait is over now that Puccini for Beginners is opening in theaters Feb. 2.
Puccini—which takes place in Manhattan and stars Elizabeth Reaser, Gretchen Mol, and Justin Kirk—is a sophisticated screwball sex comedy revolving around Allegra (Reaser), a woman with a fluid sexuality who is struggling to make a commitment.
“I have a lot of affection for the characters, but they are crazily self-absorbed,� the 44-year-old Maggenti says. “The movie is a rather romantic portrayal of the world. It’s about what happens when a woman ends up seeing two people at the same time who are ex-lovers. I take the position that my movie is about an ideal world in which your sexuality is OK. Nothing bad will happen to you if [a gay man] sleeps with women and a lesbian sleeps with a man.�
Maggenti knows a thing or two about that fluidity, since she has been in relationships with women and is now currently involved with a man. As a result, the filmmaker has been put in the position of having to debate over whether someone can be truly bisexual.
“I know from personal experience that to cross boundaries, whoever you are, can be very threatening to the people around you,� she says. “In the movie I try and honor that, and also make fun of it. Years ago I did defend myself. But the world has changed around me. Things are far less rigid than when I came out in the mid-’80s. If I am at all successful, what I hope to accomplish with Puccini is a distillation of those conversations that have existed, and take them on with affection and humor.�
The movie was shot in a mere 18 days on a budget of less than $1 million. Kirk and Mol signed on immediately after getting the script, but up until a week before filming was set to begin, Maggenti still did not have a leading lady.
But the problem was solved at the eleventh hour when Reaser was brought in to audition for the key role of Allegra, a writer who is involved with both Kirk’s and Mol’s characters.
“The part is really difficult,� Maggenti explains. “It had to be someone who had to be an intellectual, but she also has to be emotional and visceral and be funny. She has a lot to deal with. It was definitely a hard part to cast. Elizabeth turned out to be perfect.�
The film’s box-office chances could be improved by the good fortune of its cast members since Puccini wrapped. Reaser has since gone on to star in the TNT series Saved opposite Tom Everett Scott, while Kirk is now in his second season of the Showtime series Weeds—a show that recently earned him a Golden Globe Award nomination.
“For me, the preproduction casting was sheer hell and I was thrown into self-doubt,� Maggenti admits. “Then we got into production and it all fell together.�
Even though it’s been 12 years between feature film releases for Maggenti, she has hardly been idle. She’s found steady work in episodic television, including three years spent writing for the CBS crime drama Without a Trace. But she’d love to have the opportunity to make more of her own movies and take them on the film festival circuit.
“I’m the gregarious type and I’ll go anywhere where the light shines in my direction for a few minutes,� she says. “One of the great things about making a movie is that you get to interact and meet other filmmakers and see other people’s films. I am more seasoned now and I don’t take things as personally, and am more relaxed than I was the first time around.�
Prior to the 1995 release of Two Girls, Maggenti cut her teeth directing the documentary Doctors, Liars and Women as well as the short films The Love Monster, Waiting for War, Name Day, and La Donna è mobile. She also wrote the screenplay for the 1999 romantic comedy The Love Letter that starred Kate Capshaw, Tom Selleck, and Ellen DeGeneres, among others.
It’s now been a year since Puccini had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. It then went on to be the opening-night selection at last summer’s Outfest in Los Angeles, among other stops along the way. Now its creator is eagerly awaiting the public’s reaction to her labor of love.
“This is always the weirdest time for a filmmaker,� Maggenti says. “You make a movie then you have a long downtime and feel like ‘Now what?’�