Her first feature-length film, a documentary called Nuyorican Dream (2000), is about access—and the lack of it—to the American dream. The fictional Sherrybaby (2006) tackles privilege, drug addiction, and re-entry into society after incarceration. Her most recent film, Sunlight, Jr. (2013), stars Matt Dillon and Naomi Watts as a mostly homeless Florida couple struggling to stay above the poverty line. Each earned critical acclaim—and award nominations—but, as Gyllenhaal noted on Letterman, films like these are not an easy sell to mainstream audiences. Later this year, however, Collyer’s name and brand will become familiar to a somewhat surprising demographic: viewers of Lifetime Television, for which she is directing a four-hour miniseries, Marilyn, based on the 2010 New York Times best-seller The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe by J. Randy Taraborrelli. Actress Kelli Garner plays the lead role. Collyer grew up in Mountainside, New Jersey, a picturesque, economically privileged suburb very much like the one where much of Sherrybaby is set. As she told a New York Times reporter in 2006, Mountainside is “very idyllic. It’s a great place to raise kids.” But, she added, “I always had a love-hate relationship about growing up in such a white-bread sort of environment.” It’s that love-hate relationship with her background, and the experiences she’s had throughout her career with those less fortunate, that inform her storytelling and filmmaking aesthetic. “I’ve always been a feminist,” Collyer says during a phone call from Toronto, where she’s in the midst of filming Marilyn. “I went to Oberlin partly because it was the first college in the country that graduated women and blacks. I was pretty politicized in high school.” At Oberlin, she majored in German, initially intending to pursue a career as a translator of German literature. She spent two of her college years studying abroad in Tubingen, Germany. She also volunteered at a shelter for abused women and in special education classes, which inspired her to switch directions after graduating and begin a career in social work. After Oberlin, she lived in San Francisco for six years, holding several jobs in social services, working with kids in group homes, pregnant teenagers, and children in special education classes. She loved the work, but quickly realized she wasn’t meant to make a career of it. “A lot of the characters I’ve written have similar backgrounds to Marilyn, including the kids from Nuyorican Dream,” she says. “All Marilyn had was herself. It’s a different way of moving through the world when no one takes care of you.” “You have to have a certain personality to be a therapist, counselor, or social worker. You have to be able to separate your emotion from the situation at hand. I w a s n ’ t u l t i m a t e l y v e r y g o o d a t t h a t ,” s h e s a y s , a d d i n g w i t h a l a u g h : “ I a m a v e r y emotional person. I have more the personality of an artist, for better or worse.” Just for fun, Collyer decided to take a filmmaking class at City College in San Francisco. She made a short documentary film, Thanh, about a Vietnamese girl she worked with who had cerebral palsy and was transi- tioning from special education into regular classrooms. Around the same time, in the early 1990s, she attended an Oberlin alumni event in San Francisco, where she met Robert Torres ’90 for the first time. “We found that we were kind of doing the same thing, working in group homes,” she says. “He was working with runaway teenagers in a shelter, and I was working with pregnant teenagers. We connected that way, but also as friends.” Torres gave Collyer the idea for her next film, which became her master’s thesis when enrolling in a graduate film program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 1995. Torres told Collyer about his younger brother, Danny, who had just been released from jail. Robert Torres, who is of Puerto Rican descent, grew up in poverty in Brooklyn as one of five kids—and the only one to escape a vicious cycle of drugs, violence, underage pregnancies, and prison sentences. “We started talking. I said, ‘I didn’t realize that the work that you do is so connected to your background.’ Usually in those sorts of jobs you find a lot of people from outside the community. I found it really interesting and powerful, and I began to see Robert in this whole different light—as a very strong, powerful figure.” Collyer began following Torres and his family with a video camera, chronicling their lives in a project that evolved into her first feature-length documentary, Nuyorican Dream. They began filming in 1994. The end result, a chronicle of three generations of a New York Puerto Rican family shot over five years, premiered at Sundance in 2000. Collyer came up with the title after reflecting on “the whole notion of the American Dream and access. The Nuyorican Dream, in the context of the New York Puerto Rican community and poverty, was kind of the other side of the American Dream: the American Nightmare. When you are not educated and come here looking for a better life, sometimes you find something a little bit worse.” The New York Times, in a June 2000 review, described Nuyorican Dream as an “astoundingly intimate film” and noted, “As much knowledge and wisdom as Mr. Torres has gained, he is essentially powerless against the social forces that have oppressed his family and thousands like them.” HBO bought Nuyorican Dream and aired it later that year. Collyer was quickly confronted with a paradox she has worked around ever since—as important as it is for films like Nuyorican Dream to be made, they are the hardest films to sell. So Collyer takes her time—years, when necessary— between films to perfect her scripts and attract buyers. “They fill a gap in a way, these movies. I tell stories you don’t hear so much, or I put a spin on them,” she explains. “You have to be tenacious and not take no for an answer. Somebody early in my career told me, when I was working on the Sherrybaby script, ‘This script is good, but for this kind of material it needs to be better...because good isn’t good enough.’ It stuck with me.” Collyer developed the script for Sherrybaby in 2001 while taking part in a Sundance Institute lab program for screenwriters and filmmakers. For the script to be “good enough,” Collyer had the Herculean task of writing a title character who faces her dark demons with desperation and determination and grasps hard for success, yet is lovable at her core (if not always likeable). These types of roles, Collyer admits, can be hard on the actors who play them. “Actors, even more so than I do, use their emotions as their instrument,” she says. “Maggie (Gyllenhaal) playing Sherry really took a lot out of her. It rattled her because she had to be this very destroyed person. Of course, S h e r r y h a s a l o t o f s t r e n g t h , b u t s h e a l s o h a s t o s u s t a i n a l o t o f d a m a g e . “As long as you have love on your set, and you’re dedicated to your actors, you can make it work,” Collyer adds. “You have to be really attentive and tuned in to the humans around you who are telling your story.” Between making Sherrybaby and Sunlight, Jr., Collyer and her husband, who live in New York (surrounded by other Obies in Brooklyn, she notes), had two children, now 7 and 10. “Everybody has a different level of stamina and ambition, and I’ve also been very committed to having a family,” she says. “I don’t have the same level of ambition as some filmmakers I know do. It took me a while to realize that I have to travel to L.A. on a regular basis. I have to go every 1 6