We were lucky to catch up with Ilana Turner recently and have shared our conversation below.

Ilana, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

I’m in Paris and I rent a car to head west to the Normandy beach on a research quest. A friend of mine, the incredibly talented musician Adrien Reju, and I want to see her great-great grandmother’s country house. About two thirds of the way there, Adrien asks me if I have an address. And I realize I don’t! What I have is a postcard of the house from 1906 — and it has never occurred to me that the house might not be there, fully intact on the beach in Normandy, now very much post World War 2.

A few months earlier. My dear family friend (Adrien’s grandmother) tells me about her grandmother, Réjane, an actress from Belle Époque Paris who’d been world famous in her day and blazed trails on stage, in fashion, and even legally — and who is almost forgotten. I am immediately obsessed and want to learn everything I can about her, including doing research in France. Luckily, I get private funding to follow that impulse, and off I go with Adrien to absorb it all.

In retrospect, this is when I become a playwright (and by extension, a screenwriter) but I never made a conscious decision to ‘become a writer.’

So, Adrien and I are driving around the tiny French town of Hennequeville aimlessly, when we spot two old men in bathrobes having a chat by the side of the road. They are kind enough to lead us down a tiny private road, and… we find Réjane’s country house. It looks exactly like the postcard. We introduce ourselves to the current owner — a Comtesse — who invites us in. It is magic.

The whole, long process of creating what turns out to be my first play, O Réjane, is filled with moments like this, that look nuts in the rearview. Taking big swings — like driving west into the past — is what it takes to carve out a future in the arts.

Directed by the incredible Christopher Sivertsen, O Réjane premiered in 2014 and Cara Pifko, who played the title role, won the L.A. Stage Raw Award for Leading Female Performance. Alex Berry was nominated for Costume Design and I was nominated for Playwriting. My first screenwriting job came shortly thereafter, and screenwriting requires a hell of a lot of big swings, too.

Ilana, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m a playwright/screenwriter, actor, and I own Moelle Pilates in North Hollywood. Having grown up figure skating and dancing, theater felt like the next natural step when I got to Hampshire College where I got a B.A. in Theater and Dance. My thesis was all about the intersection of movement and text.

On my last college summer break, I started coaching skating at the Lake Placid Olympic Center. After graduation, I moved west to start coaching at the Oakland Ice Center — and to pursue acting. In the Bay Area, I did enough theater, commercials, and indie films to lead me to L.A., and I’ve been working here ever since. These days, my acting work is mainly dubbing foreign shows into English which is incredibly fun.

Ever since O Réjane and the ensuing feature film gig turned me into a writer, I’ve been laser-focused on developing for TV and film. My writing/producing partner, Adam Scott Epstein, and I have several features and series in various stages of development — all of which are thankfully gearing back up post-WGA strike. Our partnership is incredibly supportive, so we often co-write. Adam is also the first person to read and give me feedback if I write something intensely personal. We write drama and dark comedy in the thriller/mystery lane, sometimes with a sports or historical bent. I’m always feeling my way through the rhythm of dialogue and the flow of a story.

For theater, I also always bake in an element of heightened reality and spectacle. Often my stage directions read almost like choreographic notes because I’m still so captivated by that relationship between movement and text.

My studio, Moelle Pilates, keeps me connected to my movement roots. Pilates put me back together after years of skating wear-and-tear, and it drastically improved my quality of life. A method of exercise designed to strengthen the body from the core muscles out, Pilates improves alignment, flexibility and balance, and prevents injury. Over the last 20 years, clients have come in for everything from general fitness to sport-specific training to post-rehab conditioning — and I’ve worked with many pre- and postnatal women. Moelle offers private and partner sessions so we can tailor workouts to each individual. Going forward, I’d love to work more with high level athletes, like the incredible Angel City FC team.

Whatever I do is rooted in strong technique, heavily researched, and wildly creative. I cannot stand being bored.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

I get, “Wow, you do a lot!” when people hear that I write and act and also own Moelle Pilates, where I still teach. But to me, it’s all the same thing: artistic expression using the body and mind as tools. Writing leans more towards the mind, Pilates more towards the body, and acting sits squarely in the middle — but all of those disciplines require mind-body harmony. Writing well is visceral and has a rhythm I can feel. Acting is visceral but requires the mind to make sense of story. And Pilates is like the nuts and bolts that hold everything else together. Movement helps me quickly, fluidly pivot from one thing to the next.

Doing Pilates also makes it physically possible to get out of the chair after writing for a long time; and my studio means I can pay bills between projects. I think there’s an illusion that you’ve “made it” in the arts or entertainment if you don’t “need” to do anything else. But almost everyone in entertainment has other business ventures going, even at the highest echelons, because this business is incredibly quixotic. “Making it” just means you get to stay in the game.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

Skating and dance training was rigorous and quite rigid. While I’ve been well-served by the work ethic those disciplines required, I definitely had to unlearn the idea that there is a “perfect.” I’ve learned that even within structure there is room for individuality. I’m going to get really technical for a moment here, but I promise I’m going somewhere with this. My figure skating coach taught me to skate with a flat lower back all the time, meaning I was constantly tilting my pelvis to change the natural shape of my spine. People are often taught to do abs this way — you’ve likely been told to press your lower back all the way into the mat to do anything like a crunch. Well, I skated and danced like that with a really tucked pelvis for years. And while it had worked for my coach to skate that way, I ultimately got hurt. We have really different body types and in trying to skate exactly like she did, I was using the wrong muscles. That discovery led me to Pilates, which helps my muscle-firing patterns and also my quality of life.

Learning to really personalize my work, even within an accepted structure, was also an artistic light bulb. Storytelling for the stage and screen often uses a classic, familiar structure. (Not always, but often.) The story itself has to be compelling in some way, of course, but how we as artists hook into it and tell it with a strong point of view is what ultimately resonates with an audience and other artists. I read an interview in the Guardian with filmmaker Boots Riley, who said, “The more personal you get, the more universal you get.” It’s a sentiment I’ve heard echoed before, but the way he said it really landed for me and I think about it all the time.

Pilates is what helped me embrace my own structure and learn to move the way that works for me. And that’s key in any artistic discipline.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.ilanaturner.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itoverdrive/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilanaturner/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/itoverdrive
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/moelle-pilates-studio-city-3
• Other: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1728588/