Finding Their Way Home
Husband-wife filmmakers Lawrence David Foldes and Victoria Paige Meyerink bring two lifetimes of film experience to every movie they make. Finding Home is the story they've been waiting 20 years to tell.
by Carolyn Arends | posted 10/11/2005
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Lawrence David Foldes directed his first feature film (Malibu High) at the tender age of 18, making him the youngest professional filmmaker in Hollywood history. But Victoria Paige Meyerink makes Foldes look like a late bloomer—she began her acting career at the age of two and starred opposite legends like Danny Kaye, Rock Hudson and Elvis Presley before reaching grade school.
Foldes and Meyerink have been partners—he's still a director, she's now a producer—in movies and in marriage since 1979. Both call their newest film, the critically acclaimed family drama Finding Home, their crowning achievement. The couple gave five years and their life savings to the daunting project, constructing a temporary movie studio on the rugged coast of Deer Island, Maine in order to capture the spectacular scenery central to the story.
But the technical challenges of making the movie pale in comparison to the personal ones they faced. Just before shooting began, Meyerink was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Unwilling to accept the devastating side effects of the prescribed surgery, she created and underwent a controversial new radiation treatment. Foldes and Meyerink both claim that their personal odyssey—including the possibility that Meyerink could die—uniquely prepared them to explore the themes at the heart of Finding Home.
The film is the story of a young woman (Lisa Brenner) who returns to her deceased grandmother's New England inn, where she confronts the repressed memories that haunt her dreams. The movie includes veterans like Louise Fletcher (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), Jason Miller (The Exorcist) and a particularly strong performance by Genevieve Bujold (Oscar nominee for Anne of The Thousand Days). Newer faces like Brenner, Misha Collins and Johnny Messner give Finding Home a youthful energy and credibility.
Funded in part by the non-profit organization Christian Life Resources, Finding Home takes on issues like sexual responsibility, the value of family, and the legacy of choices good and bad. Foldes doesn't want his film branded a "Christian movie," but the experience of making it has cultivated his own faith. We talked to him via telephone from the couple's home in LA.
You've said that making movies is really the only thing you've ever wanted to do. Where'd that come from?
Foldes and Meyerink on the set
Lawrence David Foldes: I think it goes back to my relationship with my grandfather, who was from Hungary. In elementary school, my grandfather would meet me after school every day, and we'd take the bus down to Hollywood Boulevard and see at least two, maybe three movies every day before we went home. I would see anything and everything with him—from family stuff all the way to R-rated movies. Because he was hard of hearing, the two of us sat in the very back of the theatre, and I would translate the movie into Hungarian for him. When the movies were lousy I would paint the story all together so it was a whole different story. He never knew the difference and I actually think that I probably even made the movies more interesting for him. I think that's where my whole love of storytelling began.
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