Conversations with an emerging screenwriter Gabby Zevin

Screenwriter and author Gabrielle Zevin is an ambassador to multiplicity. Her press photo - taken by Aaron Eckhart, the male lead in her film "Conversations with Other Women" (appearing at the Nantucket Film Festival) - depicts in black-andwhite the 28 year old's shade of beautiful ethnic grey: Asian eyes, a lush head of twining black hair, fair skin and high cheekbones. "My mom is Korean and something else, something 'X' - that's my super power," Zevin said. "My dad is Russian, Polish, Lithuanian and Jewish. I am officially 'Other.'"

Gabrielle Zevin "Other" is a definition

Zevin accepted in high

school when filling out forms asking for racial identity. "That always bothered me," Zevin said. "In terms of the notion of identity - the things I'm most interested in in a person are the things you can't check off in boxes, all the things you don't put in an author bio at the back of the book."

The author bio in the back of Zevin's acclaimed young adult novel "Elsewhere" (2005) - about a deceased 15-year-old who moves achronologically toward infancy in the afterlife - mentions that Zevin is a 2000 graduate of Harvard with a degree in English and American literature who was born in New York and lives there now with one pug dog, Mrs. DeWinter, and her partner of 10 years, director Hans Canosa.

What is not on the back of the book is the year Zevin took off between her junior and senior years at Harvard - a black ice patch of a year during which Zevin drifted through temp jobs while maintaining a forward, if haphazard, momentum with her writing.

That summer, Zevin did all of her grocery shopping at K-Mart - ate boxed mashed potatoes or saltines and BBQ sauce - and watched "Beverly Hills: 90210."

" I really had not much planned at that point," she said.

She gave up the idea of working part-time and went back to school.

Her senior project was a film entitled "Alma Mater," about a Harvard professor and his wife in the 60s who model themselves after JFK's Camelot - except Mr. Professor has William Anderson instead of Marilyn Monroe.

It marked the directorial debut of her partner Canosa, a former Harvard tutor and NYU film school graduate.

"It was a student project that kind of grew out of hand. We kind of were just using the resources we had at the college to shoot a film, which played at festivals," said Zevin, who moved in with Canosa in New York City after graduating.

"I pretty much continued to write from the time I said I was a writer to the time I actually was," said Zevin, who began optioning scripts on a fairly regular basis - including a vampire romance - until she managed to create a film on a small enough scale for Canosa, the film's director, to make.

That film was "Conversations with Other Women," a bantering romantic encounter between a man and woman in a wedding party. Focusing on two characters (Helena Bonham Carter and Aaron Eckhart), the film is shot in split-screen to show the action and reaction of each character as well as flashbacks that correspond to their present actions, wherein we learn that the two have a history. It's "The Way We Were" on the same screen as the way we are now.

The fact that "Conversations" opens at a wedding is another act of multiplicity on Zevin's part, in a sense, since she has no plans to marry.

"I'm all for marriage for some people; I don't know if I'm all for marriage for me," Zevin said. "I was really lucky to find somebody I wanted to play with and have a good time with so young. In a way it freed me up to think of other things than just courting."

Ostensibly, it also freed up Canosa, who initially had the split-screen dream.

"He kept wanting to do split screen, and I said, 'That's great, but it has to be more than an experiment,'" said Zevin. "When you're doing something formally different, you should have a reason for doing it. I felt the most interesting way to exploit the split-screen was to do a two-character story. The idea came from the idea that I explore a lot in my work - a person is many people in their lifetime, and life is more fluid than we think it is or choose to see it."

It's an idea she's been testing since those days of bubbling in racial identity on Scantrons. A senior in high school, Zevin wrote a play called "Fugue for Seven Madwomen"- a work about a psychological fugue that mimicked a musical fugue in its structure.

Zevin went to Spanish River High School in Boca Raton, Fla. - a school where every flavor of Latino was represented, as well as every island in the Caribbean, every major religion, the kids from

wealthy homes around central Boca and the kids from lower-income homes bussed over from Delray Beach. And hardly anyone -including me, two years behind Zevin - knew exactly what to make of her, the girl who made her candidacy speech

for student council president in a

man's suit and tie. (She lost the election, but won rumors of being a lesbian.) Even though she had already been accepted to Harvard, she worked furiously on "Fugue for Seven Madwomen" - sometimes in the back office of the student council advisor, where I once sat in silent adoration and watched her type.

"At that time, I saw multiplicity as being craziness," Zevin said. "Now I see it as - That's just life. My mom at one point said to me that people never change. But I think that people do change and sometimes refuse to see how much."

How has she changed, now that her work has achieved not epic, but substantial recognition?

"Actually, not much," Zevin said. "When you come back to it, as a writer, nothing changes. You still have to go look at a blank computer monitor and hope that something comes out," she said. "What's come into perspective for me is how much I don't give a crap about other people's reactions."

Though the film has been well received, critics have questioned the decision to utilize the splitscreen.

Variety's Todd McCarthy wrote, "...It's debatable how much the elaborately worked split-screen technique actually adds when all is said and done."

"When you try something that is stylistically different, you're going to have extreme reactions to that," she said. "This was just one movie, a small movie, and given the size of the movie, experimentation was appropriate. There has to be room in this culture for everything not to be homogenized."

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