“I love this town. This is a lovely town,” said director and actor Karen Allen.

A three-year veteran of the Port Townsend Film Festival (PTFF), Allen brought her 2016 short film, “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.” to be screened at the festival.

The film, based on a short story by Carson McCullers, marks Allen’s debut as a director.

In addition to presenting her short film, Allen said, she was also here to help Janette Force, PTFF executive director, hand out awards.

Allen said Port Townsend is similar to where she lives in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts.

“I love them both. I’m in the mountains, and you’re on the water, but they have a very similar quality to them.

“It’s a beautiful town ... just where it’s nestled on the water is gorgeous. And the people that I’ve gotten to know since I’ve been here have been just lovely people. I’ve mostly just been around the film festival, but I kind of keep coming back because there’s a sort of magic here that I really love. I have two really good friends that live here as well, that I know from many years ago: John Considine and Astrid Considine. They’re like old pals.”

She said dining during the busy festival was “catch as catch can.”

“Last night, we went to the one that’s upstairs, Sirens. That was fun. People were doing karaoke and that was fun to sort of peek in and look at that.”

PAPER ROUTE

Allen’s short black-and-white film was shown several times during the festival, and she spoke with the audience about her work after the showings.

Allen said she added a scene to her short film that was not in McCullers’ story in order to allow the audience to get to know the protagonist - a newspaper delivery boy - before the main drama takes place.

“I just thought, since in the story she talks about him being on a paper route, I just thought, ‘Why not put him on a period bicycle and having him coming to the cafe?’”

The opening scene shows the boy out in the forest. A moment later, he tosses a newspaper toward a customer’s door, but it misses the mark.

Instead of leaving it where it landed, the boy picks up the paper and places it on the doormat.

“I wanted him to be the kind of kid who gave a damn,” Allen explained.

“I think that’s a rare boy of 12, honestly, even in the 1940s. I think mostly kids would just sling them,” she said, laughing.

“Some people say to me, ‘I used to deliver papers and I never cared.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I know, but that’s not this kid. This is a kid who actually cares. For whatever reason ... he’s a polite kid.”

In another introductory scene, the boy is shown alone in a forest, thinking, and appreciating the beauty.

“He takes something from nature. He gets something from that, which not all kids do. I mean there’s a lot of 12-year-old boys, like, they go into nature just to, like, kill something,” Allen said.

The opening shots of trees and the boy later tie into a story that an old man in the cafe tells the boy.

“I thought why not bring those [nature] elements in before, and let the boy already have his own kind of private connection with those things.

“Plus ... I have a personal kind of thing with trees. It goes back to my childhood. I think that I love the idea of the boy, when he needs time to be alone, that he turns to a tree.”

Allen said there was “a lot of turmoil” in her family growing up, and trees were a source of solace for her.

“Both of my parents were people who had so much going on in their own lives,” she said, “I took a lot of comfort from trees and have continued to in my life. I think Thomas Merton ... said, ‘It is impossible to be neurotic in the presence of a tree,’ and I actually truly believe that. I think it’s very healing ... to be just with a tree. I’m not a tree hugger per se, but I am definitely a tree lover,” she said.

PREP KEY FOR DIRECTORS

Preparation is key to being a good director, she said, “so you don’t have to be trying to figure things out on the set. You can really ‘be there’ and very present for your actors, and that means a lot for me. I mean, I’ve worked with directors over the years who are so harried all the time.”

So harried that some of them didn’t have time to rehearse with actors or develop a strong connection with them.

“They just expect the actors to figure it out and just do it.

“I understand the process that actors need to work through and I understand the value of rehearsal and the value of listening to actors ... the value of actors trying things and not always being sure of what direction they’re headed in.”

Working though that process, she said, actors can discover who their characters are.

“If a director can allow actors to work that way, a lot of very, very interesting things can come from it.”

She worked with director Steven Spielberg on the film “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and said Spielberg took a similar approach when it came to preplanning.

“Spielberg is fantastic to learn from because, I mean, talk about preparation!

“He does an enormous amount of preparation, and yet you know his preparation gives him the freedom to be very spontaneous when he’s on the set. So he’ll prepare, prepare, prepare ... he has a very wonderful team of people around him and they work beautifully together.”

“I have to say Steven works with people who are ... they’re fine-tuned, you know?”

INSPIRED BY ‘IDA’

“A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.” is a black-and-white movie with very little camera movement. All but two shots in the film are taken with the camera in a stationary position. Allen said the aesthetic from the 2013 film “Ida” made a impression on her.

“[‘Ida’] was very much an inspiration to me in terms of style ... I very, very much admired [director Pawel Pawlikowski’s] storytelling style and the way in which, by keeping the camera still, the characters revealed themselves.

“I often feel that like in a lot of films ... I see the camera is moving so much [that] I get to the end of a two-hour film and I don’t feel like I’ve met anybody.... It’s like I’m passing them on the street or something.

“If I start studying camera movements when I’m watching a film, it means I’m bored to pieces,” she said.

Lots of camera movement “can make for very exciting filmmaking, but it doesn’t necessarily make you slow down and pay attention to what someone is feeling or thinking or saying. And not all films want you to pay attention to what somebody’s feeling or thinking or saying, but in this film, I very much wanted ... the audience to become ... involved with the characters and involved in their stories and how they’re reacting and responding. It’s important really to simplify ... moving the camera around a lot would have been antithetical to that.”

‘YEAR BY THE SEA’

Allen’s latest feature film is “Year by the Sea,” based on the novel by Joan Anderson. It recently opened in Seattle, she said.

The film is about a woman who’s “been the caretaker of the family for 25 years, 30 years. And she’s kind of lost her voice,” Allen said.

“She’s been kind of in all these caretaking roles and her children’s lives ... she’s revolved her life around other people’s lives and suddenly she feels like she’s lost the thread of who she is or who she could be or what the future holds for her. So she just wants to get away. And her husband doesn’t really understand that .... She doesn’t want to leave him, she just wants to get away from him for a while so she can figure out who she is.”

RELATED LINK: "A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud."

RELATED LINK: "Year by the Sea."