Sutra, the restaurant film director Megan Griffiths chose for our rendezvous, is a cute little spot on the west end of Wallingford next door to a yoga studio of the same name. It serves delicacies like edible flowers from their backyard garden and begins each service with a gong and a moment of thanks for farmers. The whole thing is a stark contrast to the dark, human trafficking subject matter of Megan’s recent film, Eden, but somehow we found ourselves sharing a table ready to eat some artisan vegan cuisine, and set to talk movies.

Megan showed up a few minutes after 7PM on the Wednesday evening. She’d cut her long brunette hair to more of a bob compared to the pictures I’d seen. She wore a black top flowing at the arms and a very unassuming, yet charming, smile. We expressed excitement for the Sutra fare and presentation. She noted she’d never been here for dinner (I’d only been once before). We’d almost scheduled our meeting for the following evening, but Megan had a prior engagement: a regular VHS B-movie get-together—this one, though, at a SIFF theater.

“Basking in badness,” she says happily. “We’ve watched everything from Piranhas 2 to Barbarian Brothers. And recently my friend wanted to program a night at SIFF and to do a public VHS screening. So we did!”

Just after I tell her some friends and I do a similar thing called TV club where we rotate people’s apartments, watch an 80’s or early 90’s sit-com and make pun-themed food (i.e. Jesse Spanakopita for Saved By The Bell), the waitress comes to our table to ask what we’d like to drink. Both Megan and I choose the alcohol pairing for the four courses, which includes a sparkling white while we wait, a Sauvignon Blanc for the first and second courses, a Rioja for the third course, a Cabernet Franc-Merlot blend for the fourth, finishing with a sweet Merlot if we make it to dessert.

“I haven’t been in town that much this year,” Megan begins. She sighs the sigh of someone who’s done a lot of traveling. “We wrapped the new movie, Lucky Them, in early March, then I was in New York until the beginning of July. I was here in Seattle for like twelve days then I went back to New York, and I just got back home but I’ll be leaving next week to go to Toronto where the movie premiers. This year I’ve been in Seattle less than ever.”

Our first drink, the sparkling white, arrives in small flutes. We cheers! “I miss New York,” I tell her before I sip. “The corner shops—you can get an egg and cheese sandwich anywhere at four in the morning! For some reason I miss that most.”

The script for Megan’s new movie was set in New York (where the movie’s producers live), but she talked with the writer and they agreed to re-set it in Seattle, shooting much of it in Capitol Hill and Belltown. The movie is about a rock and roll journalist who gets an assignment to track down an elusive singer. “He also happens to be her ex,” Megan adds.

The process of putting together a movie astounds me. In doing research for our conversation, I watched Megan’s two most recent features, Eden and The Off Hours, trying to put myself in her position. “The idea of truck rentals, soundtrack selection, permits, casting, lighting, camera choices, boggles my mind,” I say.

“When you have a little bit more of a budget you can start delegating that out,” she says. “But when we made The Off Hours we had no money. And so everybody was wearing so many hats all under the pressure of getting things done for free or super cheap.”

The Off Hours is about a young woman in a small town that’s imploding in on itself. The movie depicts her struggles as she tries to get out of the 24-hour truck stop where she works. The film was shot in Seattle, a city, Megan says, that’s conducive for shoestring budgets and big creative projects. “The nice thing about the community here is that while it’s nice to be able to pay everyone what they’re worth, there’s a lot of motivation that’s not money-driven. It’s a very creative community, and very passionate. The Off Hours would not have been possible if I didn’t live here.”

The movie was written in 2003 but then production stalled. It was supposed to be re-launched in 2007, but still timing wasn’t right. In the mean time, Megan made a short for SIFF called Moving, starring one of Seattle’s favorite daughters, Lynn Shelton. The movie was largely a preface to The Off Hours (as well as a new opportunity for Megan to show her chops). “I wrote the lead role for Lynn,” Megan says, beaming. “She’d auditioned for The Off Hours in the early days—we’ve been friends since her first feature, We Go Way Back—but I didn’t know her as an actress. Then she came in and read for The Off Hours and it was clear how good she was. I got the opportunity to make Moving, so I wrote the role for her!”

Eventually, though, after making a couple shorts and doing more legwork, The Off Hours was completed and debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011. The movie was recognized by the Sustainable Style Foundation for its use of environmentally friendly sets and wardrobe, all from thrift shops. After the Sundance premier, Megan was handed the script for Eden and seven months later they started shooting. It took seven years to get The Off Hours off the ground, now seven months later she was embarking on a new, large-scale journey.

“I definitely had my moments of desperation when we were trying to get The Off Hours made,” she says, “but I was really lucky on Eden. A lot of the groundwork was already done. There was a script, funding. I didn’t have to do any of that. Fundraising is insanely difficult. I’m not good at it and I have very little patience for it.”

Promotion and funding aside, there is the matter of the creative work of making the movie. “I want to believe I could go off and do every aspect of it myself, but really my strengths are when I’m on set,” Megan says. She also has a go-to team of people she works with. “I used to be an Assistant-Director, the person who organizes the shoot and makes the schedule. And so, through that, I’ve worked with everybody in Seattle and found the people that I really gelled with. And so when we made The Off Hours, we basically handpicked this amazing crew. And everybody we asked all said yes.”

Despite the talent in the town, a problem remains: Seattle still doesn’t have its own soundstages. “There’s things we need here to keep it growing,” Megan says. “Certain infrastructure. A soundstage would be huge because then we could potentially attract television series, which keep people working nine months a year.”

The Sutra gong is rung. Chatter dwindles. A chef appears in the back of the small restaurant. He begins to explain tonight’s fare: fresh corn paprika-leek soup with a side green salad topped with agave nectar-marinated pumpkin seeds, followed by lentil- and cashew cheese-stuffed ancho chile peppers with a peach and black garlic sauce. The third course is a savory crepe with lobster-mushrooms and ground cherry-daikon sprouts. Dessert is huckleberries in an orange blossom coconut whip cream, topped with chocolate bourbon sauce.

The chef finishes his presentation and the chatter picks up again. I sip my sparkling white wine. We talk a little about Paul Giamatti, about Michelle Williams, people Megan said she’d like to work with down the line. A little later the first course arrives. One taste of the soup and I love it. I have to make sure not to eat it too fast. I turn the conversation toward a theme I’d noticed in Megan’s work, “All the movies I’ve seen of yours, except one short, focus around women in trouble. Was this intentional?”

“That’s funny you bring that up. I was in a meeting in L.A. recently and some people were asking me what I wanted to do next. I told them I’m not a genre-driven person, so it’s hard for me to answer that. I like relationships, mostly. So they asked me more questions about my work and what scripts I’ve read and a guy there suddenly said, ‘You do have a genre, it’s damaged women movies.’ It was a total light bulb moment when he said it.”

While the idea of a female director making movies about damaged women shouldn’t be off-putting, it might still be difficult for these projects to take off in certain markets. Not Seattle, though. “In Seattle crews are not sexist,” Megan says, putting down her soup spoon. “They’ll just as happily do the work on a movie with a female director.”

With all her recent success, I can’t help but wonder, “Are there more and more people coming up to you these days trying to get in your movies, or ask for help?”

She sips her white wine. “Yes,” she answers with a smile. “I am trying to get better at saying no to favors unless I really do have time to do them. If I said yes to everything, I wouldn’t have time to make movies! I am, though, a big believer in the feedback process. I discovered that giving other people feedback was really helpful for me. It helped me become a better filmmaker—all these years watching people’s rough cuts, reading scripts, giving notes. All of the times I’ve done that for other people was practice and totally benefited my own work.”

While watching Eden, I tell her, I had to stop, get up, go outside for a break. And when I did, I would watch the cars, suspicious of what’s in their trunks. I was hyper-aware of the possibility of human trafficking. How then, I ask, did she live with all the work of this script on her back for months?

“It’s a part of society that no one really wants to think about. But it does happen in America, not just in other countries. I was prepping for that movie two summers ago and spent a lot of time in my apartment reading articles about human trafficking. It’s beautiful and sunny outside and I’m holed up, submerging myself in this dark underworld. It was hard. But when it was time to actually make the movie, it became a lot more technical. There were some difficult times, though, for sure, like when Jamie was in the trunk screaming, that put everyone on edge. We had to do justice to the story.”

Megan and her crew had to maintain the impact of the script while not cheating by showing nudity or sexuality to arouse cheap interest. A difficult task. One thing I found myself surprised by, I tell her, was that the men who bought these women never decided to help them once their ordeal was done for the night. “How often do you think anyone would wonder about the backstory of a person they’re paying for sex,” Megan says. I’m quiet for a moment, the whole idea is so sad.

I take another sip of wine and tell her I loved the performance by Matt O’Leary, who played Vaughn, the film’s male lead. “He and Eden are the only people each other sees for years and so they become bonded,” Megan says. “I was very compelled by their interactions. And he was tremendous!”

In her features, Megan incorporates an interesting generational dynamic, always showing at least three sides of the same problem with a young girl, a young woman and an older woman. “I think it’s always interesting,” she says, “to have a character be able to look at somebody else and see their future.” I wonder, given her eye for detail, if she considers herself a writer or a director first. “I’ve been a writer the longest,” she says. “But I consider myself a director first—the ability to work in a lot of different areas, having a hand in a lot of different aspects of a film, that’s what I like.”

Our waitress comes up with yet another glass of wine. She puts a Rioja in front of each of us. “I just realized I’ve been giving you both fat pours,” she says with a smile.

“I’m going to get trashed!” Megan responds, a touch of playful nervousness to her voice. Shortly after, another waitress comes to our table with the next course: the stuffed pepper, the sauce spiraled beautifully over the plate. We pause from the conversation to take a bite.

Megan grew up writing short stories then got into photography. “My mother was a social worker and my dad was a chemist,” she says. “So I feel my career is the perfect intersection of my parents’ work because when using actual film there’s a lot of chemistry involved and my mom has an understanding of certain human behavior. Both my parents are very smart—I certainly can’t ever beat my dad in Trivial Pursuit.” In 1994, as a sophomore in college, she declared to herself in her journal that she wanted to be a movie director. As an undergrad, she studied arts and then earned an M.F.A. in film as a graduate student in a university that prompted its students to “try everything” in their discipline.

In the movie world one cannot escape the debate between the use of digital photography and film. Film incorporates a tangible, throwaway product wrought with chemicals (not to mention the myriad of printed scripts and food waste like empty bottled waters). Megan finds herself in an interesting place being a filmmaker, concerned with minimizing trash. “It’s hard to argue the sustainability of a reusable hard drive,” she notes. Our waitress comes up again and before she can take Megan’s plate, she reaches for the edible flower. “Oh yeah,” she exclaims. “That’s a tasty flower. It’s so tart!”

We muse on various vegetarian and vegan foods available in the Northwest. I tell her about some AMAZING vegan chili mac-and-cheese I got at a food truck in Portland in the Mississippi district. We share that we both eat Boca burgers. When our waitress approaches the table to ask if we’d like the dessert wine, a Merlot, or coffee, I say yes to the wine and Megan chooses the coffee. “Hemp milk?” asks the waitress.

“Why not?” Megan says.

The waitress leaves to bring us back our delicacies. “You know,” I say, out of the blue, “when I was a little kid, I could watch Sister Act over and over again. For some reason I could pop it in the VHS player anytime!”

“I was a Star Wars girl,” Megan says. “I liked watching the original three all in a row. I just introduced my niece to them. But the more recent three don’t count. I was so incredibly disappointed with those.”

“Are you a blockbuster gal?”

“I’m never going to go see something because it’s a blockbuster,” she says. The wine and coffee are delivered.

“I couldn’t stand the new Spidermans!” I say. Sipping my dessert wine, I tell Megan that, in The Off Hours, I caught a glimpse of a Bukowski book on the dashboard of the main actor’s truck. I bring this up because I am a huge Bukowski fan, having read dozens of his books.

“Good eye!” she says. “That was one of the few things that we had license to show on screen. Nowadays, you have to have permission to show just about anything. It’s a whole ordeal—another fun aspect of making movies! If you want to use Star Wars bed sheets, you have to get that okay’d by someone, or pay for it.”

Amidst the happy chatter at Sutra, the waitress approaches our table with the final course, huckleberries in coconut whipped cream, and places one in front of each of us. “Yum,” Megan says, licking her fork. “I grew up in Idaho, the home of the huckleberry. In Idaho you can buy Huckleberry-whatever-you-want. But this is really good!”

In a time when big business and big industry drive so much of the world’s creative production, it’s a pleasure to sit and chat with someone like Megan Griffiths. She came up via her own hard work, galvanizing talented people here in Seattle and making films on tight budgets. And by using these techniques and honing them through dedication, she brings community sensibilities to her work. It’s refreshing.

The night before our chat at Sutra, she was at a birthday party for Lynn Shelton where they did karaoke until the late hours. “It’s a hobby,” she admits with a smile. “When I moved here in 2000 I’d done it once before and it was miserable. I used to go and just watch karaoke singers, but eventually I got bored just watching. So I decided to try it again and I realized how fun it was! I like to think that people who come to Seattle to make a movie don’t get out without doing a little karaoke!”

As the evening winds to a close, and since I’ve had my fair share of wine, I begin to wax sentimental about the city. “It’s beautiful, it’s got so many talented people,” I say. “It was once the end of the road, in a way, and now seems to be the beginning of the road.”

“It’s such a visually stunning place,” she says. “There’s been times historically when attention has turned to Seattle, certainly in the Grunge era.”

“It’s a delicate balance,” I interject. “The more money that comes to the forefront, the more the idea of control comes into play. And that’s dangerous.”

“You don’t want to lose your roots, or stray too far from your DIY-make it work mentality. You want to save that aspect of the community, but you also don’t want people to run out of money and leave. It feels like there are a few successful hip-hop artists that are blowin’ up right now, but it doesn’t feel like labels are swarming in the same way as in the 90s.”

Megan, who was knighted at the recent Seafair on top of the Space Needle by Sub Pop co-founder Jonathan Poneman, says she moved to Seattle after visiting the city to see bands like Pearl Jam. “I loved Seattle music and so I came here when I had the opportunity to move.”

“Seattle feels like the Simpsons to me,” I add. “You can walk around town and see all these people you know, all these defined characters.”

It’s then that our check arrives in a neat faux-leather case. I pay it, gladly, throwing down a cash tip. We finish our desserts and exit the restaurant, walking into the balmy Seattle night. What started as a handshake prior to dinner, finishes with a hug after it. Megan turns then and heads east toward her car and I head west toward mine.