Rose Troche

Rose Troche (born 1964) is an American film and television director, television producer, and screenwriter.

Troche was born to Puerto Rican parents and grew up on the north side of Chicago.

In an interview she stated, "My parents thought moving to the suburbs was a sign of success," and "We were always the family that made everyone say, 'There goes the neighborhood.'" She and her family moved to the suburbs when she was a teen.

She started working part-time at a movie theater where her interest in film developed.

She earned her undergraduate degree in art history from the University of Illinois at Chicago and went on to get a graduate degree in film.

Troche is a lesbian.

She met Guinevere Turner (her then partner) in the early 1990s.

They began to work on a film based on their own experiences and their friends in the Chicago lesbian community, which they originally titled "Ely and Max," but was changed to Go Fish.

Troche began her professional filmmaking career in the 1990s.

Troche is just one of several lesbian directors who launched their careers with independent gay-themed films and have gone on to find work in Hollywood, where women make up just 12% of the Directors Guild of America membership.

While studying at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Troche made several short films while in school such as Let's Go Back to My Apartment and Have Sex (1990), This War Is Not Over (1991) and Gabriella series of short films in (1991–1993).

Rose Troche did three features before she went into television, Go Fish, Bedrooms and Hallways and The Safety of Objects.

These three films were made over the course of ten years.

After completing The Safety of Objects, Troche realized that she had only directed so much content and wanted to work on her craft of directing.

She wanted to work on projects that were immediate work not something that was going to take three years to make.

By 1993, Troche and Turner ended their relationship and Troche moved to New York where she wrote several scripts.

Rose Troche says mixing business and romance on a lesbian film set can be a recipe for disaster.

Turner and Troche detail how their breakup during the middle of Go Fish's production was not only difficult for them personally but also trying for their cast and crew, who felt compromised by the fighting couple's palpable tension on the set.

Her directorial debut was the groundbreaking film Go Fish (1994), a lesbian love story.

Made on a shoestring budget, it was one of the truly "independent" films of the mid 90s, and certainly one of the first in the lesbian genre.

It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1994.

The film was co-written and co-produced with Guinevere Turner, who was Troche's girlfriend at the time.

The film was released during gay pride month in June 1994 and eventually grossed $2.4 million.

Go Fish proved the marketability of lesbian issues for the film industry.

Troche mentioned that during the filming of Go Fish (1994), at one point she didn't have money to pay her phone and electric bills.

The film also put a label on her and critics considered her "a professional queer", a fact that she sometimes hated: "Go Fish made me such a card-carrying member. It is, like, boring. I go into interviews for Bedrooms and Hallways and all anyone can talk about is being gay, gay, gay."

"If you're gay, and you sleep with someone of the opposite sex, does that make you straight? Troche muses afterward. "I've done it, and I don't consider myself straight at all."

Troche lived in London from (1997–1999) until she returned to United States to direct The Safety of Objects (2001).

To make sure she would not forget the film's lesson, she had "remember that this life is short" tattooed on the inside of her left wrist, in Spanish, as she was writing the script.

In 1997, Troche moved to London to direct the film Bedrooms and Hallways (1998) with British producer Dorothy Berwin and her partner Ceci Dempsey.

The film was backed by a major studio so it was completed fast.

It was a film that was exploring the romantic complications among a diverse group of gay, straight, and undecided characters.

Her next feature film was Bedrooms and Hallways (1998) which explored sexuality.

She also directed The Safety of Objects (2001), which was adapted from the short stories of A. M. Homes and focused on heterosexual love in suburbia.

She was also a producer for both Go Fish and The Safety of Objects, as well as for Stacie Passon's 2013 film Concussion.

Rose Troche, a Latina director teamed up with her then partner and co-writer to finance on their own an experimental lesbian feature.

It was the first film to be sold to a distributor during the Sundance Film Festival.

With the small amount of approximately $8000, started their road to a Samuel Goldwyn $450,000 sale.

Help along the way with Vachon's company Killer Films who contributed $5000 when funds ran out and John Pierson bankrolled the remaining $53,000.

"Troche's Latina identity was (problematically) written out of the marketing campaign and the film was promoted on the basis of her gender and sexuality."