Actresses Amanda Seyfried and Jennifer Garner paid their respects to Gary Winick, the director who died on Sunday of brain cancer at age 49.
“Gary’s heart was so big I think each of us who loved him have a piece of it now,” Seyfried tells THR. The actress starred in Winick’s last film, Letters to Juliet, which was released in May 2010.
“It’s unreal that he’s gone and I’ll miss my friend more than I can say,” she adds.
Garner also fondly recalls her 13 Going on 30 director.
“Gary and I had the most successful collaboration possible,” she tells
Entertainment Weekly. “I don’t mean success in terms of box office, or from anyone else’s point of view other than my own. I left it better at what I do. He was one of the most inclusive people you could ever meet, and I was energized by our creative mess together everyday. From then on, there wasn’t a single project that I didn’t try to do with him.”
“I think everybody who was a friend of Gary’s considered him one of their best friends. He had a hundred best friends. He just was unafraid of being intimate. And that spilled over into his directing. His whole company, InDigEnt, was based on trying to find a way to fold everyone in, being 100 percent invested in the movie, because they were going to profit from it if the movie was successful.
“Even in a frothy romantic comedy, he found what was really human about a scene, or about a character, or about a moment. That’s not always easy or pretty. [While filming 13 Going on 30], he wasn’t afraid to bring the writer in and change the words completely and start again. So it was messy, but I loved every minute of it. I really, really loved him.”
In 1999, Winick founded InDigEnt, which went on to produce nineteen independent films over the next 10 years, including Winick’s Tadpole, which he sold to Miramax for $6 million at the 2002 Sundance film Festival.
