"I'm a romantic at heart," says Julia Stiles. But anyone familiar with the actress' most indelible roles, from the flinty Kat Stratford of 1999's "10 Things I Hate About You" to the vengeful Lumen Pierce on "Dexter," would know that her romantic streak has been leaning a little dark for decades now. So perhaps it's inevitable that when, after years of searching for the right project for her directorial debut, she gravitated to novelist Renee Carlino's wry tearjerker, "Wish You Were Here."
Stiles, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Carlino, described the wistful love-at-first-sight tale with a heartbreaking time limit as being "about the fragility of human life." The movie is "more mature than just the age of the characters," (played by "Orphan" star Isabelle Fuhrman and "Aladdin's" Mena Massoud), Stiles said.
