What was brave about Katrin as Claire Dolan was that she played each tryst, each sex scene, differently and was aware of Claire's complex feeling about each episode, with complete conscious choice in every moment. Sex scenes in movies are the most difficult scenes for actors and for their directors. No matter how much bravado you may have, the looming sex scene is always on your mind when you're shooting a movie. It demands that you direct that much more consciously, and it demands that the actors act more consciously, and it's tough to stay in that purity and not be shackled by your morals, comfort level, self-consciousness and embarrassment.

Often directors and actors give up in the sex scene, stop doing their jobs and just hope that nature will make it look right! Katrin and I had many conversations about her approach to this character, and it was in these conversations that I became aware of what a brilliant artist she was. She talked about how she needed to be sure that each sex scene in "Claire Dolan" was furthering Claire, that each one was needed. She felt she needed to bring something different to each tryst: Sometimes Claire is bored, sometimes scared, on a few occasions she's even a little into it, then catches herself, or even numbs herself with the activity -- she played all of these.

I also became aware in my talks with Katrin about "Claire Dolan" that we directors, even in Indiewood, often treat actors as meat puppets, even at our best. We write these characters and select the person we expect to best manipulate into the performance we have in mind. As high-minded as I had always felt I was in my casting and my work with actors, and the freedom I allow actors (for which I am always appreciated), I had never really let them own their characters until Katrin and I talked about her process. I had always felt deep down that I owned the characters. Much as I adored and cherished the work of my actors, I felt that they were cast to do and be what I could not physically do or be.

But Katrin owned her characters. All of them. She may not have created them alone, but she only signed up for the ones who called to her, and called to her intensely. God knows she was not careerist, but she was also not foolhardy or lofty. She was very practical and knew how she needed to live in order to continue to answer her calling. When she got down to the core of these characters who called to her and needed her to bring them to life, she owned them. And then she did what only actors can do -- she gave them away. Directors and writers can't do that, only the great actors can. She taught me this. Imagine being given such a gift.

And what a friend! When I moved to London for a year, Katrin was my godsend: She was English, but also something of an outsider, so she possessed a brilliant, objective, often hilarious view of the city. She understood my frustration when things didn't make sense to me. She would laugh and say, "I know, but Allison, you're in a shitty neighborhood!" (This was Kensington.) "You need to move up where I live." She drove me around Belsize Park, and I fell in love with the place where she had been raised and found a house just blocks away from the flat she shared with Peter.

Katrin also defied being English by being an outrageously great cook. She was proud of the string of garlic she had hanging in her window. In fact, this was how you were directed to her flat: "Look for the garlic in the window!" Her mother is Jewish and had sought asylum in England in the late '30s, which was one of many reasons Katrin always felt somewhat of an outsider in London, even though it was her home. She laughed that when she was growing up her English friends never knew what to make of her because of her mother's garlic in the window. Telling me all this while she's effortlessly whipping up the most incredible, generous meal. She's the first person who taught me how to use vanilla bean -- I always thought that stuff came in a bottle.

She even got my notoriously hard-to-cook-for son Ruben to eat, and then she challenged him to a game of Scattergories. We worked in teams: Peter and I, and Katrin and Ruben. They won. Ruben's 12 now, and when I told him Katrin was dead, young and unexpected, he was especially affected. Before I adopted Ruben his own young mother had died suddenly. He was quiet for a long time and said, "Well, that really sucks. She was so nice."

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