‘Carrie’ Is Back. So Is Kimberly Peirce.

Catherine Opie for The New York Times

"I don't know if I believe in the supernatural, but Brandon Teena's story entered me in a weird way," Kimberly Peirce told me. "From the day that I read that story, it was always my responsibility." Peirce was a graduate student at Columbia's film school when a friend gave her an article about Teena, who, though born a woman, passed as a man for years, until his biological sex was discovered and he was raped and murdered. "Maybe it's because I'm a queer person, or maybe it's because I'm a human being, but I love Brandon so much."

Peirce took a series of odd jobs to pay for the production of a short film about Teena, which she was ultimately too broke to finish. She couldn't afford to get the dailies out of the film lab, but the producer Christine Vachon saw footage and adopted Peirce, much as Peirce had adopted Teena. It took five years, and there were many challenges, including uncertain financing and the threat of an NC-17 rating, but together they made "Boys Don't Cry," the feature version of Teena's life, for a little over $2 million.

The film, released in 1999, was an immediate sensation, not only because of the subject matter but because it was, by any standard, a remarkable directorial debut — powerfully told, visually assured and filled with breakout performances by relative newcomers, including Hilary Swank (who won an Oscar for her role), Peter Sarsgaard and Chloë Sevigny. The film made nearly $12 million, and suddenly everyone in Hollywood was asking, "What are you making now?" Peirce spent the next nine years trying to answer that question.

Peirce and I had arranged to meet at her friend's house in Malibu, near where she lived after the success of "Boys Don't Cry." We intended to take an early-afternoon walk along the beach, but she forgot to check for high tide, which left us with only a foot-wide strip of sand. So we stood there rather comically, our backs pressed against the wall of the house, two very pale people in excessive clothing on a sweltering August afternoon. Peirce has lived in Los Angeles since 2003, but still regards herself as a New Yorker, which explained her beachwear: red pants, long-sleeved T-shirt, black motorcycle jacket and boots. She reminds me of Swank as Teena: small-boned, gently seductive, androgynous yet pretty — a butch sprite.

We gave up on our walk and moved to the house's deck, where I tried to get a handle on the large gaps in her career: the nine-year hiatus between "Boys Don't Cry" and her second film, "Stop-Loss" — long by even early Terrence Malick standards (he took just five years between his first and second films) — and the five-year break between "Stop-Loss" and her new film, a remake of "Carrie," which opens Oct. 18. But as Peirce pointed out, what might have seemed like a disappearing act is instead a fairly good representation of a movie business built for easy paychecks and commercial compromises, not for making the kind of personal, character-driven films she favors. She wasn't interested in many director-for-hire gigs, turning down, among other films, "Memoirs of a Geisha." And finding the kind of project she wanted to do next took a lot longer than she expected. "That's the kind of director I am. I rewrite and make sure it's good and make sure I care and make sure it's human," Perice said. "Because they do take three or four years per film." After "Boys," she "was still in the mode of, I'm going to find a story that means something to me."

In 2000 she stumbled onto the scandalous 1922 murder of the Hollywood director William Desmond Taylor, a case that remains unsolved, and turned it into a script called "Silent Star" for DreamWorks. The project "was very complicated," says Pamela Abdy, a producer who worked with Peirce on "Stop-Loss." "She spent a year and half of her life trying to pull that movie together. She takes a long time to do research." Peirce believes that she solved the murder in the process of investigating the story and co-writing the script. "Steven Spielberg loved it," Peirce said. "I had Hugh Jackman, Evan Rachel Wood and Ben Kingsley cast. We had a proposed budget of $30 million. But then DreamWorks ran the numbers, and there was a $10 million gap. I said, 'I'll cut $10 million.' And they said, 'But we don't want you to do that, because the $20 million version wouldn't be lavish enough.' Crazy, right?"

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 28, 2013

An article on Page 22 this weekend about the film director Kimberly Peirce misstates the number of children her mother had after marrying the son of the late Puerto Rican singing star Tito Rodriguez. It was two, not three.

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