Brent Lang Executive Editor When Patricia Arquette decided to make her feature film directing debut with “Gonzo Girl,” she made a promise to her cast. “I told them that I would always edit everything for the acting — even if the camera work wasn’t the best in that take or some thing didn’t match from a continuity perspective,” she says a week before the movie’s big premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. “I don’t think someone has ever edited my performance directly for the acting, so I wanted to do this greedy, delicious thing for my ensemble.

I wanted to create a space for great acting.” It helps, of course, that the star of “Gonzo Girl” is none other than Willem Dafoe, a four-time Oscar nominee, as well as rising talents such as Camila Morrone of “Daisy Jones & the Six.” And that kind of creative freedom, and not big salaries, was presumably what attracted them to this low-budget, very indie adaptation of Cheryl Della Pietra’s semi-autobiographical novel about her roller-coaster tenure as Hunter S.

Thompson’s assistant. “It was a high-speed chase the whole time,” says Arquette. “We had three weeks to shoot the whole thing.

The creative process was terrifying. We had no money. I hadn’t done this before. It was like learning on the job.” And though the hallucinogenic-enhanced, gun-toting, sunglasses-wearing, always-intoxicated writer that Dafoe plays has more than a passing resemblance to Thompson, he’s been rechristened Walter Reade for the purposes of “Gonzo Girl.” Arquette and Dafoe were also careful to provide some distinctive shadings (the actor doesn’t imitate Thompson’s distinctive patter, for instance). “Neither Willem nor I were interested in doing some caricature of Hunter S.

Patricia Arquette on the Actors Strike and Directing the Hunter S. Thompson-Inspired ‘Gonzo Girl’: ‘We Have to Fight For Our Art Form’

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