The idea of hanging with Sandy was almost motivation enough. Apparently, it was her idea that I direct. We’d hit it off at a Sundance party, and she’d seen my short film that premiered there. Later, I would fly to London to meet Nicole on one of her rare days off from shooting Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. Instead of pitching my take on Practical Magic, I used our time to interrogate her about working with Kubrick. After our lunch, I gave Nic a chaste kiss on the cheek before she stepped into a waiting car, both of us unaware that paparazzi were lurking. The next morning, one of the British tabloids had a grainy shot of me leaning into Nic’s face for what looked like a real make-out session, under a headline blaring something like, “Who is This Cad Nicole Is Cheating on Tom Cruise With?”
On my second, more in-depth reading of Hoffman’s novel, I found certain themes that ran parallel to my life story, themes I might have understood more than most, which became my gateway to embracing the unpredictable, terrifying, and wondrous belief in magic.
The most glaring comparison I originally overlooked was a throughline of trauma that haunted three generations of Owens women. From grandmother to grandchild, these three sets of two sisters were powerful characters possessed with passion, willfulness, bravery, and devotion to each other. Powerful women raised me, and my mother raised a fearless daughter. My grandmother was from Mexican aristocracy, and her passion drove her to ditch her fiancé at the altar to marry my gringo grandad across the border. She was a tough old bird who’d been stung by scorpions so many times she was immune to their pain. She raised her only child, my mother, on a cattle ranch in the border town of Nogales, Arizona. My mother had a lonely childhood. Her only companions were characters from her favorite books and a collection of Deutsche Grammophon records she begged her father to buy when he was in Tucson. Only mariachi music brought her out of her shell, and when I was a child, I remember her singing along to lyrics she knew by heart about sad cowboys and two-timing women. Her only daughter, my little sister, was named Dominique, and though she’d never been stung by scorpions, she and her abuela never suffered fools. My sister’s love for family, friends, and animals was intransigent, and her boundless curiosity taught her to master gourmet dishes and the Italian language, and blessed her with an empathy that could detect a suffering soul like a dog whistle only she could hear. I now find myself a father to a fourth-generation daughter who is as strong-willed, animal-loving, empathetic, and sometimes as intimidating as the three women that came before her.
