Every film begins with an idea .
They told me to speak with Laurel, the author of the book, which I did. And the two of us clicked. From the very beginning, I had the idea of interweaving the story of Martha Ballard's life with Laurel Ulrich's process of piecing it together. It is the job of a film's producer to raise the funding for the film . Scripting and production grants came several years later from the public program division of the National Endowment for the Humanities.