“Bee Season,” the film based on Myla Goldberg’s acclaimed novel of the same name, is the third feature from co-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel. Their previous films, “Suture” and “The Deep End,” traveled a prestigious circuit of festivals and garnered critical acclaim for, among other attributes, a “mesmerizing sense of style.” “Bee Season,” though it had as auspicious a beginning, with its world premiere at the 2005 Telluride Film Festival, has fared less well with critics. But critics and audiences, as we know, don’t always agree.

I was fortunate enough to be in the packed house at the premiere, and I fell a little in love with the Naumann family portrayed in the film—the achievement-oriented, spiritually ambitious father, the mother distracted by private sorrow, the son whose idol loses interest in him, and the daughter who’s taken her brother’s place in their father’s thoughts. Their lives together are filled with unspoken yearnings—for security, for wholeness, for each other. Siegel and McGehee recently shared their thoughts about the story’s themes, about their casting decisions, and about the rewards of making the film.

In your public statements about “Bee Season,” communication and connection are words that recur frequently. In what way are those concepts at the crux of the film?
SM: Well, we started out thinking about Myla Goldberg’s book along those lines, that she had built this story about spelling bees and permuting words back and forth and Kabbalistic, mystical practice and chanting and Krishna practice, and all of this kind of language use was the background for telling this story that was essentially about this family that couldn’t talk to each other, that (was) living together quite effectively but really (wasn’t) communicating effectively.

DS: One of the things that’s interesting about the story is the way language becomes extremely specific and utterly bankrupt of meaning, all at the same time. And that’s an age-old issue, right, in lots of different religious practices … when you turn the thing that we use for communication into something that isn’t specific at all, mantras and meditation and all of those things do the opposite with language (than) what we normally use language for. And that is one of the things that Scott and I really admired about the plot devices that Myla chose to use to get at some of that.

The most elusive and difficult part of the film for me was also the most elusive and difficult part of the book—the character of Miriam (the mother, played by Juliette Binoche). Have you heard this from others, and what can you say about her?
SM: Yeah, she’s an elusive and difficult character. We hear that all the time, that there’s something very enigmatic about the way she is in the world, and, yeah, I think we also felt that in the book she was hard to grasp, and we struggled a lot with how to bring her to the screen, what changes we might make in her character—as we were fleshing her out and putting a real person in the place of a literary character—what changes would help. We were anxious about making her feel reductive, that she’s a person who these things happen to and therefore she has these problems. Coming up with too pat an explanation for her seemed like a dangerous road.

DS: You never really want to be able to say what’s wrong with Miriam exactly because then … the beauty of what’s going on for her gets lost…. Let’s just say, hypothetically, Miriam’s got Asperger’s, and it started when she was 6, and that’s when she stole her first object, and then her parents’ death kind of launched it into blah blah blah—there’s nothing really beautiful then. I mean, there is, I guess, just in the way that a human soul is beautiful, but then Miriam’s sick, she’s got a sickness, as opposed to a good degree of (the spiritual gift) her daughter might have.

SM: Once you put a person in the role, she kind of fills it up with her own humanity, and Juliette’s humanity somehow seems richer than so many other people’s. She’s got such a deep, soulful presence onscreen…. There’s something that is really rewarding about the depth … that you get from just watching a human through a camera.

Richard Gere, who plays the father, has taken a lot of criticism for his work in the film. Do you think it’s difficult for people to see beyond the whole “Pretty Woman” thing, even now?
DS: It has surprised us, actually, the way people have reacted to Richard because I think his performance is great. I think it’s some of his best work and super-credible and right for the role. I do think for some reason he still gets tagged with being a bit light and vain, and I don’t get it exactly. Especially given, you know, we know a lot of actors, and Richard’s one of the more insightful, intelligent and deeper humans (among them).

SM: It really does feel to us like it’s a problem people have with his celebrity, somehow confusing his gifts as an actor with the roles he’s played or something. It seems … that people don’t want to see him do things beyond the roles he became famous for, which seems incredibly shortsighted and limiting.

How does a director, never having worked with an actor, see past the stereotypes that the average person reading a tabloid can’t?
DS: We had the good fortune of having met Richard prior to casting him, but I think even if you just look at Richard’s work—if you look at “Unfaithful,” and you look at “Chicago”—there’s a lot of breadth to who he is onscreen. For the most part, we try and actually discard what we know personally about people and look for what they might be able to do, in the bits and pieces of their work.

How much work goes into editing? Is it difficult to let things go?
SM: You know, it’s interesting—we cut and cut and cut this movie, and rearranged things and trimmed and reshaped and so on. In the end—we noticed this when we were going back to look at deleted scenes for the DVD—very few scenes, actual, whole scenes, got cut. What it mostly was—and this is part of why it was such a long but also rewarding process—is we found ourselves really just trimming from within scenes, just bringing scenes down to their essential interactions, and so in the end, most of (what) we shot made it into the film.

Are you able to experience the magic that happens in your own films or, standing behind the camera, is it just all business?
SM: I think it’s difficult once the film is finished to really see (it) as we hope someone in the audience does…. At the point the film is finally done, we have such a practical relationship with it, and all the struggles and decisions and everything—I think we tend to see them rather than the movie. And when we’re standing behind the camera, I think, (are) the exciting moments when it is magic, when we’re seeing actors do their work and seeing the set that’s come together and the lighting. And relying on our memory of those bits of magic is one of the tools we have for putting the film together.