Tim was in the kitchen of his apartment for a bit, so I sat alone with Nora in the living room. Here she was: a girl, 19. A big girl, a beautiful girl--but no longer Eleanora.

"I'm so glad it's all over," she said. "I really got to hate the place. I just couldn't sleep there. It was so awful. You should have been there at the beginning." She smiled a bit. Her voice, a little shaky as always, steadied somewhat: "It was fun then. Everyone was laughing." And now, a little softer, a little sad: "But it got grimmer and grimmer as we went on." Her face went blank: "I'm happy it's over."

Tim came into the room.

"You know," he said, sitting on a chair next to Nora, "I think I'm a human being when I'm working--a rational human being with the same objectivity, the same responses, the same everything as when I'm not. But then I take a few days off and I realize I was wrong. I realize I wasn't human. I had no idea where I was at."

Nora made no perceptible response. Her eyes were wide open, but she wasn't looking at anything or anyone.

Tim talked about 3 Sisters, his last film. "Each production has a different atmosphere. 3 Sisters was an obsessive film, a deranged thing, but the process of making it got very calmly caught up in group morality. A kind of working morality developed and almost all of us got caught up in it.... I can't explain it well."

IN Eleanora, updated to the present from Poe, Tim has had to accept the supernatural element more than Poe did. Poe suggests that Eleanora's appearance from the dead came when the narrator (Steven in the movie) was hovering on the edge of total insanity. It was, perhaps, the power of his mental abberration that brought his lover back.

Tim, though, firmly believes that "the girl comes back from the dead....It's not in any way a dream. I believe every second of it. On this level, one speaks in terms of the supernatural as one speaks in any terms."

I did not understand. I could not accept the supernatural the same as anything else. It was inconceivable to me that one could cross the line between the real and the unreal, and dwell there. I could not see that one could merge his soul with a haunted quarry--to make a movie.

Tim explained, "When you get to work, you get to work. To some extent the project takes over. You have to immerse yourself in it without qualms--although I think there is something dangerous in that...it gets rough."

"And then I hit the bottle," said Nora.

"You started to resist the part," said Tim.

"That movie started to scare the shit out of me," she said now, "that's really what it was...."

And Tim repeated: "I'm not human when I'm working. It scares me too. It's not good to lose yourself in these things, there's got to be a pay-off somewhere. If Eleanora turns out to be a stinker, I think I'd go into a corner for a year and a half."

Now Tim would edit his film for six weeks at WGBH. Like him, I wondered if the ghosts of New Hampshire would be as real for the people who would watch the movie as for the people who made it