A director is something like a chef -- bringing together different ingredients, combining them in novel ways, subjecting them to heat and pressure to create something new.

And looking at "Julie & Julia" for the first time, Nora Ephron didn't see how anything edible could come from it.

"I had first read a piece about Julie's project in the Times," says the filmmaker, referring to original writer Julie Powell, "and I thought, as I do about almost everything: Is this a movie?"

The project Powell had embarked on was to cook every one of Julia Child's recipes from "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" -- the first volume, anyway -- and blog about them. It took her a year.

"And," Ephron says, "I thought no. No it's not, a movie. Or at least, I don't know how you make it into a movie. A person decides to do something, and they do it, and it's done. It seemed too straightforward."

But then Ephron is kind of straightforward, too -- and, like the practical chef the film celebrates, usually able to find a way.

Eventually -- thanks to, Ephron says, a smart suggestion from studio executive Amy Pascal -- a clever script for "Julie & Julia" emerged, one that created flashbacks (and re-created post-war Paris) to bring Julia Child to life too, and push her center-stage.

And with it came a movie, featuring a sweet turn by Amy Adams as the amateur cook, an Oscar-seducing performance by Meryl Streep as the formidable chef -- and a probable hit for Ephron.

None of which is too surprising, once you glance over the recipe for her own life.

Take two writers.

Marinate in alcohol.

Nora Ephron was born in 1941 in New York, but grew up in California, where her playwright parents had relocated to work in the movie business, trading the Bronx for Beverly Hills.

They specialized in musicals, doing original scripts for "There's No Business Like Show Business" and "Daddy Long Legs." They dreamed up the charming "Desk Set," with Spencer Tracy as the efficiency expert who wants to introduce -- oh no! -- a computer into Katharine Hepburn's paper-and-pencil research department.

What they didn't specialize in was developing any normal, centered kind of family life. The parents' cocktails were strong, and the cocktail hour started earlier and earlier; family dinners were a competitive sport of jokes and storytelling and their four daughters (Nora is the oldest) didn't get much in terms of hand-holding.

It's something Ephron accepted, even came to appreciate. She has little patience for whining; she much prefers doing. (That's particularly clear in "Julie & Julia," which often pushes aside the dithering Powell to focus on the "very capable, pull-your-socks-up" Child, says Ephron, "who was truly a spectacular Wasp in the best sense.")

If sympathy was in short supply, what was valued was a writer's cold objectivity. "Everything is copy," Ephron remembers her mother telling her. (Her parents even turned Nora's letters home from Wellesley into a Sandra Dee comedy, "Take Her, She's Mine.") Even on her deathbed, years later, Phoebe Ephron told her daughter, "Take notes."

Screenwriting was not a career Ephron aspired to. She hated the way women were treated in Hollywood; she hated Hollywood, where she felt dark and plain and out of place. She was, briefly, engaged. She did an even briefer stint in Washington (where, she wrote later, she was "probably the only young woman who ever worked in the Kennedy White House that the president did not make a pass at").

And then she moved to New York and changed her life.

Add ink, wit.

Wrap in paper.

"I didn't at all want to go into the movie business because I'd grown up in L.A. and I didn't want to live there, which you pretty much had to then," she says. "And I certainly didn't want to do what my parents did. So I became a journalist -- which to them, in terms of rebellion, was the equivalent of becoming a polar explorer."

It was the heady days of the New Journalism -- writers like Jimmy Breslin and Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson were breaking down barriers, reinventing models, inventing language, crossing the line. And Ephron joined them.

But she brought a different taste to it, and not just because she was a rare female journalist. She wrote about Bobby Riggs, feminism in Israel and her embarrassment over her small bust. She examined Julie Nixon Eisenhower, consciousness-raising groups and Helen Gurley Brown.

She embraced pop culture and politics equally, yet -- that Ephron thing again -- kept her distance. "Wallflower at the Orgy" she called her first book, and that was her approach to this rowdy and radical new world. Boy, this is exciting! Boy, this is amazing! Boy, I can't wait to leave, so I can go home and write about it!

And then, she says, "the movie fairy flew over Manhattan, and suddenly everyone was writing a screenplay. And suddenly I was, too."

Spice with betrayal.

Bring to boil.

Ephron did a few things for television and then in 1983 co-wrote the script for "Silkwood" -- and she was lucky, or maybe blessed. Her old friend Mike Nichols was directing; Meryl Streep was to star.

"Making that was so much fun," Ephron remembers. "There were all these people, which was quite a contrast from sitting in a room with your typewriter. Suddenly I found myself on this learning curve that I really didn't expect myself to be on."

She was still, of course, in Hollywood terms, "only" the writer. ("Usually the most you get to do on set is occasionally whisper something in the director's ear before they swat you away like a bug.") But Nichols was patient, and generous. "Watching him," she says now, "was like being paid to go to film school."

Along the way, Ephron had already divorced her first husband, the humorist Dan Greenburg, and married her second, the Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein. She had divorced him too, in 1980, when she was pregnant and found out he was cheating.

But still, "everything is copy." Everything. So, after the split, Ephron turned all the pain into an angry, artful, only flimsily veiled novel "Heartburn." And eventually Nichols turned that into a film, too, with Streep and Jack Nicholson.

Revenge is a dish best served onscreen.

Ephron followed that with "When Harry Met Sally," directed by Rob Reiner. With co-stars Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal -- and an extraordinary scene in Katz's Deli -- it became an immediate classic. Yet Ephron's next two pictures -- "Cookie" and "My Blue Heaven" -- well, not so much. And it started her wondering.

"You know, sometimes you write a script and the movie that's made out of it is better than you ever dreamt," she says. "And, sometimes, it isn't. And you think, you know, I could have made just as big a mess of my screenplay as the person who got paid quite a lot to do that. And at the very least I won't have anyone else to blame."

The other thing that led her to directing was her gender.

"When I started, I think about 98 percent of directors were men," she says. "Now, maybe, it's 93 percent. And, you know, most men really don't want to make movies about women. They just don't. And I had written a script called 'This Is My Life' (about a woman starting a career as a comedian). And I realized nobody is ever going to direct this but me."

They may have had other reasons; once it was in theaters, the movie didn't connect with audiences or critics. But Ephron's next effort, "Sleepless in Seattle" -- a clever romantic comedy, with a nod to that great weepie, "An Affair to Remember" -- became another instant favorite. And proof of that old Hollywood maxim: Nobody knows anything.

"I never know if it's working," Ephron says. "The summer we were doing 'Sleepless in Seattle' was, on many levels, a divine experience. I had two great actors, everyone was a doll, you had this marvelous Northwest sun. There was not a moment of tension -- and still I look back on it and think, it would have been 10 times more fun if I knew it was going to be a hit. But you don't. You never do."

Adjust flavorings.

Serve with relish.

If Ephron doesn't know how an audience is going to react while she's shooting a movie, she knows soon enough afterward as -- like everybody who works for Hollywood -- she sees those first-weekend box-office results trickle in.

Her directing career has been hit or miss -- but, frankly, mostly miss. "You've Got Mail," an e-mail revamping of the old "The Shop Around the Corner," was a huge hit. "Mixed Nuts," "Michael," "Lucky Numbers" and "Bewitched" definitely were not.

And as a screenwriter -- well, Nichols and Reiner retain their record as the only other directors to get her. (The disappointments include Susan Seidelman's "Cookie," Herbert Ross' "My Blue Heaven" and Diane Keaton's "Hanging Up," which Ephron wrote with her sister and occasional collaborator Delia.)

So there is a lot riding on "Julie & Julia." The woman needs a hit -- and if Ephron were her mother, middle-aged and at the height of her career, she'd be worried.

But she's not. Ephron is 68 now, and far more centered than her parents ever were. She finally met a writer she can happily live with (journalist and "Goodfellas" screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi, whom she married 22 years ago). She has two grown sons, a wide circle of friends, and is a self-taught but widely admired cook. (It's her meatloaf recipe that's served at Manhattan's Waverly Inn.)

And as she hilariously detailed throughout her recent essay collection, "I Feel Bad About My Neck," she has learned what she can control, and has come to calm terms with the rest.

"Actually, control is a kind of hilarious word when it comes to making movies," she tells me. "There are so many things involved. There are X number of people in a scene who can say the lines in an almost infinite number of ways, and may make your lines better, or worse. And the variables! Someone has a cold. Or the costumes don't look right. Or it starts to rain. The idea of controlling any of it is rather laughable."

She takes a moment.

"But when the picture comes out, and it's great?" she says. "That's one of the great thrills of life."