When Kat Candler yells "Quiet on the set!," you look around to see who said it. The voice is soft and girlish with a spunky charge. Amid the bustling scrum of film crew, which looks umbilically entwined by cables and walk-talkies and headphones, your eyes locate Candler, an unimposing young woman with a choppy page boy, no makeup and the unruffled bearing of someone who is glad to be exactly where she is.

That would be the set of her new film, "Jumping Off Bridges." It is a hot and humid night in the foliage-choked backyard of a South Austin home. Lights, monitors and cameras jam the area. Faces are glistening and bugs are biting. "Who needs Off?" a producer shouts.

Assuming there is a prototype for how a movie director looks and acts (virile, despotic), Candler doesn't fit the part. That sweet voice and unassuming presence. The endlessly kind words she has for her crew, which not only must be talented but "nice." Her tendency to tear up when the actors nail a scene. Her modesty and inclusiveness. Her optimism. Her hugs. So mild-mannered is Candler that she only took up the caffeine habit for the duration of the shoot, which wrapped earlier this month.

The four lead actors of "Bridges" — teenagers Glen Powell, Bryan Chafin, Savannah Welch and Katie Lemon — are sitting in an empty brick swimming pool, where their characters are plotting a big bridge jump into Town Lake.

"Quiet on the set!" Candler yells, sliding on headphones. "Roll camera! Slate! And . . . action!"

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Candler demands action frequently. She is a rising star in the Austin film community who hews snugly to the independent, do-it-yourself orthodoxy that has always driven the scene, from Richard Linklater's no-budget classic "Slacker" to Candler's own "Cicadas," her 2000 feature debut that became a festival-circuit hit. She has made several short films, including the sensitive and understated character study "Roberta Wells," which played at last year's Slamdance Film Festival.

Candler is one of the few local filmmakers actually making films, not procrastinating, dreaming and postponing, not allowing niggling obstacles like money to stump her.

"I don't like to talk about doing things," Candler says a few days after the outdoor shoot. "I don't like wasting time. There's only so much time in the world."

Candler, 30, doesn't even like to talk about what her movies are about, but she likes talking to people, and her socially curious mind probes and prods the person who is interviewing her. ("I'm a terrible interview," she says.)

She asks as much about me as I do about her. ("What's your middle name?" "What's your favorite place you traveled to?" "Do you read books on film theory?") Eventually I have to snap off the tape recorder, because it's taping too much about the wrong person.

And so a couple days after the interview Candler sends me two e-mails that might help fill in the gaping blanks. The first one begins: "I've been trying to think of interesting/stupid facts about myself. Here are a few." The second one: "More stupid stuff."

A sampling:

"I've bitten my fingernails ever since I can remember. They're so short it usually frightens people. Sometimes they bleed."

"For some reason I don't close cabinet doors. It drives my boyfriend batty."

"I want to work with Kate Winslet. I think she's the bees knees."

"I have a cat named Pork Chop. He's missing one eye and about 3 to 4 teeth."

Thanks, Kat. But what about the movie?

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"Jumping Off Bridges" is "very loosely" based on a boy with whom Candler attended eighth-grade in Jacksonville, Fla., where she grew up. The boy's mother killed herself, shaking the boy and his group of friends. "It's basically about the people who are left behind and how they deal with it," she says, then hesitates. "I hate to get into the autobiographical part of it."

"Bridges" concentrates on the teen friends in the aftermath of a parent's suicide. They like to jump off bridges — they call it recreational jumping — and the performers were filmed leaping off the Pfluger and Zilker Park bridges (The City of Austin waived bridge-jumping bans for Candler's film.) Did she jump? "No, of course not," Candler says. "I don't even do rollercoasters."

The young actors have performed in various television and movie projects. Chafin played the alienated 10-year-old boy in "Cicadas" the same year he appeared as Mel Gibson's son in "The Patriot." Candler sifted through dozens of audition tapes to fill the teen roles. "I pride myself on picking good casts," she says. "I'm really proud of the cast I put together for this one."

She's particularly proud of netting film and television actor Michael Emerson, who won an Emmy for playing a serial killer on "The Practice." He portrayed a violent freak in the horror movie "Saw" and will appear alongside Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones in "The Legend of Zorro."

As a teen in Florida, Candler, a wannabe actress, took a Shakespeare workshop from Emerson and has since followed his career. "He was the bomb in the theater world in Jacksonville," she recalls. With Emerson in mind for the role of a teenager's father, Candler sent her script to his agent. Within days, he called expressing interest.

Emerson was impressed by Candler's less-is-more aesthetic. "The script has a quiet integrity," the actor says from his New York home. "It's really simple and the dialogue is true to life and completely genuine. It's a mature screenplay."

Candler "loves" pre-production and she plans her shoots meticulously. In January she began storyboarding the "Bridges" script, which was a semifinalist in the prestigious Sundance Screenwriter's Lab; by March she had her shooting schedule down. She rehearses her actors, usually by sitting them down for several rounds of the card game Spades. It's more about bonding and familiarity than dry-running scenes. Unlike many microbudget indie movies shot on digital-video, Candler shot "Bridges" on Super 16 film for a warmer, more naturalistic look.

Candler recently became a principal at the Austin-based Storie Productions, founded and run by filmmakers Lorie Marsh and Stacy Schoolfield, who are co-producing "Bridges." They won't discuss budget specifics but are gushy about the armada of local businesses that donated food, services and equipment.

"There's strength in limitation," Schoolfield says as she leads me around the movie set. When people ask her if "Bridges" is a low-budget production, she snaps back, "No, it's a we're-gonna-do-it-anyway production!"

This week Schoolfield, Marsh and Candler got a double dose of good news. "Jumping Off Bridges" was one of nine films out of 109 selected for an editing workshop at the Independent Feature Project Market and Conference in September, and Candler won $5,000 for post-production costs from the Austin Film Society's Texas Filmmakers' Production Fund.

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Acting was Candler's first calling, until she took acting classes at Emerson College in Boston and "hated it." She returned to Florida in 1996 to study creative writing at Florida State University, where she wrote a short play that a teacher suggested she turn into a screenplay. She started working on friends' short films before trying to make one herself. She moved to Austin in the late 1990s and took film workshops from Steve Mims at Austin FilmWorks.

Her first big work was "Cicadas," a meditative drama about teens figuring out relationships and being together. It won the audience award at the 2002 Austin Film Festival and numerous accolades at smaller festivals. "Bridges" returns Candler to the dramatically rich territory of juveniles, as will her next movie "Brain Brawl," a semi-autobiographical comedy set in the bruising world of eighth-grade academic decathlon teams.

"I'm like stuck in adolescence," Candler explains. "It's a very romantic age."

Her films are slow and voluble, moving to languid Southern rhythms and the beat of ordinary conversation. "People talking and their relationships, that's what I love, just normal, everyday life," says Candler. Not surprisingly, her favorite films include "To Kill a Mockingbird," "The Last Picture Show" and "The Ice Storm."

"I always want to do things that are honest and that feel real," she says. "It doesn't matter if it's a big budget movie or a small movie, just as long as I can relate to it and other people can relate to it."

Before college, Candler had no idea how movies were made. They were abstract mysteries that simply materialized on the screen. Now, even though she doesn't know how to load a camera or light a scene, filmmaking is in her blood. (But a job at a software company pays the bills.)

"I make movies because I love the process. I love the process of moviemaking and I love the process of collaborating with people. I love getting to a set and seeing people who are excited to be there. I love rehearsing. I love actors and the people I choose to work with," she says.

"I'm not good at anything else. This is what I like. I have to do this."

cgarcia@statesman.com; 445-3649