Tod Lippy: In your 1968 interview with Mike Nichols, he and you both seemed to agree that L.A. is, in fact, an easier place to live than New York. Nichols, though, concluded with, “But who says that’s good?” If New York isn’t necessarily the easiest place to live, what makes it so valuable as a context for working (particularly, writing)?

Nora Ephron: Actually, I disagree with Mike about the premise. I have been in L.A. for several months now, and it is nowhere near as easy a place to live as New York. In fact, one of the most mystifying things to me is that people don’t get how much easier New York is. I mean, the subway alone.
   But to answer your question, I’m one of those people who grew up always knowing that when I got things sorted out, I’d live in New York. My parents had moved us to L.A. when I was four, and—I am not exaggerating—I knew at the very moment I saw it that a terrible mistake had been made. New York is the place where I feel most at home, where I feel I have to do next to nothing in order to belong, so that automatically makes it a wonderful place for me to work or write. And now that I’m in the movie business, it’s even more thrilling to live there (as opposed to L.A.) because people there don’t think the sun rises and sets on whether you have a deal. New York has always been a print-driven city, and it’s still a place where the written word rules.

In an article about You’ve Got Mail, you said jokingly that the genteel, almost homey New York City the characters inhabit in the film was at its “Giuliani­ fantasy best.” Do you think one could characterize that New York as very “Ephron” (much as one would characterize the NYC of After Hours or Bringing Out the Dead as very “Scorsese”)? Does it reflect in some way your actual experience of the city?

I’ve probably always had a very romanticized view of New York, and now, finally, the reality of New York has caught up with it.

You were raised in L.A., the child of Hollywood screenwriters. You thought to yourself as a young woman that you “would have committed suicide before (a) staying in L.A. and (b) going into the movie business.” You’re one for two. Would you ever move back to L.A.?

I don’t think I could ever live in Los Angeles all the time. There’s nothing wrong with it for a few months, although you have to use a lot of moisturizer.

In your first collection of essays, you likened your journalist’s role as observer to being a “wallflower at the orgy.” You’re writing fiction these days, but I was curi­ous to know how many of the details in your screenplays—at least the stuff that adds background texture to your films—come from witnessing people and things around you, particularly given the rich source material New York provides.

Most writers can only write what they know, and we were certainly raised to believe that. My mother must have said it once a week. And of course, the other thing she always said was Everything Is Copy. When we were doing You’ve Got Mail, Delia and I pretty much fed our view of New York right into every detail of the script. Our neighborhood, our failed neighborhood bookstores, our views on coffee, our passion for email, etc. One night while we were writing You’ve Got Mail Delia got stuck in the elevator, and the next day the character Tom Hanks plays in the movie got stuck in an elevator in the script. When Harry Met Sally, which is not at all autobiographical, is a script that I always thought of as a direct result of all those years I spent writing essays—in this case a movie version of an essay on love, or dating, etc. And it’s full of my observations—and Rob Reiner’s—from years of falling in and out of love and dating. There’s always a certain amount of reporting involved in what I write. I try to make the scripts I write as specific as possible; one of the most frustrating things to me about some of the scripts I read is how generic they feel.

Numbers, as far as I can tell, is your first directing gig working with someone else’s screenplay. How does it feel to be approaching a job solely from the directorial angle? Is it “cleaner”? Did you work with Adam Resnick before or during shooting?

I met Adam Resnick after I read his script, and we worked for several months on the screenplay. He is a wildly funny writer. Since we began shooting, we’ve pretty much been shooting the script, and very few revisions have been needed.

When your novel Heartburn was adapted into a film, more than one New York reviewer grumbled that it had been “de-ethnicized” with the casting of Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson (definitely not Jewish) as the two leads. Was that something that surprised you at the time?

I never thought of Heartburn, or of any of my writing, as “Jewish.” Which is not to say that I’m not in a Jewish tradition, etc., etc. The whole idea of Heartburn—the whole tradition of turning a terrible story into a funny one—is probably pro­foundly Jewish. But it never crossed my mind that for it to work as a movie it had to be performed by—who?—Barbra Streisand? And if it didn’t work as a movie, I don’t think it was because it was “de-ethnicized.”

Your most successful films to date (You’ve Got Mail, Sleepless in Seattle) feature leads who not only generate enormous box office (and who, of course, are enormously appealing), but who also happen to be definitely not Jewish. Do you think middle America prefers it that way? Or am I being too cynical, or for that matter, paranoid? If the answer to the “middle America” question is “yes,” does it reflect a conscious choice on your part (both in the writing and casting stages)?

Tom Hanks is Jewish.

Critic John Leonard once called you a “blithe moralist.” If you think that’s an accurate moniker, could you talk about how and why that attitude has informed your approach to the subject matter which interests you (whether it be Deep Throat or chain bookstores)?

I love that John Leonard once called me that, but I can’t say that that’s really how I respond to anything. But I do have a tendency to enjoy seeing both sides of things, and that certainly seems to me to be the thing that characterized my work as an essayist and as a filmmaker. There are lots of ways to tell a story, and I like staying open to more than one of them. One of the things I like about You’ve Got Mail is the moment when Meg Ryan’s character walks into the huge bookstore and suddenly realizes it’s not all bad.

Do you read reviews? And if you do, are you ever inclined to respond to critics?

I don’t read bad reviews if I can help it. I certainly have read some, though, and they kept me up at night thinking of ways to respond to the people who wrote them, and that’s one of the main reasons I stopped reading them.

You once said that “The romantic comedy was killed by sex.” Can you elabo­rate, and talk about how that’s affected your take on the genre?

What I mean is that in the thirties and forties and fifties, when people didn’t gen­erally have sex before they got married, it was possible to write a romantic com­edy that went on quite a while before sex reared its head, if at all. Then along came modern life, and people leapt into bed the minute they met, so it was hard to think of obstacles to becoming lovers. That’s one reason why When Harry Met Sally works, I think—it found a very nice obstacle, the friends thing. And, of course, Sleepless works because it found the nicest obstacle of all—they don’t know each other. But you pretty much have to go that far these days to come up with an obstacle that sustains you in a modern romantic comedy.

While we’re on the subject of genres, do you have any interest in returning to more dramatic stuff, like the script you co-wrote with Alice Arlen for Silk­wood? Or is there something inherently more satisfying to you about comedy, romantic or otherwise?

Alice and I wrote a wonderful movie about a correspondent in the Korean War, and I have been trying for several years now to get the money to make it—and to cast it so that I could get the money to make it. The studio I originally wrote it for was willing to make it last year, but the actress I wanted for it wouldn’t cut her price so it would work. It’s been very very frustrating and sad, to be honest, because I certainly never wanted to make only romantic comedies or even come­dies. Although I do truly enjoy making comedies.

For whom do you think your movies are best suited? Do you have an ideal audience in mind when you’re writing?

No.

When Scribble Scribble came out, you were quoted in an interview as saying, “The act of doing a column forces you into figuring out what you think about a subject.” Do you find yourself undergoing a similar process before you begin a new screenplay?

Not always. Sometimes. Sometimes you think things through beforehand, and sometimes you don’t really get to thinking about themes until you’re through with a first pass. Screenplays are very different from columns. I think the closest I ever came to the process of writing a column when writing a screenplay was When Harry Met Sally, which is a sort of series of essays about dating. But I didn’t really figure out what the movie of When Harry Met Sally was about until we did the junket.

I know Lubitsch’s Shop Around the Corner served as an inspiration for You’ve Got Mail. Are there any other classics you’ve thought might be particularly suitable for updating/contemporizing?

Probably, but I can’t think what they are. I mean, there are all sorts of movies that work well whenever they’re done—Clueless as a reinvention of Jane Austen’s Emma is a perfect example—but then there are movies one probably shouldn’t go near with a ten-foot pole. The problem with updating romantic comedies, of course, is that sometimes the obstacle to love that worked perfectly well in the thirties doesn’t work at all now. It Happened One Night, which is probably the greatest romantic comedy ever, is all about class differences, but no one today would ever buy the idea that a journalist couldn’t marry an heiress.

Do you feel like you’re part of a filmmaking community in New York?

No. The good part of living in New York and working in the movie business is that you’re not part of the filmmaking community. The filmmaking community is in Los Angeles, and many of the people there are obsessed with the details of that community—who just got cast in what, which script just got auctioned for a trillion dollars, who’s about to be fired, etc. These things are not important, and it’s nice to live in a place where that’s understood, and where the culture is not dominated by film but by print and theater and art, among others.

Do you find the production experience (attitude of crew, dealings with residents, etc.) to be different in L.A. from how it is in New York?

There’s no question that dealings with residents are the same in New York and Los Angeles: people who live in either place are very used to film crews, and are basically bored witless by them. They are impatient with large lights and noise all through the night and traffic jams and the general inconvenience caused by people making movies. This is one of the reasons why we went to Sacramento on the last film l did (the one l just finished shooting): we needed to shoot for ten nights, and to turn a small neighborhood into a snowscape, and we knew we would never find a neighborhood in Los Angeles that would agree to it. But the people in Sacramento were thrilled to have us there, and couldn’t have been nicer about all of it. They stayed up all night for a glimpse of John Travolta, etc. l haven’t noticed any difference in crews in Los Angeles and New York.

Some time ago, you remarked on “the difficulty intelligent people have in dis­tinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive.” Can you give any recent examples from the film world?

That remark rings a bell. From about twenty years ago, I think. I don’t see that many examples of this in the film world, but I see it all the time on television, where it seems to me the urge to push the envelope has become pathological.

When you were writing your column on women and the woman’s movement in Esquire, and later New York, you talked about how much easier it was to “reach people by making them laugh than by shaking a fist and saying don’t you see how oppressed you are.” Do you still think of your work as political, or “politicized,” at least with regard to feminist politics?

I don’t think of myself as political. I think that I have politics, but I don’t think they’re what drives me in any way as a filmmaker. I have certainly turned down a script because I was offended by its politics, but it was probably a script that wasn’t particularly well written either. Silkwood was the most “political” movie I’ve ever done, although my approach to it was as journalistic as it was political. I did a huge amount of reading about Karen Silkwood, and it seemed to me that the stuff that was written about her by people who were either “for” or “against” her told you absolutely nothing about her and why she did what she did. This is what we tried to do in the movie, just tell a story about how sometimes the most unlikely person does something heroic. But if you asked me, and Alice Arlen, and Mike Nichols what political point we wanted the movie to make, I think we’d all have different answers. Mine would be about the exploitation of labor by large American corporations, not about feminism.

Is there a particular characteristic you’d ascribe to the majority of films you’ve seen by New York filmmakers?

Well sure. I think they’re smarter than films made by Los Angeles filmmakers. Don’t you?