Was Walking and Talking your first feature film script? 

No. It’s maybe my seventh or eighth. I wrote my first after I graduated from college. Then I wrote a few in film school; the first couple I didn’t really show to anyone but a few friends and my mother. The better I got, the more I’d show them around. 

How and when did you come up with the idea of writing a film about a long-standing friendship being threatened by a love relationship? 

I guess it was after I had gotten some perspective on the time in my life when my closest friend had gotten married. It was a hor­rible year—a lot of fighting and all that—and I was really childish, and freaked out that she had found the love of her life before I had. She called me less, needed me less. She’d come over to visit me and then call him every 10 seconds—I didn’t adjust well to it. In retrospect, it seemed funny, and like a good dramatic premise. It was a big experience in my life, and I usual­ly write about personal things, so this one just came very easily. At least the first draft did. 

You said recently that when you wrote that first draft you were single, but as you worked on subsequent drafts you became involved with someone—whom you eventually married—and this contributed to your successively more sympathetic portrayal of the character of Laura. 

Yeah. [Laughs.] I realized, “Oh! Now I know what it’s like to be really in love and act like an idiot and ignore all your friends. Everyone should be entitled to this bad behavior once in a while.”

All of your male characters are sympathetically rendered: was that a conscious choice on your part? It seems like films of this sort written by women—Something to Talk About, Postcards from the Edge, Waiting to Exhale—tend to go hard; often justifiably, on the guys. 

It was and it wasn’t. With each draft, every character became dimensional—especially Andrew. People would read the script and say, “This guy is just too fucked up for anyone to be in love with, let alone to have sex with.” People thought he must be a gay guy acting like a straight guy because he was obsessed with his weight, which was more in the script than in the movie—as if a straight guy couldn’t be obsessed with his weight. And people would say he was just too rotten a guy. But I never saw him as that—he’s actually based on someone who’s close to me, and who’s a wonderful person, even though I’m sure he could hurt people and had been a mess at certain times in his life. So with each draft I wanted people to like the men more. There was also a tendency for Frank to seem passive, and I didn’t want him to be too wimpy, so those kinds of things I had to be conscious about. Bill was always Bill, though. 

Where did you come up with him? He’s a wonderful character. 

Thanks. A mixture of experiences led me to create the need for this character and for what he does to Amelia—and what she learns from it. I don’t know where I got his personality from. A guy at my video store used to ask me out, which was terrible. I mean, you’re in a video store on Friday night at 8:30, and he’s asking you out because he knows you haven’t got a life. You can’t say, “Oh, I can’t, I’m really busy”—which is what Amelia says as she’s holding a video in her hand. And it was frustrating, because I wanted to go to the video store—when I was single, it was like a second home to me—but I didn’t want to be assault­ed by this guy. But as for Bill’s involvement with horror movies and all of that stuff, I just made it up. And Kevin Corrigan embodied it 200 percent. 

It seems like most of these characters have fairly sketchy backgrounds, particularly regarding their respective work situation. Although there are scenes with Amelia in her office, Laura is the only person we see actually “working.” Also, most of the other characters—Frank, Peter, Bill and Andrew—are doing stuff they dislike basically to just pay the bills. 

I don’t think the job situations of the characters are that impor­tant to the story. I mean, if you’ve got 10 minutes to tell some­one about yourself, you can’t tell them everything; you only pick what the focus is of that particular moment. And when I think back on that period in my life, I don’t remember what script I was writing, or whether I had any money or a good job, I just remember thinking, “Madeleine’s getting married!” I did want to make the characters seem real, though: actually, there are more scenes with Laura and her job in the shooting script that were shot but which were ultimately cut out. They were about her struggle to be a good therapist—she wanted to get the approval of her supervisor in a couple of scenes—but it just took away from the main story too much. There was more about Amelia’s job, too, in the script. It just wasn’t what it was about. 

When I saw the film I got the impression that a real effort had been made to use realistic dwelling spaces, as opposed to the huge, expansive lofts that characters usually inhabit if they’re in a movie that takes place in New York. 

Really? Good. I really wanted that, because I hate going to see those kinds of movies. I wanted to actually shoot in studio apart­ments, but you can’t shoot in a studio because there’s no place to put the equipment. So I’d block off walls. I remember at one screening, at the question-and-answer session afterwards, some­body said, “None of these apartments looks like a real New York apartment.” And I said, “But that’s exactly what they are!” With some of them we didn’t even move the furniture around. For instance, Andrew’s apartment was the place of this guy who lived in the East Village—we didn’t touch anything, we just shot it as is. 

Several of the characters are either in therapy or attending a support group. My sense is you have ambivalent feelings—coming particularly to the fore with Andrew—about the efficacy of such things. 

I just think it’s funny that nowadays there’s a support meeting for everything. And with Andrew, yeah, he does go to his Coping with Alzheimer’s meetings more than he goes to visit his dad—­that’s just on the nose. In terms of therapy, I guess I have mixed feelings. Amelia has this therapist, but does he really help her? I don’t know. She’s growing, but maybe that’s just the natural order of things. And then there’s Laura, who’s a mess herself, who’s trying to help people as a therapist. Therapists are people, with their own huge problems, and while they can certainly be a help, they can also be a crutch, especially for someone like Andrew. 

Your dialogue really rings true—do you depend solely on your imagination while writing lines or do you have a memory bank of things people have said to draw from? 

Sometimes I do. I don’t walk around with a pad constantly scribbling things down, but sometimes I’ll remember a particular line somebody’s said. Usually I’ll remember it without knowing I’ve remembered it—I’m sitting down to write, and all of a sud­den I’ll think: “Oh, God, remember when that person said this about that…”; that’s when it comes back to me. 

How do you go about writing comedy? Do you know when a line in a scene is working, timing-wise, or do you read it to other people to get their reaction? Your short film, Angry, was very funny as well—

It wasn’t supposed to be... 

Really? 

I’m kidding. [Laughs.] I don’t really think of them as jokes, so I’m never quite sure whether other people are going to think certain lines are funny. Sometimes I write them without know­ing they’ re funny until a reading of the script, when some actor reads a line and it’s a crack-up—it surprises me. Usually I don’t run around thinking I’m writing really funny things. 

Do you write with any kind of an outline, or do you just let it flow? 

I’m sort of in between, but I’m more on the “let it flow” side. I start with characters, and I take notes on each of them: funny things they’d say or do, what they wear, bad things that hap­pened to them in their past, who they’re based on, who they look like, or what actor I would want to play them. That’s really fun; that’s the inspiring part of the process. And then it starts to get more burdensome. I start to create plots based on characters interacting with each other, and I’ll make some kind of outline that almost always disintegrates in the middle of the second act, because by then I’m so bored with plotting I just want to start writing. So I’ll just wing it and hope it doesn’t turn out too badly. At least it will get me to write. Sometimes if I’m bored, or I’m too bogged down by the plot, I won’t be able to write it; I feel intimidated by the structure, as opposed to inspired by the char­acters. So I’ll go with the inspiration. I can generally write a first draft this way: just figuring out “What would they do next?” And usually it’s completely different from even the very beginning of the outline. So-and-so talks so differently than I thought they would that they’re not the person I thought they were. They start to come alive. The script inevitably ends up being about some­thing I didn’t think it was about: you know, I think it’s about Betty buying a red dress, but if Betty’s boyfriend commits suicide in the second act and I hadn’t planned on that, the red dress isn’t important anymore. Strange example I used…

Although there is a very strong narrative spine running throughout Walking and Talking, it is composed almost entirely of short, “vignette-ish” scenes, which give it a casual, comfortable pace and feel. Is that the way you like to write generally, or did you just feel it would be suitable for this particular subject? 

I would say that in general I write that way—it just comes naturally to me. I don’t like to be heavy-handed. You know, I went to film school and they beat it into you not to have eight­-page scenes with people talking. Which can work—you go to the movies and there are plenty of them—but I was always afraid of them. I would love to write longer scenes. In other scripts, I’ve written at a different pace, but the short scenes seem to come naturally to me. 

A lot of the humor in the film comes from the timing of cuts between various of these scenes: I’m thinking, for instance, of the scene in which Laura comments to Frank about the pre­dictability of their sex life; then we cut to Amelia, alone in her apartment, then finally cut back to Frank, now in bed turned away from Laura. Did a lot of this come to pass in the editing room, or was that kind of intercutting something you’d envisioned while writing? 

In that case I knew the rhythm I wanted while writing it. I did shoot Frank getting into bed, though: it’s easier that way for the actor to make the transition. It’s also better to keep the camera running in case it happens to be funnier to show him pulling the sheets down or whatever. You don’t know what’s going to be funnier, what’ll make a better cut. But with something like that, I could really see it in my head; I was intercutting there to make a statement: “She’s lonely. They’re lonely. Ooh—everyone’s lonely.” [Laughs.] It’s a combination. Sometimes it’s a big surprise in the editing room: you cut something out and suddenly it’s much stronger. Probably the more movies you make the more you can know in advance, and the more film you can save. 

One of my favorite moments in the film is when Amelia calls Laura and Frank’s machine and goes off on the tangent about how her sponge smells like a hot dog. 

[Laughs.] Now what does that say about you…That’s right out of my friend Alison Rosa’s mouth. I didn’t make it up—she said it on my machine. It was the funniest thing I’d ever heard. But I don’t think she said it smelled like a hot dog, actually. I think she said it smelled like an amusement park—that was in the shooting script. 

So how did “hot dog” come about? 

That was Catherine Keener [Amelia]. We were trying to think of funny things it would smell like. We had disgusting things: “It smells like your butt, Laura.” She kept saying that. But then everybody was thinking, “But how would she know what Laura’s butt smells like? They must be lesbians. We’d better get rid of this.” Then it was “It smells like your armpits,” etc. It evolved. 

You also hit a nerve for anyone who s ever experienced that early-love obsessive phase in the scenes in which Amelia debases herself by either calling up the video store with a fake British accent or actually following, and then trying to hide from, Bill. 

I don’t think I’ve ever followed anybody, but I have called people before. Once I had my friend Madeleine call up some guy I was interested in and pretend she was a man: [deep voice] “Is John there?” Just insane. I was in my early 20s. That’s probably no excuse. That scene in which she follows him is the most desperate, the most pathetic. Catherine didn’t want to do it—it’s just so low, and so embarrassing. Actually, on one of the takes she stabbed herself in the eye when she ducked. She still went through with the scene: it heightened her humiliation. 

What about when Bill laughs at the fact that Amelia’s cat has cancer? 

People laugh at the weirdest stuff. Bill would laugh at that. My cat didn’t have cancer, but I remember a friend of mine’s cat fell out the window, and people would make horrible jokes—“Real­ly? It died? Don’t they have nine lives?” But here it just seemed so funny because it pointed out how ill-suited Amelia and Bill are as a couple. She really wants to be with someone, and they’re attracted to each other, but all the signs are screaming at her: “This guy doesn’t get you!” 

There are several scenes with Amelia and Frank alone; did you want to imply a certain amount of sexual tension be­tween them? In the first scene, where they get stoned together, I had an inkling they might end up sleeping together.

It wasn’t really in my mind. I wasn’t naive; I knew people would think that, and it was an option I’d considered—but I didn’t want that to happen. I felt there was already enough tension between the two of them that wasn’t sexual, revolving around the fact that they were now sharing this woman, and I felt that that was enough. I thought it would be really cliched—and a drag—if they ended up sleeping together. We’ve seen it before; it’s been done. There was enough drama there already. 

What about the whole subplot concerning Frank’s mole? 

What about it? You got any? Have you gotten them checked? [Laughs.] 

Was that just a way to foreground her anxiety about com­mitting to the relationship? 

I wanted something to embody her fear about everything ahead: being with one person, being with one person who could die, not being able to control the person—all those things. It was eco­nomical. As for him giving it back to her, that was one of those things you can’t plan. But when Frank is so mad, and Laura’s been bugging him about the mole, it just seemed perfect: “Yeah, he gives it to her in a box!” I don’t think that’s even possible once they’ve done a biopsy. I do, by the way, think it was a pas­sive-aggressive maneuver on his part. A lot of people see the movie and get angry with Laura for being so offended by it, but I think it’s a hostile move, just like her bugging him about it in the first place. 

It looks like you made a conscious decision to not treat any of the sex in an explicit way, although there’s quite a bit of it going on offscreen. 

Well, we shot a couple of sex scenes between Laura and Frank, and I wouldn’t have shot them if I hadn’t thought they were important, because nobody wants to do a sex scene, including me: I don’t want to direct it, I don’t want to watch it—it’s embarrassing. But here I thought it was important to show their connection, and their strong attraction to each other—that they really loved each other. But once we were in the editing room, it just didn’t fit; it seemed superfluous.    
   Also, the whole beginning of the movie is different in the shooting script. After the flashback scene, we cut to Amelia in her apartment, feeding her cat—which she obviously adores­—and the cat won’t eat anything, which is the setup that the cat’s sick. Then she calls Laura, and is talking into her machine­—“Pick up pick up pick up pick up…,”—and we cut to Laura’s apartment and she and Frank are making love. It wasn’t explicit, but it wasn’t shy, either. That was to show the huge contrast in their lives. After that it cut to them meeting at the coffee shop. It was confusing—the things that seem so simple on paper don’t always translate. Now it goes straight from the flashback to the coffee shop. I still think that’s one of the weak points of the movie—those first several scenes. But don’t get me started.... And then there was another sex scene, but it just didn’t fit. I think with comedy, especially, you can get the point across with­out having to show that kind of stuff. 

When did you finish the first draft? 

About six years ago. 

Was it a lot longer than what eventually became your shoot­ing script? 

Probably, although I usually don’t write long. Most of my scripts just naturally end somewhere between 95 and 110 pages. I showed that draft to a few friends to get some advice, one of whom was Mary Weisgerber, who had produced a short I’d made at Columbia. She said, “I know this guy named Ted Hope who’s produced a couple of things, and he’s starting up this company called Good Machine. Maybe he’d like it.” Prior to that I’d had a couple of things optioned for little bits of money—like a TV pilot, that sort of thing. So Ted read it and said it needed a ton of work, but he really liked it, and liked the short I’d done. He asked if I’d like to work together with him on it. Although he couldn’t pay me, I was happy to have a partner, someone who could produce it. And eventually, after six years, we did it. 

Did he give you a lot of notes? 

Um-hmm. He showed it to James Schamus, who became his partner at that time, and James gave me notes. My agent at the time, whose name I don’t even remember, gave me notes, friends gave me notes ... 

What kind of advice were you getting? 

Probably they were things about focusing on what, and who, the story was about. And advice about structuring it more rationally. “If it’s about this, then why is this scene here?” There was proba­bly a lot of extra stuff. Like Andrew and his relationship to his father: that’s one of the extra things that made it into the movie. That came and went a lot of times. I think Amelia’s mother was in it at one point. It just became more focused. After a couple of years of this, it got into the Sundance January Screenwriter’s Lab, and I rewrote it there, which was really helpful. 

Who were you working with? 

Alice Arlen was helpful, and I worked with Kit Carson and Syd­ney Pollack. And then I rewrote it again after that, which was probably the best rewrite. Then it got into the June Filmmaker’s Lab at Sundance, where I directed a bunch of scenes from it, and we did a reading. That was the best part, to finally hear the lines being spoken by actors. [Actor/director] Todd Graff played Bill, and was so funny—he played him as a real enthusiastic, sweet guy. I was laughing—everybody was laughing—and I finally felt like the script had gotten to a place where it was working. And then it changed again. 

How many rewrites did you end up doing? 

Probably 30 or 40. I never count. I just kept working on it all the time. I was doing other stuff, too: I wrote a couple of other screenplays, one of which I’m rewriting now. And I wrote for a TV show in Canada, and directed another short. 

Did you always write the part of Amelia for Catherine Keener? 

No. I didn’t know of her when I did the earliest drafts. Amelia was written with Joan Cusack in mind; I’m a huge fan of hers. And I wrote another script with her in mind, but I was never able to get to even the first stage with her. It was disappointing. So I’m not writing another script for Joan Cusack. Catherine has become my muse instead. I’d seen Johnny Suede at Sundance, I don’t know, maybe three years ago, and that’s when I went crazy for her. 

Did you have to rewrite the part for her? 

Not really. I didn’t change the words, she would just take them and make them her own. 

What about the other actors? When did they get involved? 

Anne Heche [Laura] auditioned early on, and I really liked her. At different points it looked like I would have to cast name actors, depending on who was going to finance it. When I had the opportunity to cast who I wanted, Anne had a lot of “buzz” and she was really funny—I loved the combination of her beauty and her humor. She can also be really vulgar, which was appealing. Like the “I’m farting” line? That’s totally Anne. I saw Kevin Corrigan in Living in Oblivion and a short film, and asked for him to come in and audition. After he did, I couldn’t picture anyone else in that role—and all of the actors wanted that part. Liev Schreiber [Andrew] was in Greg Mottola’s film The Daytrippers, and Greg suggested him to me for the part of Andrew. Todd Field [Frank] l saw in Ruby in Paradise.

You mentioned financing. When did that finally happen? 

It was during the June Lab at Sundance. Ted Hope had given a copy of the script to Dorothy Berwin and Scott Meek at Zenith Productions because he’d worked with them before with Hal Hartley, and they liked it and optioned it. This was the first time I was getting paid, which was great. They had notes, of course, so I rewrote it again—but at least I was getting some money, and there was a good shot at it being made at this point. It took them a couple of years to raise the money. They were going to get 75 percent of it from a company called WMG. When that looked like it was going to happen, my husband and I moved back to New York from L.A. and we started casting and hiring, and then WMG went under. This was two years ago. I had to tell everybody that it was a “no-go”—I was very upset. It was incredibly disappointing. 

These were all the actors who ended up in the film? 

Completely different cast. WMG needed name actors, so we had cast Jeanne Tripplehorn as Amelia, who had just come off The Firm. She auditioned, and was really funny, so I was happy. She was the only one who was really set. When the money fell through, Jeanne took Waterworld.

No comment. 

Yeah. When we finally got the money together again from five different sources, I asked her if she wanted to do it, but I think she was still doing Waterworld. [Laughs.] Finally, after a lot of casting problems, they said to me, “”All right, you can cast who­ ever you want, they don’t have to be famous,” and I went right to Catherine; she was my first choice. So it turned out really well; I didn’t have to worry about finding big stars to play all the leads, which I think was more appropriate for a low-budget, first-time film. I didn’t want it to be about the star; and I didn’t want to be worrying about the star on the set. 

Both of your leads are beautiful women, but they have a unique, quirky sort of beauty that seems appropriate for the characters they ’re playing. Was that important to you? 

I think Amelia and Laura actually turned out being played by more beautiful actresses than I would have originally pre­ferred—it just sort of shook down that way. You know, I really wanted people that looked like me and my friend. But ... the financiers wanted prettier people, and actually it just happened that they turned out to look that way, because I picked the peo­ple I wanted. If Catherine wasn’t beautiful, I think the financiers would have made a stink: “We said cast who you want, but not really anybody you want! She’s gotta look great!” 

Well, maybe it’s the modesty of the way they dress which plays into it as well. 

Right. That was very conscious on my part. The executive pro­ducers were worried; they wanted them to wear much sexier and fancier clothes, and I really didn’t want them to. You know, I go shopping—I know what kind of person can afford what kind of clothes—and I didn’t want us to be taken out of the reality of these characters’ lives. It takes place in the summer—you wear the same thing five days in a row till it stinks and then you put on something else. [Laughs.] No, I wanted it to be realistic, espe­cially in contrast to their beauty. If they’re gonna look that good, you’ve got to play it down. They were good sports about it. 

Did you have a rehearsal period before production started? 

We had about two weeks, an hour here and an hour there. It wasn’t a really intense schedule. We did a read-through of the script once with everybody. I didn’t rehearse with Bill and Amelia, because I wanted to keep them awkward, so they weren’t too comfortable with each other. Anne and Catherine and I probably rehearsed together the most. By the way, those two, especially, really hit it off—they’d go out to dinner together, that kind of stuff. I was so grateful, because I don’t know what I would’ve done if they didn’t like each other. Anyway, all of the rehearsals were really invaluable, especially because they gave the actors a chance to tell me what they didn’t like about their characters, and they improved upon the script. 

Can you give me some specifics? 

Well, there were a lot of lines of dialogue changed. You know, they’d say, “Oh, I’d never say this, I sound like an idiot.” Liev gave Andrew a lot more dignity than I had given him on the page. He really wanted it to be clear that he cared about Amelia and wasn’t just using her. Actually, I do remember one specific thing: there was a scene in my final draft with Amelia and Laura, on the night before Laura’s wedding, sitting in inner tubes on the lawn in their pajamas, talking to each other about the strength and spirit of their friendship, and how it would prevail despite the marriage. Whenever we rehearsed that scene, though, Anne and Catherine were resistant to it­—I think they thought it was stupid. Eventually they said, “Something’s wrong with this, what are we trying to say here?” They both really wanted to do a scene in the water since we had this beautiful lake, so we rewrote the scene to just have Amelia holding up Laura as she floats on her back in the water, which worked well. 

How long was the entire shoot?

It was five five-day weeks. It wasn’t a lot of time, but we story­boarded and planned really carefully. Also, I cut out so much from the script—

How much?

I don’t know, probably five percent of the script had to be cut out because of the schedule. Small things, transitions, that I thought were really important and I wish were in the movie. Like when Amelia’s cat has fallen out of the window and you cut to her walking down the street, carrying groceries. It’s an abrupt transition; I think it’s clumsy and it really bothers me and I can’t watch it. I would have like to see her at the checkout counter at the supermarket—just for a few seconds—interacting with the checkout person. I would have liked to shoot her with a really long lens walking down the street toward the spot where the cat had landed. Also, a shot where you could see the crowd from far away. You know, have her say “hello” to a neighbor, or mail a letter—whatever. But it could have taken seven hours to shoot the grocery store scene. So little things like that got taken away. I also cut a lot of establishing shots—you know, ”EXT. HOUSE” shots, with people knocking on the door or whatever—thinking all that stuff wasn’t important. I thought it was more important to use the time to focus on the meat of the scene, but now I know it’s all important. We actually went back and shot a couple of exteriors when we were editing, very small things that gave you a chance to breathe. 

There seems to be a very conscious choice on your part as director to keep the camera’s presence as low-key as possible. I can’t even recall that many extreme close-ups. 

It’s just a style I like a lot. We actually did shoot a lot of close­-ups; whether we ended up using them all, I don’t know. Although there are a lot more medium close-ups, I guess, and medium shots. I just didn’t want things to seem heavy-handed. I don’t like that. Also, comedy can be played out so well when you see the person’s body—when they’re moving around the room, stuff like that—so if it’s working, you don’t have to push it any closer. 

Was the editor’s first assembly a lot longer than your final cut? 

No, it was short. Alisa Lepselter did an unbelievable job—­it’s as if she read my mind. When we were shooting, I would come in a couple of times to make suggestions, but that’s all. Our first cut was about an hour and 45 minutes—so no disas­ter there. If anything, I got kind of brutal and chopped away. When we found out the movie was down to 87 minutes I thought, “Oh my God. We can’t cut anything else out even if we want to!”

So what kinds of things were among the 15-20 minutes of stuff you cut out? 

The opening scene I talked about, and a whole sequence of Laura at work with her supervisor. And a great scene with Laura and Peter, the actor. After the play, he asked her out again and they go back to his apartment, so it’s more like a real date. He makes her dinner and he kisses her and then she leaves, wigged out. That’s right before they go to the lake house. And then there’s another scene with Peter where he takes Laura to a party—and this is right before the wedding, she shouldn’t be doing this—and she gets sick and throws up in the bathroom. Peter tries to comfort her but it’s not work­ing. Those scenes were all really great—Randall Batinkoff was terrific as Peter. Those scenes worked, but they didn’t work in the movie—they were taking too much away from the story of Laura and Amelia. It was horrible to have to cut out good acting and hard work. 

And you sent Sundance a take of this last cut? 

We’d been cutting for a month, and sent them a videotape off the Avid. It took a long time to hear from them. I kept hearing things like, “I think you’re in.” “You’re unofficially in,” “I heard from someone you’re in.” But I didn’t believe it. When I finally found out I felt so happy, and surprised. 

Wasn’t there some difficulty in getting a print to the festival in time for the first screening? 

You mean the plane? It was the second night of the festival, and the first screening of the film was scheduled for, I think, 10:00 p.m. And we had a plane that took off from New York at 8:00 a.m., so we thought we’d have plenty of time. We get on the plane, which was delayed to begin with, and then one of the passengers has an anxiety attack while we’re on the run­way, so we have to turn back and start over. We finally get in the air, and about half an hour into the flight we’re told that something is wrong with the cockpit windshield—they thought maybe a bird had hit it—so we had to turn around again. We were saying, “Oh, so what, keep going.” We didn’t know how dangerous it was until we were getting off the plane and we passed the cockpit—the entire windshield had been shattered.    
   Then the weather got bad, and we tried to get on other flights, but everything was either delayed or booked. As the day progressed, I became increasingly depressed—the plan was to try to sell the movie at that first screening, and it now seemed virtually impossible that that was going to happen. And my family in L.A. was flying to Sundance to see the movie that night. Finally, Ted and James decided to hire a plane. [Laughs.] You should hear the embellishments now: “The producers had a plane flown in from Israel.” Where did that come from? Wouldn’t that have taken a little bit of time? [Laughs.] What happened was, there was a plane-for-hire at LaGuardia. We all got on—it was a five-person plane, scary—and we got to Sundance and there was a car waiting. So we tossed the film­—which was an uncorrected print from the lab we’d picked up that morning—in the back, drove up to the theater, threw it on the platter and started the screening about 45 minutes late, which was not the greatest, because an audience starts to get pissed off when it has to wait that long. 

But I understand the reception was great. 

I don’t think it was the best screening we had. Miramax did buy it that night, so that was great. Sundance was thrilling. It was amazing to sit in the back of the theater and watch something that had happened to me, and caused me some pain, turned into something funny, something that people could relate to. I felt proud, although of course there were several things I’d still do differently. 

How did you get Billy Bragg to do the score? 

I loved him, and had listened lo his music for five years. I wanted to meet him. [Laughs.] I mean, he basically scored my life, especially during this period the movie’s about—those days were Billy Bragg days. Anyway, I asked Ted if there might be any chance in getting him, and he called his manager, who said he seemed interested. So we sent him the script and he liked it, then we sent him the rough cut and he liked that and sent back some melodies, which were great. He eventually came to New York and we worked in the studio for a couple of nights. Instinctively, I felt he would be right, and it really paid off to follow my instincts; his music provided just the right tone. 

This feels like a “New York movie” to me. 

I never felt that strongly that it had to be about New York. It just didn’t occur to me to put it anywhere else. This is where every­thing took place, this is my home. There were times when we were looking for financing that we thought we’d shoot it in Toronto—or Milwaukee, for that matter—because New York is such an expensive place to shoot a movie. And that was fine with me; I would have shot it anywhere to get it made. 

Do most of the scripts you write tend to be for this type of character-driven, relationship-based film? 

All of my scripts are fairly similar in the milieu, I guess. I’ve written one that was a little bit different, that wasn’t a comedy, and wasn’t based on any kind of personal experience. I want to begin to do different things.

Is there a particular filmmaker you feel you have some debt to, who’s had an influence on your work?

I love Elaine May—The Heartbreak Kid is one of my favorite movies. 

Are you interested in directing other people’s scripts, or, for that matter, writing something for another director? 

I can imagine—especially if I needed the money—being hired to rewrite something if a director was already attached. Right now, I’m reading things that other people have written to possi­bly direct. I haven’t really found anything yet, but I’m open to it. I don’t feel like I have to preserve some image of myself as auteur or anything. But I’m not sure I will end up directing someone else’s script—you really have to love it—although I want to take advantage of the opportunity, because no one has ever sent me scripts to look at before. 

So Hollywood is knocking? 

Yeah, a little bit. I’m getting scripts I never would have gotten before, with name actresses attached. I ask myself, “What, are they kidding?!” It’s very wild, and weird, but it’s great, whether I go that way or not. I mean, I didn’t have a lot of success in Hollywood when I lived there—I did a lot of pitches—so it’s ironic in a way. 

(The interview with Nicole Holofcener was conducted by Tod Lippy at her apartment in New York City.)