On the relationship between criticism and personal taste

Nicole Holofcener has written and directed seven films including Walking and Talking, Friends With Money, Enough Said, and most recently You Hurt My Feelings. She co-wrote the Oscar nominated screenplay for Can You Ever Forgive Me?, as well as collaborating on the script of The Last Duel by Ridley Scott. She has directed numerous television shows including Enlightened, Parks & Rec, Mrs. Fletcher and the soon to be released Hulu show Phony.

I was reading the interviews that you’ve done for your past films, and I think that it’s funny that everyone wants you to answer for all women all the time. Like, “So, what’s it like being a woman director?” Or your movies being chick-flicks. I’m just like: her movies are movies, and she’s a director. That must be so annoying.

Thank you. It’s annoying, it’s getting better, but it’s like I want to participate in supporting women and women in film, but when will it just be us people as people, not women?

When I used to work in tech, I didn’t really think about being a girl as much as when I was in a room full of dudes and they kept asking me what it’s like to be a woman. I’m like, “Well, I don’t really think about it that much, but now that you’re asking me, I guess I have to think about it.”

Just because they’re asking you doesn’t mean you have to answer them. I’ve said things like, “Oh, well, I pee sitting down.” And then they’ll say, “Well, so do I,” and I’m like, “Well, you’re a weirdo.” It’s just such a silly question. People ask me the state of the industry, and the state of the industry for women, and is it getting better? I live in my own little bubble, and it’s always hard to get something made no matter what. I think it’s getting harder and harder. But I can never give statistics or anything, I’m not a producer trying to get 10 films off the ground, I’m just trying to get my one.

Do you want to talk about the years before you made Walking and Talking?

I wrote the script six years prior to making the movie, so I just spent time writing and writing and rewriting, casting, losing casting, getting financing, losing financing… Other than that, at that point, I think I was working as a secretary. I taught English as a second language, which is easy and kind of fun. The video store was earlier. I wrote something for this show called Ready or Not, which was Canadian. I wrote my film school thesis, It’s Richard I Love, and then I got paid to turn it into a pilot. I wrote the pilot and it never got made. But that’s when I joined the Writer’s Guild. So, it was a combination of making small amounts of money in the industry, with my own work, and then regular jobs. If I had a better memory or time, I could come up with more things that I did, but it was kind of piecemeal to make money. And I had help from my family too, so I wasn’t starving.

How do you stay motivated in between projects? Or at least when you’re making your first movie, when you have to keep telling yourself, “I’m doing the right thing.”

It’s funny, I just found a postcard that I sent to my father, and it said, “God, will I ever make it? I feel like I’m spinning my wheels. I hate the script I’m writing, I’m so sick of it. What’s the point? What if I don’t make it?” And it was sweet to see that. I mean, it was painful at the time, but you never know. And that just proves it. I mean, I was as insecure and fearful as the rest of us trying to make a feature. But I stuck with it. I felt like somewhere inside of me, I felt like, “This is going to happen.” I also felt like if this doesn’t happen, I’m not going to die. Maybe spiritually, but not literally. And I had support. When I wrote the script for Walking and Talking, immediately I had Ted Hope wanting to produce it. So, when things were looking really, really bleak, like losing financing, losing a cast member, stuff like that…Whenever I felt like, “I’m done, I’m done, Ted, I can’t do this anymore, it’s humiliating,” he would say, “No, we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it.” I was really lucky to have that kind of support. He was the one dragging the script around trying to get people to make it. I had a lot of meetings that led nowhere, but he was always there and that really helped.

Catherine Keener has been a big collaborator in your career, and you’ve worked with Julia Louis-Dreyfus a few times. Can you talk about what you’ve done in order to foster these kinds of strong relationships?

I can have a lot of fun when you’re collaborating with somebody where we just get each other. With Catherine, it just built. She knows exactly what I want, and she probably wants the same thing. And same with Julia, we just have such a good time, and I think we both feel it’s very safe to come up with bad ideas, good ideas. She loves to be directed; it’s a relationship. When you work with the same people over and over again, there’s a comfort, and you get to know each other’s tastes really well and work from there too.

How did you develop your own personal taste?

Just practice. It’s so intuitive. And probably watching really, really good movies over and over, and becoming aware of what I love and what I hate. When you see something in a movie and it’s like, “I’m never going to do that,” and I could feel it bubbling up in a scene, and it’s like, “Oh no, no, no, no, this is what I hate, let’s change it. This feels too corny.” Or it worked on the page, but it’s not working now. You’ve got to be open to changing things. I just trust my gut. My gut is telling me what my taste is, and what I like, and what I want to put out there, and what I don’t.

I don’t think you can learn… I mean, I guess I learned to have a certain taste, but it was very organic. Watch a movie, and you know what you like and what you don’t like. Well, at least I do. I think a lot of people watch movies and just enjoy themselves. But as a director, you’re not allowed to enjoy yourself, you have to watch very carefully so you don’t make the mistakes that others have.

Sometimes I’m jealous of my friends who can just watch things and enjoy them just for the sake of enjoying them. I’ve been writing a lot more film criticism this year, and it’s almost exhausting when you keep on disliking things. But it’s such a valuable learning experience, where I appreciate the things that I like so much more.

I agree. I now watch movies, there’s a night rain scene, and I’m thinking, “Oh god, that poor crew. I’m glad I wasn’t there for that.” I can still definitely get involved in this story, but I am also like that. “Boy, they’re cutting around that actor a lot. Why are there all these very close up singles of just them? This is curious.” It can be distracting and annoying to whoever’s sitting next to me watching a movie with me.

It’s funny now where it’s like there’s this expectation that I have certain opinions about things. My friends will ask me about stuff, and if I don’t like something and I just don’t want to argue with them, I go, “It was fun. It was cute,” and that just shuts everything down.

They don’t know you’re condescending to them.

You don’t want to be the person who hates everything. I don’t want to be a negative person, so I think that’s the difficulty sometimes.

But you love things, too? Right?

Watching a movie you don’t like, nothing worse than that feeling, but watching a new movie for the first time that you’re falling in love with, that’s one of the best feelings in the world. Which is how I felt when I watched Walking and Talking last year.

You saw it last year for the first time?

Yeah, and then I bought it on eBay immediately on DVD.

That’s so cool. Well, you’re the right age for it speaking to you.

There’s a human aspect to your films—a lot of movies I watch now don’t have that anymore. There’s also this level of empathy. I wanted to know more about how you keep your brain fed and how you find your stories.

I wait for inspiration, and I can make money in other ways, like directing TV or doing writing jobs in between movies. Because I don’t make a lot of movies, there’s big space between them. I wait for my curiosity to tell me what I want to explore. For instance, my last movie, You Hurt My Feelings, I was just thinking about dating a guy who didn’t like my films. Because they’re so personal, it feels like they’re me. How can you like me but not get the movies? And so, we broke up, but not quite that easily. The idea can be: Can my husband love me and not love my work. That’s how a movie starts, then once I start writing based on that idea and that character, it becomes about a lot of other things. But generally, I start with a theme.

How many drafts do you typically write?

I have no idea. So many. So many.

When you’re editing, how do you know what to keep and what to rework?

Taste, instinct, guts. I show it to people, I take in a lot of opinions of friends and colleagues, people I trust. But ultimately, “I leave it up to me,” as Albert Brooks says in Modern Romance. It’s just one of my favorite lines. He’s editing a movie, actually, and he’s like, “You know what? I’ll leave it up to me.” But he’s on quaaludes, so it sounds funnier. And a good editor really helps.

There’s that scene in Friends With Money where Catherine Keener and Jason Isaacs are trying to work on the script they’re working on together. I almost had a flash forward of what my life could be, like, “Oh my god, this is the most terrifying thing in the world. This is what it could be like working with somebody else.” It’s really scary to be vulnerable in that way.

It is. If one person likes to get in there and argue to the death, and one person, like myself, would rather just move on, I’m like, “Okay, then let’s just lose that part.” If it’s not working, I’m much more hasty, fly by the seat of my pants kind of writing. I don’t want to analyze something to death, or prove my point too much. It’s harder when I’m writing something for someone else or directing something that’s not mine, and I really, really believe my idea is better than someone else’s or what’s already been shot, and I don’t have the last word. I don’t give up that easily there, I give up more easily on my own stuff.

Why do you think that is?

I don’t know, I can’t answer that question. No idea.

Maybe it’s going back to where you know your own taste. If it’s your own work, you know that you’ll get it right, but if you’re leaving it to somebody else, maybe they won’t get it right.

Exactly, exactly. And I see it. Of course, we all think we’re right, so I think I’m right.

I’m at the point in my life when you start to realize you could be wrong all the time. When you’re 21, 22, you’re like, “I’m right. I’m so grown up.” And now I look back, and I knew nothing. I know nothing now. It’s nice to hear that someone else has trust in themselves. Right now, I’m in a place in life where you have it inside as a little core thing, but life is really trying to tell me, “You know nothing.”

You know nothing and listen to everybody else and everybody else’s advice and opinions; it all comes down to you in the end, really does. Are you an aspiring filmmaker? Or writer?

I’d like to write movies. Directing seems scary…I was hanging out with these two men yesterday, and they asked me the same question, and I gave my answer, and one of them was like, “Have you made a movie before?” I was like, “No.” He’s a year or two older than me. Basically he told me that it was over for me already. I can’t imagine living my life at 27, being like, “it’s over.” Are you kidding?

I didn’t think I’d make my first movie at 35. If you told me that when I was 25, I’d want to kill myself. Like, “What? That’s so late.” But when the time came, it was a terrifying experience directing my first movie, but I felt ready, I knew what I wanted for the most part. I was learning as I was going, but you just know more later. So, you’re 27, you’re a baby. You baby, you could end up going to medical school if you wanted to. Directing, you just got to try it, it’s not that scary. It’s really fun, especially if you’ve written the material.

Do you still get scared at all when you’re directing?

Sure. I’ll go onto a set and forget what I’m doing, or go blank. That happens more with when I’m directing someone else’s, like for TV. I still get intimidated by complicated blocking scenes. I rely a lot on the DP and the script supervisor. I panic if there’s 10 people in a room and I have to tell them all where to go. Once they’re in their right place, I know how to direct them, it’s the spatial stuff that I’m not as good at. Working with actors I’ve never worked with, I have to learn how they like to work, and do they like to work the same as the person they’re acting with. Some people like to go first, some people like to go last, some people like to improvise, some people don’t. Some people like to be directed, some people don’t. Navigating all that can be anxiety-producing for sure. Somehow it works out. Not always, but most of the time.

When things don’t work out, what is that feeling like for you, and how do you move on from disappointment?

I don’t move on.

Fair.

I mean, there’s things in my first movies, all my films that I wish I could change and I kick myself. What was I thinking? Why did I cast that person? It’s not what I ended up wanting, or they were so difficult, or I’m embarrassed by some of my choices. You move on, but it’s really hard to really move on from mistakes. I always make them. It’s inevitable.

But there’s also something to liking art despite its flaws. If we were looking for flawless pieces of art all the time I would kill myself.

I watched Walking and Talking recently with my niece because she wanted to see it again. And I was fearful. I thought, “Oh, I’m going to be embarrassed, I’m going to hate this, I’m going to cringe.” But I watched it from a kind of motherly point of view, now that I’m so much older, and the things that I think are stupid or I wouldn’t have done now, I felt more compassion and a little more friendly toward myself so I could enjoy it.