[Laughs] Yes! Absolutely! You know, tragedy plus time equals comedy, but there’s also a maxim to be found somewhere in your films that’s about empathy and cruelty. Because what you’re describing is really real, really flawed and really human and it’s the stuff that makes your films so comedically rich and insightful because you can laugh at these characters and also recognize those failings we all have.
Ok, good. So, yes, I’m weaved through all these characters. Sometimes there’s more of me in one character than another, and that’s obvious cause they’re probably the nicer person in the story [laughs]. But yes, the female characters, there are definitely parts of me. But sometimes characters not like me, something in me comes out in them. Like Jennifer Aniston’s character in “Friends With Money,” I didn’t clean houses for money, but when I was younger and didn’t have any money to buy fancy products, I would go to those department store counters and try to get repeat samples and collect them and stack them up and my friends would laugh at me [laughs]. So, there’s also combinations of parts too.
I love Aniston’s character cause she’s such a doormat. Scott Caan takes such advantage of her, and you want to punch him in the face and shake her and say, “Girl, no!” but it’s so honest and human! And filmmakers rarely ever write lead characters like that these days because of the tyranny of agency and heroism. I love these flawed characters.
Yeah, that’s situations taken to extremes for comedy. Like I’ve been walked over by boyfriends. I’ve let some get away with murder. I was mistreated by assholes. But I let it happen, and I look back on my twenties, and I think, ‘my God, I can’t believe these jerks.’ But that’s extreme. But the way he takes advantage of her, practically mugging her, and she agrees to be mugged. But people are funny, right? So she steals foot cream in a house she cleans, and that’s her “fuck you,” even if it’s indirect.
I always find myself thinking about how ahead of the curve you were like 20 years ago. Whether it’s these feminist female stories, but very self-deprecating, but also the ideas of privilege and white privilege. Like you said earlier about shame. There’s a lot of guilt in your films about privilege, class, entitlement, and wealth—what your characters have and others don’t— which is obviously the very recognition of it.
I don’t like to think about how long ago these things are; it just reminds me of my impending death [laughs]. But yes, my stepdad [film producer Charles H. Joffe who produced most of Woody Allen’s films] was successful, and so I grew up with money from the age of eight on, and my biological father was basically a poor, struggling artist. So, I absolutely felt torn between these two. I remember not wanting to wear something new to visit my dad because he might think I was spoiled.
Wow, yeah, that’s something really hard for a kid to grapple with.
I was always fighting that—why can’t I have something new or materialistic and still be a good person? Those two fathers, they really kind of split me up in a way. And I still have that struggle: am I entitled to this or that, or what does that even mean? And am I a bad person if I want something? So, I think that’s where I got all that. [Sarcastically] It’s pretty good material, isn’t it? Me talking about my two fathers? [laughs]
No, it is! Because that push and pull of selfishness and selflessness is arguably the core element of the humanism in your comedies. I mean, “Please Give” is absolutely that. Or “Lovely And Amazing,” Emily Mortimer feels so guilty she’s literally taking in every stray dog she finds; she feels so bad for them. But she’s an actor in a shallow world, but it feels like that’s her trying to balance things.
Right, well, Emily’s character got that from her mom [Brenda Blethyn], who adopts a child. Her mom adopts this black child, but she also wants liposuction. She’s a good person, but she’s really vain. Emily’s character keeps taking in lost dogs, but she’s obsessed with the shape of her body.
Right, the contradictions and clashes of who people are. But wait, am I right in thinking your mom also adopted a young child when you were already an adult?
She did. She adopted a boy in her fifties, she got him when he was about four weeks old, and he’s African American and grew up in a family of white women. I thought, “Wow, this is a good story!”—at least from my point of view [laughs]. And I was old enough to be his mother; I was like 30 and dying to have children. I helped her; I liked to pretend he was mine.
Wow, that’s crazy. And like you’re wont to do, you totally interrogate that and pick it apart in this exact theme. It feels selfless, but the daughters rip her mom’s motivations apart and see it as a really selfish thing because she’s lonely. It’s really no holds barred.
Yeah, what does [Catherine Keener’s] character say? She did it because she didn’t want to be alone.” But it’s complex, right? If she adopted this child because she didn’t want to be alone and she loved the child, is that bad? That’s what interests me in life and stories. We can need things for several reasons, and not all of them might be bad.
So, was “Lovely And Amazing” all born out of that?
The idea of my mom adopting? Yes, absolutely. I thought, “this is what I have to write about.” And then some of the characters are similar to my family, but not and I just started to create a drama around that, and the ideas of self-esteem and sisters, and mothers and what we get from our mothers even if we’re adopted. How much we all want to belong.
A lot of my movies will start with one idea, like “Friends with Money.” I wanted to write a scene where nobody knows at a dinner where nobody knows what to pay and if they’re supposed to chip in or not. Will the person feel mad at the rich person for being asked to chip in? Or will the rich person feel resentful that everyone expects them to pay? So, I had the title before I even wrote the movie, which has never happened to me. So, that’s the theme of “Friends With Money,” but to me, it’s hardly about that, really. It’s the relationships and everybody’s individual struggles with life.