Alison Herman: Yeah. So the flip side of the question I just asked I guess would be, what are some things that you maybe weren’t able to make room for or translate to the screen that you wish you had, or you were bummed that you couldn’t find a way to work them into the final product?
Lena Dunham: Well, Karen and I were both very sad. There was an amazing part of the book that involved a bear and Birdy trying to free a circus bear. Karen and I were not able to keep the freeing of the circus bear, and that was certainly sad. We really loved that moment and loved that character moment. And so firstly I just thought, “In what way can I ethically film a bear?” I was like, “I just can’t imagine a situation where I feel really good.” We had a lot of animals on the set and they were better treated than the actors, honestly.
The people who coordinated the animals were spoiling. Our actors were well treated too, but those animals were spoiled, but it just never felt like it was going to be good to bring a bear in. I’ve also done a show where we had a computer effects bear, a CGI bear, and that wasn’t perfect either. So I was like, “Let’s just not do bears.” There’s a wooden bear in it that is an ode to the bear that we missed. Birdy gets given a wooden bear by her uncle, which is not in the book, but that was my way of being like, “The bear is still here.”
Alison Herman: Nice. I mean in keeping with Bella’s most famous role before this, you could have had your Jamie Brienne bear pit moment.
Lena Dunham: That’s exactly right. I know. It’s so funny because every time I post Bella, the incredible amount of… If I posted her on Instagram, the Game of Thrones fans, it’s like the Lyanna Mormont in all caps just starts coming in. I love it so much.
Alison Herman: Yeah. Well, I think maybe we can use the back half of this to ask about some general questions in addition to Catherine Called Birdy. And maybe a great place to start would be that Catherine Called Birdy is not your only feature film that came out this year, incredibly, and Sharp Stick, for those who haven’t seen it, I think has some things in common with Catherine Called Birdy, but is also very different and was made under different circumstances. And I just wanted to ask about how those two experiences of making those two films relatively close together stacked up for you?
Lena Dunham: Well, the way it happened was that because of COVID, Birdy, which we were supposed to shoot in March of 2020, was put on hold and I really wanted to be back on set, particularly making a feature. So I was inspired to try to write something that could be done under the confines of COVID. And so Sharp Stick is in many ways a COVID experiment, although also a deep labor of love, and the word experiment certainly isn’t meant to throw away its significance and what a wonderful experience it was. But we shot it in LA deep in lockdown over the course of 14 days. An amazing group of actors came together, and it’s a story that is also about coming of age.
It’s about a more delayed coming of age, a 26-year-old character who’s quite naive in the way that she’s lived, who starts to have a series of sexual experiences that sort of unravel and then revivify her sense of self. And it’s interesting, my father watched them both fairly close together and he’s always a pretty good reflector of what I’ve done. And he was like, “I think that Tiny Furniture and then Sharp Stick and then Birdy are like your women coming of age trilogy.” They’re all about coming of age in a different way, which is a classic topic.
I’m not the first writer to continue to return to the idea of an adolescence. But it was certainly something I was exploring in those three films which are all about young women trying to understand where they fit in the world and where their sexuality fits in their lives. But Sharp Stick had a different spirit and was much more inspired by naturalistic films of the ’70s with strong female heroines, because I always think that the ’70s was such an amazing time for performances by women, but a lot of those movies also didn’t treat their women characters with very much respect.
Alison Herman: I do agree with your father that there’s that legible, cohesive theme that runs through I think all of your work, not just the features, but you did mention that you specifically wanted to get back to work on feature films. And as someone who has straddled both those worlds and worked in both TV and film, is there a reason why you specifically were missing work and features after that experience?
Lena Dunham: I think part of it was logistical. I loved the process of making Girls and I mean it didn’t just take months or years of my life. It was a decade of my life, basically. And so while I’m really excited to go back to TV now, I felt like I wanted a moment to engage in these briefer but deeply concentrated studies of character that features allow you. And also I started out thinking that I was going to be a feature director and then I had this amazing opportunity to make television and learn on the job, and so I wanted to return and explore this genre.
And now it’s interesting, I feel like making television set me up to make these features and now making these features has set me up to go back to television. And I’m really excited to now go back to having to have made certain compromises, removed certain storylines, et cetera, I’m really excited to go back to this more long-form version of storytelling because the thing I love most about it is the way that you can develop characters over time and surprise the actors and surprise yourself with what you learn about them.
Alison Herman: As a writer, the stereotypes of television and film are that television is a little more collaborative. You have a writer’s room, and film is a little more solitary. But I did want to ask for you what the distinction or complimentary skill sets of those two mediums have been.
Lena Dunham: Well, it’s interesting. I tend to think of filmmaking in all forms. Like when I’m writing prose I’m in my own, until my editor sees it. It’s me, myself and I. And when I’m writing films and writing television and then making films and making television, what I love about it is it’s a more social medium. And I think coming back to features after having done TV for so long, I certainly was not employing the auteurist model. Nobody here can give me a note. I love a note, I love a conversation. I love to be in dialogue with my department heads and my producers and everybody who’s around me because I realized in making TV, I went into Girls petrified about the idea of a writer’s room.
My parents were visual artists and visual artists are meant to go into their studio alone and work, and I thought that’s what being an artist meant. And to find out that there was a way to be an artist and also be social and be in conversation with other writers, what a total gift. And so I was not going to give that up just because. So while I do write by myself when it’s time to write, I go into a room by myself, I’m not doing the thing where I’m up on a group computer screen that everyone can contribute to, but I love the conversations that come from collaboration and I wasn’t going to give them up even if it wasn’t a writer’s room medium.
Alison Herman: That does feed into what is a favorite in-house question here at OnWriting, which is just what your personal writing habits are? Where do you do it? When do you tend to do it? How does that work for you?
Lena Dunham: Great question. I love writing so much. It’s my favorite thing to do. I never feel better in my body or in my mind than when I’m writing. I had a nice three-hour spell working on my book yesterday and then revised a pilot and I was like, “God, for me this is like I’m parasailing. It’s the most wonderful…” Every time someone’s like, “Let’s take a walk and clear your head,” I’m like, “That’s not what clears my head.” But my actual writing habits, I have a desk, I obviously don’t write at it, I write in bed. The adult choice I made wasn’t to stop writing in bed, it was to get a lap desk.
So I have a little pink lap desk that sits across my lap and I love to work in bed surrounded by pets and magazines and beverages, and the bed just becomes just like a wasteland of my interests and habits. My husband is very tolerant. When I was younger I wrote at night and I loved it because I love the feeling of the world being cut off. And so when I’m in the UK, which is where my husband’s from, I love that because when you wake up in the morning, even if it’s 9:30, you’re still five or eight hours ahead of the US. You get that same middle of the night feeling, but it’s the daytime, because I realized it wasn’t that I was actually a night owl. It was that I loved the feeling of knowing that I couldn’t be disturbed.
It was like that room of one zone people talk about was only reachable in our world of modern technology when everyone else had gone to sleep. And I’m learning more and more to have the strength to create it for myself, to be okay with the idea that people might be texting and I don’t have to answer because then that allows me to keep the habits of a human in the world. And also, when you’re also directing or show running, you need to sleep at night. And then I just drink so much green tea that it’s insane and my hands shake, and I often stop to have… The more excited I am about the writing, the more I want to stop to have a chatty phone call with my parents in which I practically update them and then go back to it.
And then the big breakthrough I’ve had over the last few years is that I’ve found a love of outlining that I didn’t have before. I used to be much more freewheeling and feeling it out. I was like, “Weh,” and having a dump site for all of my thoughts that I would then turn into a script or an essay. And now outlining is my saving grace. I have one of the most psychotic organized Notes app systems. I joke but not joke that I want to give a TED talk on my Notes app system because I truly believe that it can help writers and change their lives. I have found a way to not feel like I was sitting there holding my thoughts about all of my projects in my mind. It’s almost like I found a hard drive I could download my mind onto. Thank you Apple for the Notes app.
Alison Herman: As a fellow bed worker, I always feel tremendously validated when anyone can also be productive in that space.
Lena Dunham: By the way, I’ve also been looking at your bed cover and been like… Look, if I see someone else’s bed and it looks cozy, I’m like, “I see you.”
Alison Herman: It is Dusen Dusen. I’m sure they have a Black Friday sale going on.
Lena Dunham: I love Dusen Dusen. Hannah Horvath wore a lot of Dusen Dusen on Girls. And actually I did a mud fight once in a Dusen Dusen dress.
Alison Herman: It feels very odd brand. Well, you are someone who is a multi-hyphenate and you are not just a screenwriter. You are also a director. You are also occasionally a performer. And when people like that come on the podcast, it’s always interesting to ask them how their role as a writer informs these other jobs that they take on and how those tasks all intersect with each other for you.
Lena Dunham: Well, I think for me, everything starts with writing. The reason I started directing was because I wanted to be able to control the way that my writing was taken into the world. And the reason I started performing was because I felt like I needed to be able to properly channel my writing and my directing. Writing is the well from which it all springs. If a London cab driver asks me what my job is, I say writer. That’s the thing that feels the most true. And I really, really, really love directing, and under the right circumstances I really love acting. That’s not me looking a gift horse in the mouth. I just recognize that there’s lots of roles that other people are better suited to than I am.
But writing is the thing that gives me energy, that gives me ideas, that makes the other things possible. And then I think what’s nice is that my job as a writer informs my job as a director. I’m able to make a lot of decisions about what I want the film to be in the writing process. And then directing teaches me lessons I then take back to my writing. I learn about what I need from a script because I get to write direct, be in the editing room where I get to rewrite and realize certain things that didn’t necessarily work. And then I get to take those lessons back when I begin my next project.
Alison Herman: Sure. You’re someone who obviously had a great success at an early age and a successful project that was also very intimately tied up with your own reputation and public-facing persona. And I’m always curious how you follow something like that up, or how having that success influences the way you think about the projects you choose to take on in its wake. And in the case of Girls, specifically, I’m sure it both opened up opportunities but also affected the kind of opportunities you wanted to take. How did that process end up working for you?
Lena Dunham: Yeah, and it also affected people’s understanding of me and understanding of what I probably could do or wanted to do. I think that when you’re 24, you are certainly not farsighted enough to know how something like that is going to impact the rest of your life. I was basically laboring under the illusion that probably four people would ever see the show. I don’t think I understood. I was like, “Yeah, how many people have an HBO subscription? It’s not that many.” But I think that I made a decision really early on that I was not going to live my life trying to, in any way, replicate a certain kind of success or response because there were things that were really amazing about that experience, and there were also things that were really challenging about that experience.
It brought a lot of people’s opinions to the fore who probably never should have been engaging with my work in the first place because they weren’t the audience for it. Like the people who were giving me the most grief on Twitter or whatever, guys who were telling me to put my shirt back on, probably didn’t have a lot of Venn diagram overlap with my interests. And so I was like, I’m not going to try to replicate it, A, because you never know what’s going to work and what’s not. And you just don’t know. You can make something brilliant, but so much of it is about the cultural moment at when it hits, what people are looking for, what the appetite is.
And then I also wasn’t going to try to replicate it because I realized there would be really great things about making projects that had a smaller and more intimate response. And then maybe I’ll make something again someday that changes my title from Girls’ creator to something else, and maybe I won’t. I realized that it’s a pretty lucky thing to get to be known and understood in regards to your work at all. One thing I was very conscious of after Girls was to pause and also to try to engage with some opportunities that would maybe make people understand that I really do have a range of interests as a writer and a director.
So whether it was going to direct a show like Industry which is about the world of finance and having to tell a story that was about things that interest me, which are ambition and the politics of a workspace and sexual politics, but in a really, really different world, or something like Birdy, which is a completely other genre and time period. It was exciting for me to get to say I am a person with immense diverse interests and a obsession with not just our contemporary moment, but with the history of what it means to live a feminine and feminist life, so where else and how else can I express that? And that’s what I’m trying to do with my projects going forward, both as a writer-director and in work that I produce for other people.
Alison Herman: I mean, bringing things back to Catherine Called Birdy, I can see both themes that are completely consistent across your work that make it a completely intuitive “Lena Dunham project”. And I could also see someone who’s maybe less familiar hearing the words like Lena Dunham children’s movie and maybe doing a bit of a double take.
Lena Dunham: 100%. And I feel like the amount of times that people were like, “You’re making that movie for teenagers? Watch out.” And I was like, “I was a teenager, too, once, guys.” And I actually feel like I grew up in such a golden age for movies for kids and teenagers, and they really inspired me, and I was hoping to harken back a little bit to the kinds of things that raised me.
Alison Herman: What were some of those touchstones that raised you?
Lena Dunham: Clueless, Slums of Beverly Hills. Also things like Splash and Big. I mean, even something like Home Alone, these movies that weren’t necessarily about… I mean there was some magic in some of those, but movies that were character studies for kids. Ultimately Home Alone is a character study of a weird kid who’s stuck home alone. Yes, there are some robbers, but really Kevin’s just kind of annoying and has no one to hang out with. I don’t know if that movie would sell today.
Alison Herman: Well, the reason I brought up the potentially counterintuitive package is because I was wondering if that was something you encountered when you were trying to convince people to let you make this movie that you so wanted to make.
Lena Dunham: 100%. I encountered that, which is like, if someone was going to invest in a project of mine, they wanted to invest in something that felt branded in a way that they could… Something that they could brand as mine and something that could feel like an extension of what they knew I did. Like there was a lot of, “We’d love to work with you, but on a medieval children’s movie really.” And then there was also the sense that maybe, as I said, those movies I love because they’re character studies.
But there came a time when movies for teenagers felt very much that they needed to have this larger-than-life element, right? When I optioned this it was really around the height of those teen franchises like the Hunger Games and Divergent and Twilight, and Birdy doesn’t have any of that. She’s a medieval girl, but she doesn’t even know how to use a sword. She’s not slaying a dragon. She’s not Joan of Arc. She’s basically Kevin at Home Alone.
Alison Herman: Well, I think we’re starting to butt up against the end of our allotted time, but for a final question, you brought up your role as a producer, and I think some very interesting projects you’ve been involved in have been in that role, and that takes on a lot of different connotations. But specifically as a writer who is providing feedback on others’ writing, how has that experience been for you and what have you taken from it for your own work?
Lena Dunham: Well, I love getting notes, and so I always want to make it a pleasant experience for people who might have note trauma, which many of us do. And I also really wanted to be able to help people and support their voices in the way that Judd Apatow and Jenni Konner supported me when I was first starting in the way that I was sort of brought into this safe space where my only job was to write and they gave me such thoughtful, loving feedback. And so my goal with other writers is always to make them feel safe, to tell them that my notes aren’t absolute. To not try to necessarily provide annoying solutions, but instead ask interesting questions, and then to surround them with the right people who are going to make them feel safe in taking their project to the next level. And I’m always interested in a project that someone else might say would be hard to get made.
I’m always interested in a project that might be a long hauler. I’m like, “I’m here for the haul and I’m excited to be in that position.” And I have an amazing producing partner, Michael P. Cohen, who’s really helped me to also keep space for my own work while also having space to be appropriately present in the lives of writers and directors that we’re working with. I find that those conversations about their work and the kinds of things that come up, you know, you go down reveries about films you love, books you love, you tell stories, and it always sends me back to my own writing, exciting and revivified. The best conversations about writing and the best writing makes you want to write. We all know what it’s like to read a book where you’re like, “I’m so jealous, I have to go write right now.”
Alison Herman: Yes. I think I would be remiss for a final question if I did not follow up on the fact that you love getting notes. I think that is maybe not a typical experience for screenwriters. So I’d like to ask why that’s the case for you.
Lena Dunham: Well, I remember Judd saying to me once when I was like 25, he was like, “You like to write.” And I was like, “Well, yeah, it’s my job. I’m a writer.” And he was like, “You’d be surprised by how many writers don’t.” And I don’t blame people because so many people had to suffer through ridiculous notes or ridiculous revisions or notes from people who don’t really understand them. But when you’re dealing with someone you think understands your voice and you’re trying to make the same thing, notes are just a really exciting, creative, problem-solving session. It’s just like you’re playing a game of Tetris and you guys are just trying to put the blocks in the right place and pull out the right blocks without it all toppling over. And it’s really exciting.
I keep my computer files incredibly organized. I always say that my desktop is very organized while my life is not. And what I always love is opening up a file and seeing 16 drafts, 18 drafts. I mean, I remember doing 30 drafts on an episode of Girls because Judd just kept sending me back and back and back to the drawing board. And it becomes this personal challenge to crack it. And when you do, and I always feel you’re in the right place when you start getting the same note from everyone. Like at the beginning you’re getting scattered notes. One person’s saying they want more of one character, one person saying they want less. But as you hone in on what the script’s supposed to be, you’ll start to get the same feedback from everyone, and that is a thrilling experience.
Alison Herman: Amazing. Well, I think that brings us to the end of our time. Lena, thank you so much for joining and thank you everyone who’s joined this live taping. This was such a wonderful conversation.
Lena Dunham: It was really fun to talk to you. Thank you so much for the thoughtful questions.
Alison Herman: Oh, I appreciate it. All right, take care.
Lena Dunham: You, too.
Speaker 1: OnWriting is a production of the Writer’s Guild of America East. This series was created and is produced by Jason Gordon. Our associate producer and designer is Molly Beer. Tech production and original music by Taylor Bradshaw and Stockboy Creative. You can learn more about the Writer’s Guild of America East online at wgaeast.org. You can follow the Guild on all social media platforms at WGA East. If you like this podcast, please subscribe and rate us. Thank you for listening and write on.
