You don't need love and sex in films
A lot of my friends are struggling. A lot of my friends didn't make movies, which was really hard and sad. I'm good friends with this film collective, Red Bucket, which made Daddy Longlegs and The Pleasure Of Being Robbed. They're climbing the walls. They're all making cartoon booklets now, because they can't raise the funds to make another movie. But I think that when it returns, which it hopefully will, there will be another surge of energy.
I think it's really hard to work in a city where you live too, because I get so absorbed with the movie that I become a bad friend and a bad participant in my own life.
I'm not someone who's an immigrant who's struggling in that way, but between New York and L.A., I had someone tell me very early on, "If you're going to be broke anywhere, it's better to be broke in L.A. At least the weather is nice." I was like, "You're right." I didn't take them up on that.
I'm interested in the feeling of getting to zero after a play, like you're never going to do it again. That's a really scary feeling.
In college, it's very easy to maintain your female friendships because you're in such close proximity all the time.
I think I'm pretty committed to staying. I'm not committed to not doing big movies, but I am committed to continuing to make smaller movies, not for the sake of making smaller movies, but because I think it's really invigorating to just go work with people and know that it might be awful.
Movies are now more often watched on the small screen anyway. But at least for me, what got lost in that is the difference in the medium.
I love just seeing shots of New York inside of a fictional movie that are not controlled. I do not like shots with extras, I have to say. I don't mind extras in other scenes, but I love New York City streets just as they look. I don't even care if someone looks at the camera. It doesn't bother me.
I love shooting in New York because I love the city. Ultimately, I like doing it there and the city is important to the story, but it can be hard to shoot where you live too because it is so all-absorbing.
It's so hard for people to give up their cell phones or their ideas of being connected to everything all the time in order to get an immersive experience. That's the best way to make art. It's almost like you have to treat it like you're going into a submarine, and Noah Baumbach totally agrees with that. There's not a real other life that happens outside of the movie while it's being shot, which I like.
I'm not really capable of memorizing stuff without moving around, that's how I do it.
If you're with one person, then you don't have to meet other people. It's like when you're acting in a movie, you don't have to audition for other movies. I prefer that.
When I felt like I was looking down the barrel of nothing on the horizon it was hard for me.
Using the energy in a scene can really cut the fat off of something and streamline it. It can make it work for you and activate it for you in a way.
I was a ballet dancer. I did other kinds of dance but ballet was my great love. But then it became clear, when I was 12, that my body wasn't going to be right. That's always a heartbreaking moment because there's nothing you can do about that. Your body is just not right. You don't have enough turnout. You're not built properly.
Everybody's got a dud. You can't get out of it. That's the price of admission: you'll get some duds. You'll get some things where you missed a little. It's a crap feeling when you're going through it. But the main thing is as long as you're not doing anything for cynical reasons, then you'll be okay.
I think in theater the playwright is king. Those words are unchangeable. They are the reason that everything else flows from.
I don't do well when I don't work.
I can say I'm a relationship person, and I like relationships. I think I also like relationships because then you don't have to date because dating is horrible.
It feels like when I write, it's intuitive. This is true of Frances, and it's true of this [The Funniest Movie Of The Summer].
I think in general with micro-budget films right now, it's rough. The economy is rough. I think that affects everyone from big filmmakers to tiny filmmakers.
There's an economy in sports that I always think is a useful metaphor for acting. You have an objective. You're trying to win, and of course, you want to do well. You want to use good techniques so you enforce it, but also you don't do things you don't have to do. It's very economical, and I think that in acting the most economical way through a scene is always the best. It's active. There is the sense of the fight and you want to win.
I think any break-up from a long relationship has this accompanying feeling of who am I without this person. You feel like a half-person because you've integrated yourself into an idea of a couple for so long, and then teasing that out and finding out who you are without them, it just takes a while. It feels like an amputation.
Sometime female characters, especially in the genre of something that people consider rom-com, make mistakes in a cute way or they're a mess in a way that's palatable. I like that.
