I feel like every movie has been wish fulfillment. For The Heat, I love Lethal Weapon. I watch it over and over again. I always wanted a friend like that; I always wanted to be the badass taking down the drug dealers. It was basically just writing what I wished I could be. Female friendship is so interesting to me. I often feel like when you make female friends as adults, it's polite. I wish it was less polite and you could be frank and mess around with each other.
I was the biggest Goldie Hawn fan, my entire life.
I think I was just a strange kid. I was definitely a weirdo. I ran a newspaper that had really dark stories all the time. My mom was always fun, she had this large box of costumes and I remember dressing up as a door-to-door saleswoman with a wig and this small suitcase I was using as a briefcase. I was walking down the street like that; I was sure I was fooling everyone.
My dad has a very dry sense of humor and my mom has a more fun, silly sense of humor. My mom is the type that, at the dinner table, you'd look over at and she'd have a piece of asparagus hanging down her nose. Classic mom bit.
I like that free spirit where you can laugh together and argue. I love a writer's room.
You're basically on set to help the production. You're helping the actors make it make sense, or maybe you wrote something that doesn't work in the production sense. Most of it is coming up with jokes.
It can be stressful if I wrote something that I realize doesn't sound right. I can write something at home and be like, "Great. Nailed it." Then I'm like, "No one should have to say those words. That doesn't make any sense." It's a lot of scrambling.
Once you finish the script, it's no longer yours; it's the other people making it, which sometimes can be hard.
I'm surprised I wasn't sent to therapy in the childhood to be honest. I think my parents must have gotten a kick out of it.
It's so hard to get started creatively - it's really hard to get those first ideas out. You just have to do it over and over again, and hopefully better ones start to come. Also, anytime a good idea comes up, for a long time I think, "Oh, my God, that was so lucky that I thought of that idea, whew, I hope that happens again." The more you work at it, the more it happens, but it still feels lucky.
My feeling is, the world is a lonely place. If you can find people who are like you, and find some camaraderie, that's special. I wish there was more of that in the world, in general.
Amy [ Schumer] is a really, really hilarious writer.She's super funny, and I feel like the core of our senses of humor is really similar.
