Nobody captures awkward moments quite like Nicole Holofcener.
In Friends With Money, an irate Frances McDormand is escorted from a department store after an intemperate outburst. It’s bad enough that a crowd watched her remonstrate with the cashier and the manager: “These two people cut in line in front of me and everyone is letting them get away with it,” she rages; “These two people right here with their stupid f**king faces!”
It’s even more humiliating when she walks into a window.
In Lovely and Amazing, Catherine Keener blithely tells her adopted African-American sister (Raven Goodwin) that her skin can’t burn because “it’s already brown”.
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In Please Give, Keener’s character musters even more racial insensitivity when she offers her leftovers to an African-American man standing outside a restaurant. “Excuse me, sir. Are you hungry?” she asks. “I’m waiting for a table,” comes the tart response.
The film-maker has always characterised her films as semi-autobiographical. Sure enough, not too long into our meeting, she tells a story that could easily be a toe-curling incident in a Nicole Holofcener movie.
“You know, yesterday, a friend of mine went to see the new movie,” says the writer-director. “And she wrote me an email afterwards and it was so clear she didn’t like the movie. She couldn’t think of anything good to say. She was trying. She said: ‘Oh, the score was good.’ That felt so humiliating to me, to be honest. I was so hurt. Even though the movie is such a hit and most people love it, I’m hanging on to that negative review.”
She laughs: “I’ve told the distributors to send my reviews but not the really bad ones. And then the New Yorker came out and my boyfriend said: ‘Don’t open it!’ So, some people try to protect me from myself.”
Magnified grievances loom large in You Hurt My Feelings, Holofcener’s wonderful seventh feature, which, incidentally, holds a 94 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The comedy of manners centres on Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), a novelist, and Don (Tobias Menzies), a therapist – a long-standing couple whose marriage is rocked when Beth overhears Don criticising her latest work. He had previously spared her feelings as he pored over numerous drafts.
When she finally confronts him, he can’t understand why it’s such a big deal: “This whole world is falling apart and this is what’s consuming you?” The warring couple variously confide in or brushes against fellow upscale New Yorkers, including Beth’s interior-decorator sister Sarah (Michaela Watkins) and their acid-tongued mother Georgia (Jeannie Berlin).
Holofcener’s script cleverly unravels a culture of well-intentioned lies, mollycoddling and unwanted earrings. Unwavering, uncritical support, whether intended for children or creatives, turns out to be no support.
And, besides, if Beth’s second book is no good, she’s hardly alone in her mediocrity. Don, it transpires, is a terrible therapist who is exposed by increasingly dubious clients, particularly a hilarious bickering married couple played by real-life wife and husband Amber Tamblyn and David Cross.
“The movie started with this idea: what if my partner didn’t like my work?” says Holofcener. “Can my ego handle that? And the answer is no. It cannot. It absolutely cannot. I don’t know whose ego could handle that. My films are personal. And that’s a good thing, ultimately. That’s what I find satisfying. And, unfortunately, it goes both ways. If someone loves the movie, I probably chew on that a little too long and enjoy that a little too much. I’m up and then I’m down. I don’t know any creative person who doesn’t have those extremes.”
Following on from the James Gandolfini rom-com Enough Said and the infamous Amy Schumer Last F**kable Day sketch, You Hurt My Feelings marks Holofcener’s third collaboration with Julia Louis-Dreyfus. She has previously worked with Catherine Keener on five features, beginning with Walking and Talking in 1996.
“We have a similar way of working. There’s a real shorthand with those women. I can say: ‘Try it sadder.’ And they don’t give me a look that says: ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ We have a mutual sense of humour. And I love their faces. That’s important to me. I feel like they both have expressive interesting faces. A lot of actors just kind of look nice but I like actors that have a lot of action in their faces.”
Five years have elapsed since Holofcener’s previous film, an adaptation of Ted Thompson’s novel The Land of Steady Habits, landed with too little fanfare – despite strong reviews – on Netflix. She has kept busy co-writing the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Can You Ever Forgive Me? and with a series of nixers, notably polishing the screenplay for Black Widow and adding Florence Pugh’s memorable outburst: “I don’t get my period, dipsh*t.” She also authored the crucial third section of Ridley Scott’s courtly rape drama, The Last Duel. Neither are films I can imagine her walking into a cinema to see, I suggest.
“You’re absolutely right, actually,” she says. “I mean, I’ve seen some great Ridley Scott movies so maybe that would make me go see that movie. But it was an opportunity to walk into that world and it was really fun. I’m so glad they asked me to do it. I’ve never had an experience like that: going to France and watching Ridley Scott direct with five cameras and 100 horses in a battle scene where absolutely no actor gets hurt. It’s mind-boggling. And for Black Widow, I had to watch a bunch of Marvel movies. And that was unique but I was up to that challenge.”
Did she have a favourite Marvel movie?
“I guess there was one I liked better than another,” she ponders. “Maybe? I don’t f**king know. There were ten of them. But I did like Black Widow.”
Working on tent-pole releases – not to mention such big-budgeted prestige TV as Sex in the City, Orange is the New Black and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt – is a double-edged sword for a film-maker who struggled for years to secure financing for You Hurt My Feelings.
“It’s shocking the way money is thrown around on a big-budget movie,” she says.” It’s just shocking. It’s like another profession almost. Thank God I don’t want to have 100 horses in my films because I’d be fucked. Although, maybe if I did want 100 horses, it would be a different kind of movie. I don’t need all that. I would like a few more days to do the work and the ability to pay the crew more. A lot of people who worked on the movie were Tier 1 (of the union scale) and that’s some bad pay for people who work really hard.”
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Holofcener was born into an artistic family in New York. Her mother, Carol, is a set decorator who has twice been Oscar-nominated in the Best Art Direction category; her father, Lawrence, was a sculptor and Broadway lyricist. Her parents divorced when Holofcener was a year old. Aged eight, her stepfather, Charles Joffe, who managed Billy Crystal, Steve Martin and Robin Williams, moved the family to Hollywood. Watch the footage and Nicole Holofcener appears next to Joffe – who produced Woody Allen’s films – as he collects the Academy Award for Best Picture for Annie Hall.
“I was maybe six when I was on a film set for the first time,” recalls Holofcener. “It was Take the Money and Run. My sister and I were in a scene. We just walked by but we were really excited. And my sister completely blocked my face in the shot. Very telling. Very prescient.”
Her stepfather got her a job as a production assistant on Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy in 1982 and as an apprentice editor for Hannah and Her Sisters.
“It was a mixed blessing. I got to work in the editing room while the movie was being shot. I was able to sit in the screening room and watch dailies with Woody Allen and the actors would come in. But the editor [Sandy Morris] didn’t start editing the movie until it wrapped. And since she didn’t hire me, she fired me. I was devastated. I couldn’t wait to be in the editing room and watch them cut this movie. Nepotism got me the job and nepotism got me fired from the job.”
Undeterred, Holofcener studied film at New York University and later at Columbia, where Martin Scorsese was one of her tutors. He fell asleep during the screening of her short graduate film, It’s Richard I Love.
“I mean, he’d seen it a thousand times in the edit,” she says. “And it was very girlie and emotional and probably not his cup of tea. But I didn’t make good stuff in the beginning. I’m sure my parents were looking at me sideways, wondering: ‘Do we want to keep paying for film school?’ But they were all creative people, my family. So they understood the desire to make something. That meant a lot to me.”
It took six years for Holofcener to get her debut feature, Walking and Talking, made. When that film premiered at Sundance, it played alongside Susan Streitfeld’s Female Perversions and Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol. The industry, however, was slow to respond to these emerging female talents.
“I did well out of Sundance because we sold the film for a million dollars and it cost a million dollars to make,” recalls Holofcener. “I felt like I had been invited into the club. But I think the fellows there had a much better chance at getting their second films made. Getting my second film made was difficult and I made it on the same amount of money. You Hurt My Feelings had a smaller budget than I’ve had in the past. I don’t try to analyse it too much. There’s still an enormous amount of sexism in the business. We are still relegated to the female film-maker ghetto. I feel like women – especially women of colour – are getting more chances to make things. But percentage-wise, it’s still really bad.”
Holofcener will rush out to see new work from Tamara Jenkins, Alexander Payne or Kelly Reichardt. Her work continues in its own lovely furrow: a world of shrinks, television producers and theatre practitioners who remain poignantly and amusingly human, even when they do awful things.
“I’m sitting around waiting for inspiration right now,” says Holofcener. “I have no idea what I’m going to write next. I hope something intrigues me enough. Probably some weird thing in my own life that either hurts my feelings or makes me feel good. Anything that takes me somewhere new.”
You Hurt My Feelings is on Prime Video from August 8th
