Nora Ephron, Academy Class of 2007, Full Interview

[Music] I think it was two things one it wasn't just that I wanted to go on writing but that I wanted to write about things that were hard to attach directors to if you wanted to write about women in any way you you know 90% of the men directing movies have no interest in in women in any real way except as girlfriends or wives they don't really want to make movies about them and they don't and so the the arduous task of getting someone to commit to something that is that it had anything to do with my life was very frustrating and and then when I did when Harry Met Sally with Rob Reiner you know I wrote that script and I thought well I don't really want to direct but if I did direct this would be a good movie to start with because there aren't a lot of people in it and there aren't a lot of people in any of the scenes and it wouldn't be that complicated shooting it and all of that but then Rob did it and he was so brilliant he did such a brilliant job he changed the script he made it so much better than it was and so I thought well I guess if I get to work with the Rob's of the world that won't you know why direct and then my next movie I did was someone else who didn't make the script better so and about that time I thought maybe I should think about directing you know really that's what both the sense that if I became a director I could at least get my own movies made my own scripts made and the sense that that I would be interested in subjects that men might not be interested in and and that would you know it it it is still it's very hard to get people to direct your movies if you're a screenwriter I had been working on this script with Rob Reiner and Rob had told me all this stuff about guys right and how horrible they are and how they how unwilling they are to commit in any way even to the bed of the person they have just had sex with for the rest of the night and so one day we were sitting around and Rob said you know we've told you all the stuff about guys now you tell us something about women that we don't know and it was like I dare you I dare you you will never be able to tell me anything about women I don't know but try so I said well women fake orgasms and he said not with me so I said yes with you and he said no no I said yes yes yes well he went completely crazy he really did I mean he did a total meathead moment and went thundering out to the bullpen at Castle Rock pictures were all the women were and I said get in here and they all came in and he said is it true that women fake orgasms and this group of six completely terrified assistants all looked at him and went like this it was just an amazing moment so we took that fact and put that into a scene and it was a very simple scene where Sally tells Harry that and Harry says not with me and she says yes with you and he says I don't believe it and she says you better believe it it was very simple and we had a read-through and Billy Crystal and meg Ryan read the script and at the end of the read-through meg said you know I think this scene would be much funnier if it took place in a restaurant and Rob said that's a great idea let's do it in a restaurant and then Meg said and then I think at the end of the scene she should have an orgasm and Rob said well that's a really good idea and billy crystal's said and one of the customers can say I'll have what she's having and Rob said and I know just the actor to play that part my mother now you know I had started out in the movie business thinking oh please don't let them change my lines please don't let them do anything to me and you know you hear an idea like that and you think I am so lucky to be working with these people I thank God people believe in collaboration of course I get all the credit for that line which I had well I'd like to think I had something to do with it because if I hadn't broken the news about faking orgasms there might be a million millions of men still walking around the earth not knowing it and they do know it because of that movie but it wasn't a really commercial movie it would have been more commercial had had it had a more commercial cast but I didn't have a very commercial cast in fact I had Bette Midler who wanted to do it and Jeffrey Katzenberg at Disney would not let her out of her contract to do it I think the movie would have done better if Bette had been in it I love Julie Kavner in it but but I begged Jeffrey Katzenberg to let me to let her out of her contract or for him to make it and he simply had no interest in the subject matter of that movie and told me so had no interest in what it was about which was balancing a career in work it was about a woman stand-up comic who had two children it's a very funny script and and a good script and Jeffrey isn't really interested in women his wife as a housewife he he just wasn't there and it was heartbreaking to me I went through it seemed like forever trying to get it made and then suddenly one day a guy named Joe Roth at Fox said I'll make this movie with Julie Kavner and he did it Sleepless was a script that had been written by two or three or four other writers before me and it never really worked but it had this kind of amazing ending on the top of him of the Empire State Building that just worked no matter what came before it it just it's kind of amazing because the characters were sort of gloopy and and unfunny and and yet you got to the end and and you went oh wow this is amazing so and I needed the money I had done my first movie this is my life which I had done for scale which is not very much money and I was completely out of dough and and my agent said oh do you here's a rewrite and it's supposed to happen it had a director it had casting attached to it and not Tom some meg Ryan and so I read and I thought oh I can I can fix this I can make this better so I did a rewrite on it and basically made it into a comedy or made it into not a comedy but a movie that had laughs in it which it didn't at all and suddenly it was a go picture and the director who had been attached to it who had no interest in making a comedy I guess bowed out of it they he was gone and the actors were gone because they weren't really funny and it was suddenly it was suddenly a script that a lot of people wanted to be in and I wasn't dying it wasn't like oh I thought I have to direct this in fact I thought well this isn't really good enough yet and they kept saying don't you want to direct this and I kept saying but it's not ready to be directed I've got to do another rewrite on it I've only been I only worked on it three weeks and no no it's fine do anything you want to I said well I've got to bring Delia of my sister in on it because I need a lot of help if I'm going to direct it bring Delian that's great Delia brought a huge number of hilarious things to it and and suddenly I've never had anything quite like it happen it was instant it was like I think I gave them the script the first pass in March and we were scouting in Seattle in early June and we were shooting in August it was unbelievable I have no idea what it was like to direct him because all my experiences as a director are filtered through food and the food was great in Seattle that's all I can tell you and the Sun was shining all the time because it was summertime in Seattle we had to actually of course have some rain in the movie and we had to bring in water trucks and everyone got really angry at us because there was a drought and we were wasting water making rain in the movie it was you know is this movie where you just thought I wonder if this is to work who knows you know I had no idea Tom wasn't quite Tom Hanks at that moment Meg I mean Tom and Meg had done a movie together and had been a big flop Joe versus the volcano you know so basically I thought well this is great I have this we had this fantastic apartment my husband and I overlooking the market you know a block from the Seattle Pike Place Market which is one of the you know seven wonders of the world as far as I'm concerned and unbelievable crab and cherries and peaches and it was great it was unbelievable experience and the actors were fantastic Rosie O'Donnell who is a you know been a friend of mine ever since and you know who was just starting out had just been in league of their own and is one of the funniest people that ever lived and every time we would shoot she you know she's so shockingly brilliant and she could take anyone anyone she would say you'd say your name and she would sing a song about you rhyming everything using your name using whatever she knew about you just she was a rapper in some way that was so brilliant I couldn't believe it and she's great at everything you know I mean she's great at everything she does it was an amazing experience david Hyde Pierce we had such a such an extraordinary cast looking back on it so being a writer is easier than having a full-time job you can make your own hours so by the time my kids got home from school I was probably pretty well burnt out as a writer for the day so it wasn't like I'm busy I'm working get out of here I think that when I went off to direct this is my life when the kids were 10 and 11 or 11 and 12 I can't remember exactly which I think they were slightly shocked because they hadn't really had the experience of having a working mother they had had I was home I was always available I did bake cookies I did do all that stuff at the school I went on class trips so even though they knew I worked and they knew that I was a writer it hadn't cost them in any way when I went off to do that first movie I think they were really surprised that their mother actually worked that was the first true knowledge they had of what that meant and by the way I think I was very looking back on it I thought well they're old enough to handle this and by the way they did handle it but the truth is it was harder for them than I thought it was going to be but I didn't care I'm sorry but I didn't well I didn't care it was time for me to do this and I thought you know we have a good support system in place they have a stepfather they have a father they have a great nanny and they'll come visit me every other weekend and we will we'll all get through this but it interested me later when when they when they complained about it that I hadn't quite been sensitive to it because I was it was time for me to do this I had to do it and it was only ten weeks but you know so I was very lucky because I was a writer but if you're a lawyer or if you're a doctor or if you're a you work in a factory you you have hours you don't have freedom they don't care that there's a school meeting in a lot of places so so I you know I in I'm very lucky had I had a full-time job I might not have had anything near thee the ability to be the kind of mother I was for the first 10 or 11 years of their life I was born in New York and and I was really happy for the first four years of my life and then my parents moved to California and as far as I was concerned my life was over ruined I had absolutely clear sense of it even at the age of four or five and one of my earliest memories is is that I was now in California the Sun was shining I was at nursery school surrounded by happy laughing children and all I could think was what am I doing here how can I ever get out of this place and get back to where I truly belong I and I don't think I know I absolutely believed that and I don't think that's unusual with kids not necessarily with the same obviously same story I had but I think a lot of people have a very strong sense early on that they are in the wrong place and that they belong somewhere else and I knew I belong to New York so obviously when I figured out I wanted to be a writer which came not that much later and not a writer by the way you met you made it sound as if I wanted to be a writer I wanted to be a journalist it didn't really cross my mind that someday I would actually think of myself as a writer but I wanted to be a journalist and there was a lot of journalism in New York that's where you wanted to end up if you were a journalist so so that was the it was a perfect marriage of those two things they went off every morning in their respective cars to the same office which was about four blocks away from our house in fact my mother drove a Studebaker for about five years and when she traded it in it had something like 9,000 miles on it to me she literally drove to the studio and drove back every day but we had we knew that they went there and they wrote movies and and that they wrote together and they were basically contract writers in the old studio system and they wrote a movie and it got made but when I became a screenwriter I could never for years I just wrote scripts that didn't get made I got paid for them but but I thought am I ever gonna get a movie made and I looked at my parents who had 14 or 15 credits and thought this is never ever gonna happen for me it was it was a completely different time but I you know I didn't have a sense of them as much as writers as I did as screenwriters they they were very much in the movie business most of their friends were other screenwriters they were very active in the screenwriters guild and and that you know and every so often we got to go to the set and meet somebody who was in one of their movies that was very exciting you know meeting Fred Astaire and people like that and for a long time I had it you know I mean I had a very I thought it was kind of great that they did this my mother of course was the only almost the only working woman that anyone knew in Beverly Hills until at one point one of my friends moved to Beverly Hills and her mother worked but her mother had to work because she was divorced you know my mother worked out of choice and she was really the only woman in that community who did and and went through quite a lot in the way of of sort of competitiveness from the other women who didn't work and and I think we're extremely irritated that my mother managed to work and have four children none of whom was flunking out of school quite the contrary and and all that but I think she was very a defensive about being a working woman in that era and and every so often there would be something at school and I would say there's this thing at school and she'd say well you'll just have to tell them that your mother can't come because she has to work and it was years later that I realized that she could have come no but she wasn't punching a time clock at twentieth Century Fox and when I had children I had no problem getting to the stuff at school I just don't think she wanted to go to school and be perceived as that kind of mother but I can't ask her about it now at night one of the things you did is that people asked you your parents said what did you do today and you told them and and unlike my experience with my children where if I asked them what they had done that day and they said nothing I was kind of that was the end of that that was not the end of that in our house in our house it was very much you were expected to to kind of be entertaining and and tell a little story about what had happened to you they really taught us I think how to be writers because we learned at the dinner table to take whatever mundane thing it happened to us and try to make it a little bit entertaining birth order is so significant that you don't have to read a book about it really if you're the first you know you absolutely know what it means to be the first you get you get all the good stuff at least it seems to me being the first is the best so so I definitely had first of all I had I had Dannette the normal things you have as a firstborn child and then also when my parents got genuinely crazy later in life I was the one who'd had the most of the good years with them so I was very lucky in that way back in those days you like to think that people became alcoholics because X Y or Z they had a broken heart or they were but now we know that alcoholism is is just a disease and and they had it and it didn't really come into full bloom until they were well into their 40s my first memory of my mother which which of course came up very easily when I was in therapy was of her teaching me to read I mean that's your first memory of each of your parents is a kind of you know sort of key to too many things about your life and and mine is I'm sitting next to my mother and she's teaching me to read and I can read and she is so happy so imagine what that is to a child I mean you're just you're just all you want to do is read because you know it will make your mother happy and of course reading is so great so so I was an avid reader you know just constantly reading reading reading reading and and television really didn't come into our lives until I was about nine or ten by which time I had already read hundreds and hundreds of books I was already hooked on the Oz books and the Betsy Tacy books and you name it I had read at Mary Poppins and all of Nancy Drew I mean junky books great books I read everything and yet Beverly Hills public library was a very short bike ride away and and I would go over there and take three books out and go back two days later and take three more books out I had a couple of great great teachers and probably my the teacher who changed my life was a teacher my journalism teacher whose name was Charles Sims and the and I always tell this story I love it the first day of class I had already by the way decided that I was going to be a journalist but but I didn't know why exactly except that I'd seen a lot of Superman comics and Lois Lane and all of those you know major literary characters like that and but mr. Simms got up the first day of class and he he went to the blackboard and he wrote who what where why when and how which are the six things that have to be in the lead of any newspaper story and then he did what most journalism teachers do which is that he dictated a set of facts to us and then we were all meant to write the lead that was supposed to have who what where why when and how in it and he dictated a set effects that went something like the principal of Beverly Hills High School announced today that the faculty of the high school will travel to Sacramento Thursday for a colloquium and new teaching methods speaking there will be Margaret Mead the anthropologist and two other people so we all sat down to our typewriters and we all kind of inverted that and wrote Margaret Mead and X&Y will address the faculty in Sacramento Thursday at a colloquium on new teaching methods the principal announced today something like that we were very proud of ourselves and we gave it to mr. Simms and he just riffled through them and tore them into tiny bits and threw them in the trash and he said the lead to the story is there will be no school the and it was this great epiphany moment for me it was this oh my god it's about the point it's about figuring out what the point is and I just fell in love with journalism at that moment I just fell in love with the idea that that underneath if you if you sifted through enough facts you could get to the point you and you had to get to the point you could not miss the point that would be bad so so he really kind of gave that little ship of mine a major push because I just I just fell in love with solving the puzzle figuring out what it was what was the story what was the truth of the story I think the decision to go to Wellesley was just a very simple one which was that first of all my mother had laid down an edict in the house which was that we were not allowed to go to any school that had sororities I don't know why that's a perfectly good edict by the way but but I I don't know if she laid it down because she hated sororities which I'm sure she did or whether it was a very simple way of directing us to a very small number of colleges all of which were very good the seven women's colleges in the East at that time and Stanford so I applied to all of them and I went to Wellesley because I had gone to a slide show and that we had a really beautiful campus it was one of those things nobody got on a plane and visited colleges in that period you just you know Wellesley was one of the best places you could go to and and most most of the very bright women in the United States went to Wellesley or Radcliffe or Stanford so I chose Wellesley I went to college in 1958 I was the class of 62 it was an unbelievably bland time mm-hmm in America it was um it was the end of the fifties the happy homemaker betty Friedan was about to publish The Feminine Mystique and the women's movement was about to to begin as well as quite a few other social movements in the 60s everything was about to really break free but but we didn't know that in 1958 it was a very very very you were supposed to go to college you were supposed to get your BA and then you were if you were interested in medicine you were supposed to marry a doctor they had this fantastic internship I thought I interned for Pierre Salinger who was the press secretary for Kennedy for President Kennedy and I was beside myself getting this internship six weeks in the White House it never crossed my mind that that I would have almost no duties whatsoever much less even a desk I had really nothing to do but to sort of hang around and eavesdrop and look through files hoping to find secret documents which I did find several of by the way and well nothing that would seem that exciting but it had to be there I went at the time I thought oh my god look what I've just stumbled onto but but anyway so I spent most of the summer kind of hanging out watching the press corps come into the press secretary going to all the press conferences you know a lot of those jobs you can't you know the the work they give you to do if they give you any work to do which they really didn't I mean there was a woman in Salinger's office whose entire job was autographing peer Salinger's pictures I mean that that was not full-time although she had a desk at least and was paid to be there five days a week but that they didn't have anything worse than that to give out and and I didn't have much to do but but in retrospect I realized many years later that I was probably the only woman who had ever worked in the White House that Kennedy didn't make a pass out it kind of sort of made me sad at a certain point as one person after another revealed herself to have had an affair with the president and I thought well why not me but then of course I realized why not me which is that I'd had it really bad permanent wave that summer and I didn't look really great but it was said I did meet the president he did say hello to me the first day we were introduced and about four weeks later I would have to say the high point of my entire summer came I was standing out at the Rose Garden on a Friday afternoon along with everyone else in the White House watching the president leave it may not seem like much to do but everyone went out to do it and they were all standing there in the helicopter had landed to take the president to I guess to Hyannis Port or to the plane to Hyannis Port where however it worked so this helicopters making this terrible noise and I'm standing there with this whole group of people and and and suddenly and we think he's going to come out of the White House itself but instead he came right out of the his door at the him the Oval Office door and right past me and turned around and helicopters going around he goes how are you coming along and I said what and that was it that was my entire relationship with John F Kennedy which someday I'm sure the Kennedy Library will ask me about and I will tell them because I don't know how anyone could write a book about that presidency without knowing that my first journalist job I was a mail girl at Newsweek I was uh I was hired as a as you know we don't have women writers but if you want to be a mail girl and/or a clipper I was promoted to clipper after I was a mail girl and then I was promoted to researcher which the men wrote these stories and then the women checked them that's how it worked in those days and then I got a job at the New York Post I got a job at the New York Post because I there was a newspaper strike in New York and some friends of mine put out a parody of a couple of the New York newspapers I wrote a parody of one of the colonists and the people at the New York Post were very angry about it they thought that the post should sue not that there was anything to sue there was no entity to sue but nonetheless they were all ranting and raving about how someone should be sued for this before people really understood what parodies were and the publisher of the post Dorothy Schiff said don't be ridiculous if they can parodied the post they can write for it hire them and so I got a job as a reporter there was a great job it was fantastic I covered everything there was to cover I covered politics and murders and trials and you know movie stars and president's daughters weddings and it was it was a very small staff there was a lot of news you you were allowed to write very much with a sense of humor and a certain amount of derision even we were not the New York Times and we knew that and it was a great way to become a writer because you could really find your voice there were magazines that didn't have a lot of women writing for them but if you wanted to write for them and you were any good at all you could but the New York time magazine which you know the first assignment I got from them in nineteen sixty eight or nine was was a fashion assignment and I had never written about fashion in my life I knew nothing about fashion I cared less but I thought well I'll do this I'll write this and then they'll see I can write for them and then I won't have to write about fashion anymore and I never did I didn't think of going into film till I was well into my 30s and had been and you know I'd been a I've been a columnist at Esquire for several years and was fairly well known and someone came to me with the idea of writing a screenplay and and I thought well why not everybody was trying to write screenplays at that point everyone was trying to get into the movie business and and I thought well this will be something that'll be fun and interesting you know you don't consciously do these things and then and yet you look back I look back on my life and I realized that about every 10 years or so I sort of moved laterally or every eight years I was a newspaper reporter then I became a magazine writer and then a columnist which was a kind of different version of it and then I started writing screenplays and and so it wasn't that I said oh it's time for me to do something different but there's no question that at a certain point you get to a place where you kind of know what you're doing and you kind of know that you're gonna be repeating yourself if you go on doing it much longer so when the the chance to do something else comes along you go well this might be fun this might be interesting and it was interesting because I really didn't know what I was doing writing screenplays I wrote quite a few before one got made I didn't have the screenplay made til Silkwood was made and that was I was 40 or so about 40 41 and and until I worked with Mike Nichols on that screenplay I it wasn't that Alice Arlen and I hadn't written a good script but then I went to a whole different kind of I got to go to school by working with Mike because he was he was so brilliant at working with you on script and and you know the realization that I had known so little and was learning so much working with him was amazing Alice was um a friend of mine and she was at Columbia film school and she was a good writer I had read a screenplay that she had done and I was by then divorced and the mother of two children and I had been offered Silkwood and I couldn't figure out how I was gonna go to Oklahoma and do all this stuff and have these two children it was very complicated and I thought it would be might be fun to do it with somebody and not have quite the burden as it turned out Alice and I actually all you know we went to Oklahoma together and so but what was great was that we work together and had a huge amount of fun doing it she she's very brilliant at screenplays in its structure and so that's how the idea came up was I just thought I'll ask Alice to do this with me and she said yes one of the things Mike teaches you is that you know is constantly asking what is this story about what is this scene about what is this section of the movie about just forcing you to understand that if you have a bunch of scenes and they're all about exactly the same thing at least two of them are superfluous at the same time if you're in a section of the movie that's about whatever it's about that section of the movie had better been be about that thing or else it too you know etc so he taught us a lot about that and then I got to watch him cast he let us be in the room when the actors came to meet Mike Nichols the greatest you know actors director and and there I learned all the stuff you would never know you and the number of screenwriters who don't know this because directors aren't generous enough to let them in the room you know who don't understand that an actor makes your scene work actors aren't the enemy which a lot of screenwriters think actors are what make it happen and you know you would watch three or four actors read a scene and you would think oh this is the worst scene I have ever written this is so embarrassing I'm going to crawl under the couch and then the right actor would come in and nail it and you'd go oh my god I'm a genius I'm fantastic or else the right actor would nailed it and you would think oh this seems a little long I got a little bored right there better fix that so all of those things were things that I learned from Mike if you came to her with the tragedy she would and and God knows children have a lot of tragedies she really wasn't interested in it at all you know she wasn't one of those mothers who went oh honey tell me what happened to you at school wanted the bad girls do too you know she just would say oh well everything is copy and all she meant was that someday you'll make this into a funny story or a story and when you do I will be happy to listen to it but not until then and I think she basically taught us a very fundamental rule of humor probably of Jewish humor if you want to put a very fine definition on it although she would not think so which is that if you slip on a banana peel people laugh at you but if you tell people you slipped on a banana peel it's your joke and you're the hero of the joke and it it basically is the greatest lesson I think you can ever give anyone and I've always worried I didn't teach it well enough to my own kids because I was so it was such a good mother I always said oh honey tell me what happened to you you know I'm kind of mystified that she didn't because it really is weird and sort of against against human nature practically but that was just who she was and I always horrified it at the especially the women I know who go through things like divorces and five years later they're still going oh look what he did look what the bad boy did to me right get over it turn it into something stop being a victim I mean that is one of the most important lessons of everything is copy is you must not be the victim of what happens to you you must own it you must get above it and and it's you know it's just an unbelievable lesson in terms of how to live your life if you if you are you know especially if you're a woman especially it's in it's one of it was always one of my most you know fundamental irritations with the women's movement in my era of it was how quickly they embraced victims and victimization and still do you know a huge number of things like like these um these women who get goosed in the office and then file a lawsuit instead of just telling whoever did it to jump off a cliff you know oh you can't do that because they'll fire you so what so get another job so or but they won't really they don't fire you that's the interesting thing especially in this day and age so but I'm very old-fashioned in that way I just I just don't get that that rush to to embrace the victim role instead of just going you know just saying something clever witty or even lame it gives you it gives you that thing if you didn't have it anyway which I may have but it does reinforce that thing that writers have which is that third eye which is always whatever horrible thing is happening to you there is always this other thing thinking hmm better remember this this might be a story someday so my second marriage ended in this very melodramatic way melodramatic if you weren't involved with it and dramatic if you were and I was pregnant and and my husband had fallen in love with this extremely tall woman who was married to the British ambassador and it was very painful and horrible at the time but then a few months later I found myself at a typewriter working on a screenplay and instead I wrote the first date pages of a novel and it was a novel that I knew if I could you know when I was going through the nightmare of the end of the marriage I absolutely knew that there was if I could ever find the voice to write it in that someday it would be a story someday it would be copy but at the time I was way too distraught to ever feel that but you know time heals especially if you've had a mother like mine so so I started writing a novel that became heartburn and that was the thinly disguised version of the end of that marriage people think that when you write something it's cathartic and I had written a lot of personal articles at s Square and people people always say oh god it must have been so great when you finally wrote about having small breasts no you get through that and then you write it it's not the writing that's the catharsis the catharsis has happened and it in some way has moved you from the boo-hoo aspect of things to the oh and wait'll I tell you this part of the story wait'll you hear this if you want to hear what you know where you really don't want people to feel sorry for you I have such a strong sense of that that I did not ever want people to think Oh poor Nora it sold a lot of books I think there were many men who were made very nervous by it I think you that men were allowed to write about their marriage is falling apart but you weren't quite supposed to if you're a woman you were just supposed to curl up into a ball and move to Connecticut but but you know it didn't really matter because because as I said it was you know it was a very I mean I I knew what the book was it was it's a funny book and and I was very happy that it sold a lot of copies I think there are a lot of reasons one is the movie business which is very much driven by the young male audience that goes to the movies that drives a movie going this is why you see a lot of women in television and not in movies television is a business that's very much driven by women viewers so it's wide open for women and that's that's part of it and that's just a little Marxist explanation but there are many many many more women in television now than there were in the movie business and and and there are many more women running studios and working at studios so all of that is evening out the director thing I don't think is going to even out or the screenwriter thing is going to even out until women drive the marketplace as much as men do and I'm not sure that's ever going to happen especially since movies in about 20 years if not sooner we'll I don't even think people will go to the movies the way they do now so that will be different my advice to everyone has become a journalist I think everyone should be a journalist now that's totally narcissistic on my part but but I think it's the most amazing way to learn about how people live I mean to to be able to dip in to other people's lives at at the unbelievably ludicrous points you get to when you are a journalist either with when they've just been killed or when they've just they're just about to win the Oscar or they've just written a really wonderful book or or they've just demonstrated against something worth demonstrating against I mean it's it's truly a way of getting out of whatever narrow world we all grow up and we all grow up in the most narrow worlds and then we go to another narrow world which is college where no matter how different everyone is they're all they're all the same suddenly they're all wearing the same thing suddenly and reading the same book suddenly and thinking about the same philosophical question suddenly you know if you have a chance to be a newspaper reporter for three or four years before you do whatever you want to do do it because you'll know so much you know when we were doing Silkwood there's a scene in Silkwood that's a union meeting and at this plutonium factory that Karen Silkwood worked at well I have obviously I've never worked at a plutonium Factory but I had worked at the New York Post I did know what people talk about when they work in an office I know what they talk about the next day they talk about what they saw on television the night before that's not a big deal but if you didn't work in a place like that you wouldn't know it well anyway we're shooting this scene in Texas where we were shooting it and I arrived at the set and Mike Nichols who is a brilliant man but doesn't know everything had put all the people in the scene the union people in the man people at a round table because he wanted to shoot at a round table and I said you can't do that it's Union negotiation it's got to be a rectangular table now that's a that's a very simple thing but we would have looked foolish and I was the only person on a set of 60 people who had ever been in a union negotiation because I had been on the newspaper guild negotiating committee at the New York Post you know that's the kind of stuff you have to know you can't just if you want to go into the movie business what are you gonna write a movie about when you're 22 years old I'll tell you what you're gonna write about your you're gonna write your coming-of-age movie and then you're gonna write your summer camp movie and then you're gonna be out of things because nothing else will have happened to you so I think it's very good to become a journalist I had been reading all these books about getting older I'd looked at all these you know when you go through menopause there are all these books out there called things like the joy of menopause and you think what is this book about what relevance does this book have to anything I'm familiar with none whatsoever and then 10 years later as I went into my 60s there were all these books about how fabulous it was to be older and and you know you're gonna have such great the greatest sex of your life in your 60s which I finally realized you know I mean I don't know why people write things like that because they're just lies you know but then I thought well there might be a circumstance that you could have the greatest sex of your life in your 60s if you had never had sex until then maybe but you know this stuff was all out there and I kept thinking why are people writing this why are people saying this don't they have necks don't they look in the mirror and one day someone of an editor at Vogue called me and said they were doing an issue on age and was there anything I wanted to write about and I said yeah I want to write about my neck it wasn't anything harder you know and I just wrote this funny thing called I feel bad about my neck which everybody read a huge number of people most people you know you don't expect when you have a piece in vogue to have a huge you know people don't buy Vogue necessarily for the articles but this was this was an issue all my friends read and and a lot of people said oh that was really funny and I thought oh I see there's a book here there's a book about getting older and there's and I started making a list of things that I thought could be written about that no one had written about like maintenance which is a full-time career for those of us who are getting on in years just sort of keeping your finger in the dike so that you don't look like a bag lady so so I made a list of things and and then wrote most of the book and sold it it wasn't you know and then there's all sorts of things and that aren't about aging like my summer in the White House when President Kennedy didn't sleep with me I've always had a very clear sense since I was a kid you know reading books about people who didn't live in the United States about how lucky I was to live here I don't I don't think there's any there's no place like it every you know I remember after 9/11 there was a lot of foolish talk about where we would go if we had to leave this place which I just thought was so idiotic I couldn't believe it because where where could you go where would where could you possibly go nowhere there's not no place like this no place that offers what this country does it's no big deal that I am a writer my parents were writers but it's a big deal that they were writers it's a big deal that they went to college you know that they were that generation of first you know first generation Americans first generation college graduates screenwriters you know so so of course they're kids I was a child of privilege my husband Nick Pileggi is the son is first generation first generation BA and he became a writer he's he and I are you know one generation different not in our ages but in our parents experience and that couldn't that wouldn't have happened to him in another place and it almost didn't happen here by the way because he was in junior high school and was assigned got his schedule in junior high school and he was in all vocational classes and he went to the guidance person and said why am I not in English class is why I don't have why don't I have any classes like my friends have and they said oh you're italian-american you're not gonna need this kind of thing you're not going to go to college that was New York City but he fooled them and you know switched out of it but the point is you and you still hear stories like that it means stories from people like Mario Cuomo Ruth Bader Ginsburg who couldn't get a job after she graduated from law school there's still a lot of that you know stuff and yet compared to anyplace else this is you know by far the best place you could be well I'm a writer and I'm very lucky because I don't always have to write the same kind of thing you know I know how to write in more than one way which is one of the luckiest things about my life but but I you know I think that I think failure is very hard because you don't really know you really don't know you know people see things that don't work and they think well why didn't they know that wasn't gonna work well they didn't they really didn't they they really thought it was gonna be fabulous and great and everybody working on it thought it was and and then it comes out and it doesn't work it really doesn't work and you go hmm too bad that didn't work but you don't learn I wish I wish one learned more it certainly doesn't keep you from failing again I'll tell you that the good thing about directing your own writing is that you have no one to blame but yourself and I'm a big one for that I would much rather blame myself then then have the alibi of saying well that wasn't my idea you know that's that's the greatest thing and also when you write when you write something you really do hear how you want it said sometimes it isn't said that way it's said much better because you have a really great actor sing and and they come at it in a completely different way and sometimes you have a really great actor who missed the joke and you have a chance to say to them no no's I think the word here you are missing is this or no you know you can at least be there on behalf of the script as the director but you have a very clear idea when you write something of what you want it to look like I'm writing something now though that I know I'm not going to direct and there's a great freedom in that there's a great freedom and not always having to know everything about what's going to happen in the scene and knowing that if it gets made it'll be someone else's problem what the room looks like what the improv is at the beginning or the end of the scene you know all that stuff

Channel: Academy of Achievement

Views: 23,269

Rating: 4.8530612 out of 5

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Id: 3HhXgLux6iw

Length: 58min 47sec (3527 seconds)

Published: Fri May 06 2016