"It's always nice to see that somebody else has gone through what you have," I gushed, with my first sentence breaking the rule I'd set for myself: Don't flatter her too much. You see, it's tough interviewing the director of one of your favorite films.

     Luckily, Nicole Holofcener must be used to this, as she gamely jokes, "has had such a bad life, suffered as much as you have." Yup, she gets it. With 1996's Walking and Talking, Holofcener established herself as a heroine for single women everywhere. The story of best friends, one about to get married, and one about as far from a happy relationship as it gets, Walking and Talking is brilliantly understated. Holofcener's voice is so perceptive, so authentic, it's not surprising how much her real life has informed her writing. Talking with Holofcener is somewhat akin to an encounter with one of the protagonists of her films, though a good bit less angst-ridden these days.

     With her latest film, Lovely & Amazing, Holofcener let us know she wasn't a one-cult-hit wonder. As with Walking and Talking, watching Lovely & Amazing doesn't feel like watching a film, it is far more voyeuristic than that. Every actor seems so perfectly chosen for his part that one can't imagine another in the role. How does Holofcener get such natural performances out of literally every actor she casts?

Jake Gyllenhaal

     "Well, it's certainly not all me, I have a casting director. Jeanne McCarthy was the casting director, she introduced me to Jake Gyllenhaal, I didn't know who he was," says Holofcener.

     Gyllenhaal turns in a pitch-perfect performance as Jordan, a coworker of Catherine Keener's much older Michelle in the film. Again I dig myself deeper into the trench of a flatterer, telling her how great Gyllenhaal was in the film.

     "Wasn't he? But it's funny," says Holofcener, "I felt the same way, like once I met him I couldn't picture anybody else in the role."

     "Right, because who else can pull off the kind of geeky young kid but –"

     "- be sexy enough. Not very many people. It was just between him and a few others and I was so crazy for him, I was so afraid it wouldn't work out. You know, when you're negotiating the contract and stuff, it's up in the air." Luckily for Holofcener, things worked out with Gyllenhaal, as well as first choices Brenda Blethyn, Emily Mortimer, and Catherine Keener, for whom the part of Michelle was written.

Brenda Blethyn with Lovely & Amazing daughter Raven Goodwin

     Nine-year-old Raven Goodwin played the part of adopted third sister Annie. This being Holofcener's first time directing a child in a feature film, was it difficult to direct a child?

     "I have to use a different part of my brain, to direct a child, and have a lot of patience. It was keeping things very simple, which I actually direct pretty simply anyway. I don't go into psychoanalyzing the characters on the set, ‘cause there's just no time. But, I think for the little girl it was just important to help her feel relaxed and good about herself, which was really no problem. She's a very confident kid."

     Finding the right child certainly helped, but Holofcener did have a few practical lessons to learn about directing children. "Things like not letting her have a lot of sugar at lunchtime made for a better performance by 4 PM. Things you don't realize with a kid. Gee, why's she jumping all over the room? Why's she improvising so much? Oh yeah, those Ding-Dongs at the catering table."

     The character of Annie was based on Holofcener's real-life brother, an African American boy Holofcener's mother adopted after she and her sister became adults. "Not her character, but her place in the family, you know growing up with a family of white crazy women certainly inspired it. Of course he's got issues of being black in a white family, but most of the issues were more female. Having turned him into a girl, then I could just address those."

     Holofcener is certainly an expert when it comes to tackling female issues. Her films evoke an instant recognition, like watching conversations you've been a part of. But in a world of flashy action pictures, gimmicky horror flicks,

Catherine Keener and Anne Heche in Walking and Talking

and romances with the depth of a puddle, it's tough for a woman to make a film, especially one that can't be described in ten words or less. Holofcener allows that being a woman affects how easy it is to make films in male-dominated Hollywood, but she says, "it's really, really hard for everybody, and especially hard for women and minorities. You know, you look at who's up for Academy Awards, and it's all white men."

     I bring up the fact that, in my previous incarnation as a computer programmer, also a very male-dominated discipline, being a woman never held me back – if anything it seemed to help distinguish me from the many others in the field.

     "Well," says Holofcener, "when I was about 25 that was kind of working for me. Now I'm an actual grown-up, I don't think it has its token value anymore. But when I was in film school, or just out of film school it was like that, ‘oh, you know, that's so unique,' but now I don't think I've got that going for me anymore. They can't say, ‘young filmmaker.' I have to actually rise to the occasion."

     Holofcener's films have met with such critical acclaim, it's hard to believe the trouble she's had getting her films financed. "I pitched [Lovely & Amazing] and people said, ‘no thanks,' so I wrote it, you know, on spec instead. And then after I wrote it I still had to pitch it in a way, you know to say how it would be a movie, since I have directed a feature before. But this one again I wrote on spec, and I didn't have to pitch it. You know it was very difficult to get financing for about a year, and then this company Blow Up said that I could make it if I shot it on digital video, and I just took the money and ran."

     Luckily, a change from film to DV didn't pose problems for Holofcener and her talented crew. "It took just as long to light. Our days were just as long and rushed. There wasn't, it's not like we had one of those small intimate crews, one of those low-down and dirty video things – it wasn't like that at all. It looked like a film production."

     Onscreen, Lovely & Amazing doesn't have the familiar shot-through-a-veil look that plagues some DV pieces. "We tried really hard to make it look good, and I didn't ever feel like, ‘because it's DV we should make it look like that,' or, ‘well therefore it should be like a home movie.' I wanted to just pretend it was film." Mission accomplished.

     Holofcener doesn't subscribe to the usual conventions of screenwriting, in which every story must have a clear outcome. "It's not like I think, 'well, I'm going to be different,'" Holofcener says. "To me, it's funny, to me it is resolved. As resolved as I would want something to be. You know, I don't want to puke over the corniness of some ending myself. So I kind of write it how I would like to see it. And I think a lot of people think there are no character arcs, or that it really is an unresolved ending, like in Lovely & Amazing,

Catherine Keener happy on the set of Lovely & Amazing

but to me it's very resolved. They've grown, they've changed, it's really about loving the family you've got, and there you are, watching her [Raven Goodwin's character Annie] put together her mother's bed, and enough said. You know, to me personally that feels like an ending."

     No argument here. Thinking that audiences need to be spoon-fed an unambiguous ending can stop some people from writing at all. "It's funny ‘cause I'm working on a pilot for HBO right now," says Holofcener, "and it's very much my sensibility and my style, and it's my characters, but I keep feeling that I've got to have more of an ending, you know, for the millions of viewers. And then you can come back for more, I mean that's perfect, you don't need an ending because you just tune in next week for more unresolved problems. But I still feel like, I guess writing for somebody else I feel the pressure of being more, you know, correct, more traditional."

     Added pressure aside, HBO sounds like the perfect place for an auteur as distinctive as Holofcener. "I don't have to have a laugh every three pages." When pressed to divulge more details about this upcoming project, Holofcener says, "Oh sure, I'll plug myself. Well I'm still writing it, so it's still very much up in the air. But, it's about a family, on the west side of Los Angeles, a rich white family, not in show business, and it's about that family and the people that work for them, like their maids and gardener and their nanny. You know, kind of an Upstairs, Downstairs but with a humane quality to it. I'm not saying, "rich people suck and poor people are angels," it's more interesting than that. And it's called Help. It's about the help. And we all need help."

     I'm afraid so.

Jean Flynn Wyant