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How was it acting in a movie that you wrote?

ZK: It was much easier than I thought it was going to be. I was concerned that it would feel weird or that I wouldn’t be able to turn off my writer brain, but to be totally honest, I’ve been writing while I’ve been acting for a long time. Never on the same project, but while I’m doing a play I’d be off writing something earlier in the day so I think my brain is used to switching back and forth so it didn’t feel so weird.

On set, was it tough to separate yourself from the script? Criticizing your own words?

ZK: I know what you are talking about. I’ve written two plays and had them both produced and it was really painful for me both times. I’ve had good experiences; I loved the people I was working with and happy collaborations, but every night I’d sit in the audience and want to die, because all I would hear was places where the re-write didn’t quite line-up or where it was missing something. I’ve been working on the script with [Valerie and Jonathan] for nine months before production and we went through every line. I literally read the whole script aloud to them and told them what I thought and what pictures I saw in my mind. We had these really in depth conversations and because of that, by the time we went into production, I really felt like it was ours. There were obviously moments where I would go, “You’re not saying that line correctly,” and I spent hundreds of hours working on that line so why aren’t they saying it right? But other than that, I think, I don’t know. It was easier for some reason.

At what point did you think of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris as potential directors?

PD: Probably Zoe had written ten pages and she showed them to me and I said Jon and Val should direct this and Zoe said, “Yes.” (both laugh) But that was a dream idea so we kind of daydreamed the whole time that they would be the people we sent it to. If we had not gotten them, I wouldn’t have known what we’d have done, but they would have been the inspiration for what we wanted in terms of sensibility and luckily we didn’t have to consider other options, because they said, “Yes.”

Speaking of Chris Messina’s character earlier, how developed were the supporting characters before you started filming or was that mostly the actors bringing the characters to life?

ZK: [Directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris] are sticklers for it has to be on the page. They don’t like a whole lot of improvisation and I’d say 95% of the movie is as scripted. But there’s a funny alchemy that happens when you cast an actor where the character exists in a platonic state and then the actor exists and when you meld the two, this new person shows up.

PD: A great example is when Jon and Val suggested Antonio Banderas for Mort, who I think probably Zoe was thinking while writing it, or at least on my first read, Mort was nothing close to Antonio Banderas, but some totally different person. So it’s the same words, but it is a really inspired choice that brought something out of that character and that’s the beauty of collaboration.

This movie just has that screwball tone to it. In certain scenes, not the whole film…

ZK: Well, a lot of that has to do with Valerie and Jonathan’s direction.

PD: And I think romantic comedies used to be … I guess we like older romantic comedies more compared to modern ones.

ZK: Yeah, I think the romantic comedy platonic ideal used to be done with more elegance and that now the romantic comedies that you and I respond to are ones that bend the genre a little bit more.

How old are we talking about? Like His Girl Friday?

ZK: Yeah, yeah. We watched a lot of those just for inspiration. The Awful Truth.

PD: Philadelphia Story is the best.

ZK: It’s just a genre I love so much.

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