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Earlier, we were comparing it to Woody Allen movies like Purple Rose of Cairo. It’s like you don’t ask questions; that takes the fun out of it.

ZK: Sure. Purple Rose of Cairo, Groundhog Day. Those are like two of my favorite movies and definitely an inspiration for this. Other things we looked at a lot are Tootsie. Even though that’s not a magic, realist leap you still accept that everybody believes this man is a woman and that Dustin Hoffman as a woman seems like a jaunt to me (laughs). I think that asking people to suspend their disbelief is central to making art.

You could have written this as a straight romantic comedy, but then it takes a dark turn, so why did you decide to go that way?

ZK: That’s a really good question and I asked myself the same question while writing it. I wrote the first 20 pages and then stopped for like six months, because I felt like I could see what that broader version was and I knew that wasn’t the game I was after. I could sense in myself that I didn’t want to write that version and I don’t think that version has its own place when I would look down on it; it’s just not what I wanted to do.

So then I started to think about it and realized I was interested in talking about what happens in a relationship when one person is basically afraid of the other person. Where one person’s independence threatens the other and what happens when issues of control come a part of the love dynamic. And the idea of a person superseding their reality and that’s something I’ve experienced in relationships and have seen in my friends relationships; that more emotional, darker subject line. So it was important for me to keep it funny and allow the comedy to come out of character, but I felt if you dip a toe in the man controls woman trope, if you have to go all the way or it’s a little bit sexist. If you don’t take it to this logical extreme, then you’re allowing him to get away with something and it allows for the audience to root for the manipulation instead of making them pay for it a little bit, too. I think it’s worth it to be a little riskier and hopefully start a conversation.

How did you come up with the name, Ruby Sparks?

ZK: It just popped into my head. And you know, it’s one of those things where it didn’t use to be the title and now it is and I look at it and go, “What if I named her Ruby Goldman or something?” (laughs) It could’ve been anything.

What titles did you have before?

ZK: I just had one, it was a working title, “He Loves Me,” which was never supposed to be the title of the movie. It was just like what the document was called on my computer (laughs).

You could have written the character as a woman writing her dream man. Did it ever occur to you to do it that way?

ZK: No. Honestly, to me so much of the inspiration came from the myth and I think it was gendered for a reason. It has come down to us, surviving gendered male to female for a reason, and a part of that is psychologically revealing of something in our culture and I think that has to deal with how men tend to look at women in a different way than women look at men. And it’s not a fantasy for a woman to create a person, it’s biology. It happens every single day in the natal wards and for men - I don’t know. For women it corresponds biologically with the fact that we can physically create with our bodies and for men, it is the seed, the pen. It’s the seed of inspiration. I don’t mean to get gross, but it’s the second sex. I’m not the first person to come up with these ideas. I just think that that impulse is particularly male. And I was trained to write things that spoke to me in terms of relationship dynamics and in the relationships I’ve been in, I felt a dynamic much closer to Ruby and Calvin’s than to the gender reverse of that.

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