(upbeat music)
- Hi, this is Marya Gullo from the Hollywood Reporter,
and we're in studio today with the cast of Private Life.
I have director Tamara Jenkins.
- Hello.
- Stars, Kathryn Hahn and Kayli Carter.
- Hi.
- Hi. - Hi, how are you?
- Good,
thanks for having us. - So wonderful to see you.
- Happy to be here.
- What a wonderful, strong female team we have here.
Makes me very happy and proud.
Tamara, I really would like to know
what it took to make this movie?
- Took a lot of time, it took some cash,
(laughs)
no, it took a lot of relentlessness
and then I got these amazing actors
and then it started happening
but it was long protracted process
and I wrote it so that was a whole,
it's like a separate category of pain,
I don't know, I just can't believe how I was really,
'cause I was talking to this person,
I just said, when I was sitting in the room,
when we were shooting the scene
with you guys around the coffee,
like the burrito scene, let's call it that.
(laughs)
Everybody was really working at their highest level
and it was really exciting.
- And Kathryn, you and Paul Giamatti,
you both went to the same school, you went to Yale,
but you had never met before?
- No, I was a minute behind.
(laughs)
Yeah, but we had never met before
and so strangely though it really did feel,
instantly fraternal,
like I just felt like, it's like,
we had just known each other our whole lives.
Like, it just felt like we just immediately,
fell into like the same dumb jokes
and (laughs) like it just felt so easy right off the bat
and, you know, Tamara had set up such a,
just kind of such an easy organic way for us
to kind of just get to know each other,
like kind of casually first, like she made dinner for us,
we had these like kind of mellow rehearsal,
like over a long period, kind of over a,
like we met once for diner and then a couple months went by
and then we had this very kind of shorten rehearsal period
but it still kind of had the feel of that.
We had like, sat around coffee tables,
we just kind of stewed in each other like.
- Presence.
- Presence, yeah. (laughs)
And then we added this like cutie in the mix
and it was like the perfect, like, last ingredient,
it just like, you know, she's a cook, really,
like a perfect cook. (laughs)
- Well it's very cook like.
- It is.
- Making a movie,
'cause you're pouring in all these ingredients
and wanting to create a certain flavor
but then, it is very, it's very alchemy.
- Yes, yes, Kayli, you just came out of drama school
when you got this movie as well.
- A few years ago, I mean, it was a few years
before I had done, I had done theater
and that's what I sort of thought I was going to continue doing
for as long as they let me
and it had been about a year and a half
that I had been doing the same play
and I'd done one thing for Netflix previously
and then we took the play that I did
with Mark Rylance to London
and the week I got back, this is the script
that I read, which came in the nick of time
because I was really in a crisis of
what to do next that would make me feel
that creatively fulfilled (laughs)
as doing a play in the West End
and it had to be something exceptional
and this script is exceptional.
- Yes, can you talk a little bit about both your characters?
- I play Rachel, Rachel's a writer, a playwright,
Rachel's been married to Richard for a long time,
they live in the East Village.
She had dreams that didn't come true,
it's almost like she's waking up
from the fog of her like, twenties and thirties
and looking around all of sudden she like wakes up
and she's in the same apartment, in the same place
and everything she thought, like you know,
goes like this all of sudden like everything
that she thought was going to happen by then has not
and so she's kind of reconciling with this new, like,
reality (laughs) of it looking the same but she's older.
You know, body's not behaving the way she wanted it to,
biology's not working the same,
like he's the same but everything else is a little.
So, yeah I'd say she in her early, you know,
early mid-life crisis.
- And Kayli would you say
your character is in a quarter life crisis?
(laughs)
- Yes, absolutely. - Yes.
- Totally. - I play Sadie...
- Totally true, everybody's having something.
- [Kathryn] Everyone is.
- Everyone is, Molly's character as well,
she's having a lighter mid-life crisis.
- [Tamara] Menopausal crisis.
- [Kathryn] Yes.
- Yeah, I play Sadie, I'm Richard and Rachel's step-niece
and I am making the decision to drop out of college,
which I have been in for a long time without graduating
and really finding what I want to be doing.
And so there's longing for her as well
to try to fulfill those dreams that she has
and even identify what those dreams are
and what she's good at. - Totally.
- And if she's any good at it which,
I know a lot of people who feel that way,
in their early to mid-twenties.
They just suddenly go, oh, I have to figure out
what I'm going to do with the rest of my life now.
And it doesn't always happen for everybody as quickly
and the path is not as straight
as people would like it to be.
And so, she takes an alternate road
and goes to stay with her, you know,
step aunt and uncle in the East Village.
And it takes her life in a very different direction
than she was headed.
- Yeah, and there's so much humor in this movie
and a lot of it is connected to very vulnerable situations
that people find themselves in
that we kind all relate to like,
the abject depression of a waiting room,
a doctor's waiting room.
(laughs)
And the idea of your butt sticking to
the paper medical, you know, (laughs)
like when you have those...
I mean as somebody who's been to the doctor a lot recently.
- Yeah. - I can relate.
(laughs)
- Yeah, yeah, yeah. The indignities.
- Yeah. - Yes.
- A lot of indignities with this for sure.
- Fluorescent indignities.
- Yeah.
- Yes. (laughs)
So some of the themes are, you know,
just how much women from whatever age they're at
have to deal with the question of,
you know, fertility, having a child,
having career versus having a child.
Why did you want to explore this very human condition?
- Because it is the female condition
and I had my own experience with infertility
and our own, my husband and I, had our own, you know, saga.
You know, Kathryn puts it very well
when she talks about that a woman's career
when she's building her career is the exact moment
when her fertility is at at it's most, you know, ready.
And so it doesn't match, like, by the time,
when you're building your career is
when you should be having a child
and when you choose the career at that point
and not the child, you might run into trouble,
it doesn't happen for everybody,
some people are super lucky
and some people manage to do both at the same time
but you know, it's a dilemma.
I mean, there's a funny story when my husband
and I were both in the thick of one, you know,
we did in different chunks of time but at think it was like,
our first round of doing a series of IVF things
and it was a mess and our lives were all about you know,
him being the scientist in the kitchen,
putting together the needle, the intramuscular needle
and putting estrogen patches
and going to the doctor's appointments and sonograms.
We were in Upstate New York and we were like,
let's just kind of take a break and we went to the movies
and we found ourselves in a multiplex
and the movie that was playing was Knocked Up.
(everyone laughs)
And we went and we watched a movie with,
you know, these actors, I mean actors,
these humans, these young people fall into bed
and they get drunk and then they like wake up
and they're pregnant.
(laughs)
And that's this comedy, I mean,
we're just like (gasp) (laughs)
We totally forgot that sex was how people get pregnant,
like I they wouldn't even do any injections,
how they do that? (laughs)
We completely, you know, detached that part of it
and then we walked out of the movie theater
and I said, "Wow, Knocked Up, what would ours be called,
"what would of our story be called?
"And then I said it would be called Knocked Out."
(everyone laughs)
That was kind of, must have been some beginning of an idea.
- Yeah, so interesting how the couple, you know,
Rachel and Richard, have such a hard time, you know,
their marriage starts to disintegrate a little bit
and then they have fresh new life Sadie coming in
and it reinvigorates them.
- Yeah, it like fluffs everything up.
- [Kathryn] Yeah, yeah.
- And all the things that were sort of dragging them down,
it's all stuff that she utterly admires.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
- Their alternative lifestyle, their bohemian kind of,
an interesting way of reflecting on themselves.
I mean she thinks they're the greatest thing
since sliced bread. - [Kayli] Yeah.
- It's like she just ripens, everything like,
it's like you know the plant in E.T. that's like dying
and like (laughs) she comes down
and it's like (gasps), it starts,
do you remember that plant in E.T.?
- I don't remember it, but that's so good.
- It's like a dying plant in E.T.
And then he touches it
and then it starts to like (buzzing noise)
yeah and then he leaves and it starts to like,
die again. (everyone laughs)
But that's what I feel with Sadie.
- This motion with your hand.
- Yeah, I'm just going to keep doing that all day.
(laughs) Of like, check please.
But that's what it feels like,
there's like all this life and then,
of course, you know, all of sudden their heart,
their family heart starts to open, you know,
towards her too, at least for Rachel.
- More possibilities of vulnerability.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- And there's a huge perspective shift
that happens for her in going in
and you know having, being a fly on the wall for this,
for this couple that can do no wrong in her eyes
and just starting to watch things like chip away
or be more honest then she was expecting.
I think it opens up a lot of things within her
and makes her grow up a little bit
and realize that she has to figure out
what she wants to do and that she has to stand on her own,
to admit that maybe she is relying
on other people to make decisions
about the direction of her life is going to go
and that ultimately she has to be the person
to make those decisions.
- Right and Sadie's character,
she's very bright but she's also very young
and I don't know the word to describe it,
I want to say naive but that's not what it is,
what is her character?
- Well, I think she has kind of this, beautiful impulsivity.
- Yeah. - And says things
without considering and does things without,
you know even her decision to go along
with their scheme, we're being very discrete
and not telling anyone the plot as we're talking
but, you know, it's this like yes,
this and it's you know.
- Yeah, she says yes to everything.
- She's saying yes.
- She's very filterless
and she runs towards oblivion without looking both ways,
it's really a scary quality.
- But it's also very youth.
- [Everybody] Yeah. - You know, and that's like,
young people aren't really thinking about mortality
in the same way not young people do.
- Or consequences.
- Or consequences, yeah. - Yeah.
- Like a brilliant puppy.
It's one of those brains that you're like,
like Sadie has one of this brain too,
like for Rich and, I mean you're like (gasp)
it's just such a beautiful brain
but then yet just does something (laughs)
these actions you're like, oh you are still a child.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, like forgetting, cause it's like they,
I felt like that
with my own child. - This expectation,
yes!
Right.
- She's very tall, she's eight, she's very tall
and sometimes, she's an only child
and so that makes her kind of,
you know, she'll burst into tears about like something dumb
and I'm like, oh my god, you're a baby.
But it's very confusing 'cause she's so tall,
she looks like she's 12 but she's eight
and anyway lots of things, she seems so sophisticated
and then her true baby-ness, eight year old ness.
- Yeah. - And sometimes it's just joy,
like it's not even an naivete
but she hasn't killed all of her joy yet.
- You.
- Yeah, she hasn't killed her hope for the future
and she's not living, she's not stewing in the same way.
- Dying plants.
- Yeah, she's still highly optimistic but also very aware
that the world is not, is not a perfect place
which I think is such a fun dichotomy to play.
You rarely get to play stuff
that's that nuanced. - She's also, you know like,
pulling away from her mother
and finding this substitute family
and there's a lot of that happening,
her mother is Molly Shannon.
- Yes. - Oh.
(kissing sound) - And she's great.
- She's brilliant. - Amazing.
- I wanted to ask you, in your directorial career,
you know, from Slums of Beverly Hills
to Savages to Private Life,
what's the through line?
- [Kathryn] Like my eyeballs, your own eyeballs.
- Yeah, (laughs)
I guess there's something, you know,
I mean each one of those films has
a core element of personal experience
that I then plant the seed of personal experience
into whatever I'm writing and then grows
and becomes its own thing
but I guess the thing they have in common, it's
that they all have touched me personally in some way
and then I turn that into a fiction.
- And do you think with this subject matter of Private Life,
do you think that people, in your experience,
would be better off if they were able to openly talk more
about their infertility issue or,
if women were able to more express themselves
about whether they did or didn't want to have kids
and be able to do it without kind of
the society around them?
- Yeah it's very interesting 'cause, I mean,
we've been doing Q&A's and so people have,
I mean, we've just amazed, you know,
people just have poured out all these feelings
about the movie, I mean, all different kind,
you know, men really like, you know.
All different kinds of people like the movie
for different reasons but then there's some
that really had similar experiences
that had their own fertility stories
and like old people coming up
and showing me pictures of their, this is my granddaughter
and you know my son had to do this there
and we got her and like lots of.
- At Sundance, a couple came up
and showed us a picture of their baby
and had said like, we watched this last night
and my god, nothing's ever, kind of, touched on that.
And then, to have perfect strangers showing you pictures
of their kids and opening up a detail
that usually is kept very quiet,
for what reasons I don't really know,
other than, women being shamed about fertility
and their bodies and what to do with them
or having other people decide that for them
but we should talk about it,
women should feel safe to talk about it
and their partners, the thing I love about this,
is watching the partnership go through those changes
between Richard and Rachel and you know.
- Yeah, 'cause it's not just a female story either.
- No. - Sure, you know, couples.
- Yeah.
- I mean I think it is like a real,
it is a real thing you know,
one of the reasons I love this title so much
and we were just talking about this,
is because, you know, I think we can,
one can be so flippant to another person about their,
what they're going through in terms of
how they are making their family, like,
oh why don't you do this, you know, just whatever.
So I cannot imagine the pain it is to go through,
to go through what this is,
I can't imagine what it must feel like
to have your body betray you in those ways
or feel like you're on top of it
and then imagine what is is to not be able to do something
you had been assuming was working
or was going to work or whatever the timing.
So, I can understand people wanting to protect
their experience but I'm certainly glad,
not that this is an issue movie, like, we keep saying,
it's like a story about a marriage really but it is exciting
that there is something out there on the planet
that touches on it for sure.
- That makes people that goes through this thing
feel less alone. - Yeah, yeah.
- I mean that's what a couple people had said
and then I've been on the phone with all these men,
like doing phone interviews with people
and I'm on the phone with this very young sounding man
and thinking we're going to be talking about cinema
and then he says, oh my god, I just have to tell you,
this is really, this is really crazy but my wife and I,
we're actually in the middle of doing this right now.
- [Kathryn] Wow.
- And blah blah blah blah, dah dah dah dah
and he was, I mean, she watched it with me
and we just couldn't believe that it was.
And he was so excited, a man, you know,
so excited, to be able to, I don't know
to have this this weird outlet to talk about this thing
that he's been hiding and he said,
"I've just sort of joked about it
"with my male friends, like ha ha."
And he's like, when was I saw Paul Giamatti in
that collection room, you know, with the porn
(everyone laughs) and like the remote control
and standing up with the thing stuck to his ass.
He was like, I couldn't believe it, I'm not alone.
Paul Giamatti is here too!
(everyone laughs)
J'arrive!
I don't know.
- Totally.
- Yeah, it was great.
- Well, thank you so much for being here.
The movie is called Private Life and it's on Netflix.
- And it's also in movie theaters first.
- Yeah in movie theaters. - Yes.
- And theatrical release on.
- October 5th.
- Same day.
Yeah, see it on a big screen if you can
'cause it is beautiful. - It's beautiful.
- The cinematography is gorgeous on a big screen.
- You all look gorgeous.
(everyone laughs)
- Oh, thank you.
- Thank you. - Congratulation!
- Yeah, she's got a baby this is,
there's a whole meta level. - Yes!
- We're talking about this and she's got
that going on in the lower level, she's pregnant.
- It's fertile in here. (laughs)
- Very exciting.
- Thank you.