-No, no, no!
[ Clattering ]
[ Breathing heavily ]
[ Car engine starts ]
♪♪
-Hey.
[ Electricity crackles ]
-What the hell? -Get out of the car!
-No.
-Get out of the [bleep] car!
-Wait, wait, wait. Please, no, no, no.
♪♪
-Welcome back to "Late Night."
We're here with Aubrey Plaza, everybody.
[ Applause ]
So this is a fantastic film. -Thank you.
-"Emily the Criminal."
So this is a script that just sort of came your way,
and did you know right away that you wanted to make it?
-Yes.
It's an incredible script, written by John Patton Ford,
who also directs the movie.
A colleague of mine who I was working on something else with
handed it to me and was just like,
"I think you'd like the character,"
and I read it so fast,
and it's just like, an undeniably good script,
and I was like, "I gotta make this."
-It's a really --
It immediately touches on the ideas
of, you know, student loan debt and the gig economy
and sort of the very small decisions we can make
that sort of snowball into
becoming a member of the sort of criminal underworld.
-Yeah. -And you're so believable.
It feels like one of these great, old '70s crime films.
It just has this real propulsion behind it.
-I know. That's what I love about it.
It's like, a real down and dirty L.A. story.
But the L.A. that you don't get to see a lot in movies.
Like, mostly it's hipster Silver Lake L.A. or whatever.
But yeah, it reminded me of, like,
"Straight Time" with Dustin Hoffman.
-Yeah. -Or Michael Mann movies.
I don't know.
There's just something kind of gritty about it.
-I know you shot it on a very small budget,
but there's some great action sequences,
great car chase scenes.
Were those fun pulling off on a shoestring?
-Yeah, I mean, they were fun -- very dangerous,
because we didn't have a lot of money, so, you know.
[ Laughter ] It was like, you know,
certain streets weren't locked down.
Day one, actually, when I got in the car, I was like --
the camera was in the front seat with me,
the DP was operating the camera, the director's in the back,
just the three of us in the car.
And I was like, "So, where are we going?
Should I take a stroll around the block, or...?"
And they were like, "We're getting on the 10."
And I was like, "The 10?"
Which is a highway in Los Angeles
that is really scary.
Within, like, 10 minutes,
I was going 80 miles an hour down the 10,
getting in actual road rage incidents with people.
-[ Laughs ] Great.
-It all felt really real!
[ Laughter ]
Which was not safe.
But that's what you gotta do, you know?
When you're making independent films,
you gotta just [bleep] go for it.
-Yeah, well, you went for it
and you could see it on the screen.
You play a criminal in this.
There's a lot of stealing.
Are you someone --
have you ever in real life done any theft?
-No, I'm a good Catholic girl, no.
Uh, no, no, I'm not a stealer.
I'm more of, like, a vandalizer. -Oh, really?
-Yeah. -Did you vandalize
back in the day?
-Yeah, um...
but I was kind of like a pathetic vandalizer.
I would vandalize buildings that were already abandoned
and stuff, so it was more like I was trying to be a punk.
Like, I'd throw bricks in a window
but the window was already broken, kind of thing.
But there was one place that I always wanted to vandalize,
and I still have it, and even to this day,
every Christmas when I go home, I drive by it.
It's a... I don't know what it is.
Some kind of community center called The Blue Ball Barn.
-Uh-huh. -And I have this fantasy
of putting an S on it, and I've never done it.
-So not on the "ball," I would imagine. The S?
-Blue Balls Barn. -Yeah.
You want it to say "Blue Balls Barn."
-I want it to say "Blue Balls Barn."
[ Laughter ] -For a community center.
[ Laughter ]
-It's funny! -It is funny.
[ Laughter ]
-I'm gonna do it. -Do it at Christmas.
-I almost did it, like, two years ago.
-Really? -And I was like,
"I can't do this as an adult." -No.
-If I get caught now... -I know.
-But any press is good press, right?
That's what they say. -Exactly.
-For the Golden Globe award push,
it would be great to get arrested in Delaware.
-You're right. You're right.
[ Laughter ]
-Hey, congratulations on everything.
-Thanks, Seth!
-Thank you so much for being here.
You guys, Aubrey Plaza. -Thank you.
"Emily the Criminal" is streaming now on Netflix,
and "The White Lotus" is streaming on HBO Max.
We'll be right back
with Bashir Salahuddin and Diallo Riddle.