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- I didn't get a chance
to meet the real women ahead of time,
which was really hard for me because creatively,
I would have loved to have heard every detail,
I think the truth is stranger than fiction.
But I had the article to work from and so,
I felt a responsibility to what really happened,
and the crimes themselves,
I didn't wanna water them down.
But I felt a little bit of freedom
when it came to the characters
because we're trying to just tell a story,
tell the movie version of it.
So the two characters, they form a friendship,
and it's kind of a love story between the two of them.
In reality, they were more like business partners,
so I had to add a lot to the characters
and the relationship,
but as far as the crime itself, the punishment,
and kind of what went down, I just felt that.
- Did you go into strip clubs and do research?
- [Lorene] Sure, yeah.
- And what surprised you about that world?
- Oh, just the you know,
there's no job security for these women,
they're not employees of these clubs,
they pay house fees, they tip everybody out,
so the difference between a good night
and a bad night is a lot, it's how much you go home with.
It's not necessarily did you have a great interaction
with someone or a bad interaction,
I mean certainly there's a lot to deal with in that way,
but the structure of it, the comradery between the women,
there's obviously some competition,
but they really are also,
they work in pairs and teams, it's much more lucrative.
- Did you like them?
- I like them a lot.
I feel a real kinship to them, I danced for the money,
dancing right now, so.
Yeah, I did like them,
and I heard so many different experiences,
I think that's the beautiful part of it
is that you can talk to so many different women
who are having the time or their lives,
this job provides incredible freedom,
they work for a month, they go take their band on the road,
and other girls who escaped a bad relationship.
For some people it's transitional,
and for other people it's where they are,
and so it was incredibly enlightening to speak to them.
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- I love the class elements
and your ability to capture so many of those things.
Was that a matter of hanging out with them,
or had you had some interaction
with people from that part of the boroughs
in Long Island before, or?
- Yeah, I mean I grew up in New Jersey,
so I felt like I grew up with these guys,
I grew up with these girls,
I worked in a boiler room when I was 18,
just doing secretarial work,
but it was really just an off-off Wall Street,
northern New Jersey,
a room full of phones
that guys are selling bad stocks to old people.
My mom worked there for a time,
a guy said he was gonna hit her in the head
with a baseball bat.
- Wow.
- The bosses said,
"Bottom line, can you keep working with him,
"because he's bringing in the money
"and you're just typing stuff into a computer."
So yeah, it was remarkable.
But there was another guy who was on a headset
for six months talking to nobody,
he was losing his mind.
- Oh, wow.
- So it was really like, it was really--
- [Charles] I wanna see that movie.
- Yes, exactly.
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For "Hustlers," I wrote the scene
where the two of them meet first,
I wrote the scene where Jennifer Lopez's character
wraps Constance Wu's character in a fur coat,
and that was the first scene that I wrote
and the last thing we shot, of course.
- That's a great scene.
- It's very much their relationship, too.
- Yeah, I though that immediate intimacy,
especially because you've seen the character, Destiny,
she's grappling with loneliness and isolation
and at this new place and doesn't have physical contact
with any of these girls
and has physical contact with men obviously and strangers,
and I think that kind of intimacy
that women have immediately
was very exciting to me to show that,
that mother-daughter relationship.
- When you write,
what's the toughest part of writing for you,
what do you struggle with?
- Writing is an exercise in empathy, so for me,
that's always my approach, so I tend to prefer characters
that I don't necessarily agree with
and I like making them convince me a little bit, so.
I don't know what I find the toughest part,
probably just what, act two?
I don't know.
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