When Nicole Holofcener first got her start in the 1990s, she was celebrated as a rarity: a female writer-director (“Walking and Talking,” “Lovely and Amazing,” “Friends with Money”). Today, she’s no rarity, and she continues to deliver funny, sharp observational comedies about imperfect middle-class New York women. But somehow, the scope and potential of her talent remain elusive.
Hollywood gives her scripts to write, rewrite and polish (for big bucks). She wrote, with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, Ridley Scott’s “The Last Duel,” and crafted Jodie Comer’s character and the roles of Scarlett Johansson and Florence Pugh in Marvel’s “Black Widow.” She earned more in those three weeks of work than three of her films combined, she told the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, which honored her this year by screening three of her films (“Enough Said,” “Please Give” and “You Hurt My Feelings”) to an audience unfamiliar with her work. She’s currently writing for Gillian Anderson and Greta Lee in Disney’s latest “Tron.”
She also has a parallel career as a television director, with Sex and the City, Six Feet Under, Orange Is the New Black and Parks and Recreation. But when she decided to pursue a more traditional directing career, she didn’t get the job. She didn’t seek out Can You Ever Forgive Me?, for which she earned her first Oscar nomination, for a film she didn’t write. She used the word “bittersweet” to describe the moment. “There are things to do that aren’t just my own movies,” she said. “That got me the job at Marvel. People know me better now and think I can do different things.”
Sometimes it’s hard for her to watch a director like Ridley Scott direct her carefully scripted scenes. She would let Scott know that sometimes in “The Last Duel.” His response? “Get out of here. I don’t need your opinion.”
Holofcener hates being called the “female Woody Allen.” Her inspirations include Allen, Elaine May, Neil Simon, Hal Ashby, Ken Loach and Albert Brooks. She, too, comes from a Jewish family in New York. While her biological father, Lawrence Holofcener, was a painter-sculptor and Broadway lyricist, her stepfather was Allen’s producer, Charles Joffe, and her mother Carol Joffe was Allen’s regular set designer. As a young girl, Holofcener was an extra on “Sleeper,” a production assistant on “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy” and an assistant editor on “Hannah and Her Sisters.”
“I really enjoyed spending time with him when I was little,” she said. “He would tease me, hit me with the newspaper, like a prankster uncle. As I got older, he drifted away from me. I didn’t really have a relationship with him anymore.”
After a series of short films in the 1980s at Columbia University, Holofcener made her feature directorial debut with Walking and Talking, a film about two friends played by Catherine Keener and Anne Heche that took six years to finance at a cost of $1 million. Miramax snapped it up at Sundance. That didn’t make financing her subsequent films any easier. She has written and directed seven features in total, of which the romantic comedy Enough Said (Searchlight) starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus and James Gandolfini (in his final role) was her most successful, grossing $26 million worldwide. The drama The Land of Steady Habits, starring Ben Mendelsohn and Edie Falco, was backed by Netflix.
“It was the only place that would finance the project with the actors I wanted,” she said. “It became a real postage stamp very quickly. It’s important to show movies in theaters. It’s a completely different experience. I know people watch my movies on Netflix and go to the bathroom and talk to their kids and scroll through their phones. I see my own kids doing it. I used to work in a video store and it was such a pleasure to be able to talk to people about movies and suggest movies. It was a real love story. And I don’t think streaming platforms encourage that kind of love story. It’s more routine. It’s like lunch. You watch a movie, you forget about it, you watch another movie, you forget about it.”
Times are tough for smart filmmakers. “I think it’s even tougher now,” Holofcener said. “There are very few directors who can make big funny movies, like Judd Apatow or Paul Feig. Those movies are great. I’m a big fan of them. I could do one. In fact, I tried to get a job doing one recently. It was a funny script. And it had funny actors in it. And I was immediately turned down because they said, ‘I’m going to make it too realistic or sad or whatever.’ Because I wouldn’t know how to be that broad. And I would. And it was frustrating. Comedies like mine don’t win a lot of awards. People don’t take dramatic comedies as seriously as they did in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. James L. Brooks’s “Broadcast News” was a huge hit. If it was in theaters, or streaming today, it wouldn’t be a huge success.” It just wouldn’t be big enough.
A couple of big-budget comedies that she didn’t get could have made a difference in Holofcener’s career. “I didn’t get the part,” she said. “There was a Texas murder story, and it was a big budget. And the characters were a little too big, a crazy Texas thriller. And I was told, ‘Nicole can’t do big hair.’ I wish I could make a blockbuster movie and make money and have more opportunities. I can do a lot of things. And I wish people would trust me more to do that.”
At a time when even mainstream comedy directors like Nancy Meyers are struggling to get their films financed by studios, the obvious thing for Holofcener to do is create her own TV series. She has tried to pitch four shows without success. One of them, she created from scratch and had stars attached. “Just like it’s hard to get my movies made because of what I like to do,” she says, “these TV shows were similar: episodic, real-life, funny, sad, no plot. So I stopped trying. It’s not worth the stress, the pitches, the meetings, the rejections. Because I can do something else.”
Holofcener feels she has been placed in too narrow a niche. “I’ve been assigned a certain kind of job. I always tell my agent, ‘Tell people I’ll do other projects, I’ll branch out.’ But most people don’t think I want to. Or I keep dropping a lot of projects. Because I’m demanding, as everyone should be. I’m not in this to make money. So it’s frustrating. Sometimes I feel really bad about it. I’ve made seven movies. Can somebody give me $6 million more to make one? Or spend more on marketing my movies? People don’t know that I can broaden my base; most people don’t know who I am.”
Shortly : She’s taking her time imagining her next film. She’s adapting Alison Espach’s book “The Wedding People” for Will Speck and Josh Gordon to direct. “It’s going to be a much bigger budget than I’m used to,” Holofcener said. “And yet it’s still very much a character-driven film. So I’m having fun writing it. It’s always within my reach.”