Girls - Interview with Lena Dunham & Judd Apatow

Lena, how close did you get to this character, in real life? Was there a point where you were in New York and didn’t have money and didn’t know what you were going to do?
LENA DUNHAM: Really close. It’s closely based on my own experience of getting out of college and not having a sense of whether I would ever get to do the thing I wanted to do, and I was really miserable. I was working in a baby clothes store, and was just excited that I got free cookies in the afternoon. It was a really confusing, frustrating time, and I saw a lot of my friends going through the same thing, but it didn’t feel like it was being reflected back at us. I’ve always been someone who feels better, if I see what I’m going through in a movie. So, I really wanted that for me, and for other people.

Did you feel you had the writing talent to make it work, eventually?
DUNHAM: No. I remember asking my mom, “Do you think that I will ever have enough money to live outside of your house?” And she would be like, “You just never know.”

What sensibilities and comedic rhythms did you each bring to this project, within the creative process?
JUDD APATOW: I loved Tiny Furniture. I was given a DVD of it. I didn’t know anything about it, and I didn’t know Lena wrote it. I didn’t know her name. I didn’t know it was her family. I just saw the movie, and then I saw in the credits, “Oh, she did all of this, and that’s her family?” I’m a big fan of doing personal storytelling, so when we started this show, just in terms of sensibilities, the only thing that I preached, having worked on The Larry Sanders Show and Freaks and Geeks, was that we only have 27 minutes to tell these stories. It’s a little more compact, and we have to get to it and have some fun, along the way. You do have to change the pace of it when you have a limited amount of time, as opposed to my movies, which are the length of Lawrence of Arabia.

Source: Full interview @ Collider

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