Feature: Actress-screenwriter Zoe Kazan
From Vulture:
In the last five years, Zoe Kazan has drawn attention for her stage roles in The Seagull, where she befriended Cary Mulligan; A Behanding in Spokane, where she played opposite Christopher Walken; and the Off Broadway revival of Angels in America, in which she played Valium-addicted, neurotic Mormon housewife Harper Pitt. In film, she’s had a less prominent run, playing Pablo Schreiber’s New York–booster girlfriend in Happythankyoumoreplease and the epileptic lead in The Exploding Girl. The granddaughter of Elia Kazan (On the Waterfront), and the daughter of two screenwriters, Nicholas Kazan (Reversal of Fortune) and Robin Swicord (Memoirs of a Geisha, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), Kazan studied playwriting at Yale. Now, at 27, she’s having her first play produced in New York, the Manhattan Theater Club–commissioned We Live Here, which is now in previews. She spoke with Jada Yuan in August during a momentary break on the set of He Loves Me — a film that she wrote and co-stars in with boyfriend Paul Dano.
How long had you been working on your movie?
I like to sit on an idea for a long time, so I had this idea for it in the summer of 2009 and I wrote about twenty pages of it and put it away. And then I was doing a play in the spring of 2010 [A Behanding in Spokane] and I had a lot of time on my hands during the day because it was an 80-minute play. So I thought, Well, this would be a good time to pick that back up. So between March and May of 2010, I wrote the first draft. Paul and I knew our directors, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, socially because Paul had done Little Miss Sunshine with them. They’re pretty notorious for being picky and developing projects and then not doing them. So I was a little nervous going to them, and I didn’t want to make things weird socially. But we sent it to them in August and by October we were in rewrites. And then Fox Searchlight came on in April and made our dreams come true and now we’re in production. So it’s been less than a year since Jon and Val got the script and we’re wrapping the movie. That’s so fast. My parents are screenwriters. They’ve had really good times and not so good times in their lives, and I know that what’s happening right now is pretty much the fastest it’s ever going to happen, and with the nicest people.
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Are your parents helping you with the writing part?
No. What do you mean?
They’re screenwriters, right? Have they given you advice or was it just that they did it and you thought you could?
I grew up in a household where they were talking about structure of movies and what happens in first act and what happens in second act and what happens in third act and where those things should happen. I was probably attuned to that from an early age. I read my parents’ scripts from the age of 5, on. And not in some weird, “Let’s train you to be a writer” kind of way. But my family’s really close and I was interested in what mommy and daddy did for a living. So when mommy and daddy had a script that wasn’t totally age inappropriate, they would let me read it. And we would talk about it. And I know that is the extraordinary part of my childhood — not the fact that my parents are screenwriters, and that they’re in the business — just what was being talked about and how it was being talked about. And then when I got older and started writing school, I would talk to my parents about what I was writing, and they would talk to me about when they had a similar problem. My mom has this lecture that she’s given at schools about structure, and at some point I had her sit down and give me that lecture. So all of that has definitely added up to an education of sorts. And that is the extent of my parents’ involvement in my writing. Mostly because imagine your mother giving you notes. I really don’t want to engage with that. I love my mom so much, but she’ll look at my shoes wrong and that’s a bad day for me. It’s rough already, I don’t need them looking over my shoulder, too. But they’ve been incredibly sweet and supportive. They came to set with my grandma this week. My grandma flew from Florida and she’s, like, 83 and awesome. They all came to set and my mom took pictures. They act like nerdy parents. I love that aspect of it. Because in that way, they’re just totally normal, and not screenwriter parents. That’s pretty cool. And my mom, when she read my script, she cried. That’s a good moment. They don’t tell me that they’re proud of me a lot because they don’t want me to get a swelled head, I think. So it’s things like that when I’m like, Oh, she’s really proud of me. That’s awesome.
An interview with Zoe:
For more of the Vulture interview, go here.
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