Interview (Part 1): Amy Koppelman and Paige Dylan
The movie I Smile Back is rolling out in select theaters this week. Starring Sarah Silverman in a breakout dramatic starring role, I had the opportunity to talk with Amy Koppelman, who wrote the novel upon which the movie is based, and co-writer of the screenplay adaptation along with Paige Dylan.
Today in Part 1, Amy and Paige describe how they got into writing, how they met, and what the origin was for I Smile Back:
Scott Myers: Amy, let’s start with you. University of Pennsylvania, undergraduate, Columbia MFA, you’ve now written three novels. You’ve got a new one coming out in November. How did you find your way into the writing life?
Amy Koppelman: I actually just started writing to try to express the feelings in me, like a vehicle for [laughs] a receptacle for sadness.
In the spring of 1994, I fell into a bad depression. Sometime during that summer, as I was getting better, I started writing on this old blue typewriter I had from high school. I was friends this man, Marty, whose father was a holocaust survivor and mother was a holocaust survivor and both of them had died. He understood grief. Marty’s probably 15 years older than me, and a brother of a friend and, I don’t know how it started but I would write him letters and he’d write letters back. Nothing romantic, just thoughts, large and small. I’d fax him and he’d fax back. At there were no scanners, or email or anything, so faxing felt immediate. Anyway, I think that’s how I started writing again, in those letters to Marty.
My first writing contest, was for Daughters of the American Revolution when I was in fourth or fifth grade. Of course I didn’t realize that Daughters of the American Revolution were never going to choose Amy Lynn Levine from New Jersey.
[laughter]
I had no idea what their organization was. And it didn’t matter because I remember being called up to get the participation certificate at a school assembly and I remember walking back to my seat smiling, feeling really proud. My first writing contest. I taped it to my wall and it stayed there for many years.
Scott: Is it true that at some point you dropped off a manuscript at Joan Didion’s doorstep?
Amy: Oh my gosh, how do you even know that story!? Yes. I graduated the MFA program and was already getting a lot of resistance to my writing. I think I was rejected by about every literary agent in New York City. I read about some spat Cindy Crawford was having with the board of her apartment building and it mentioned Joan Didion. I think Joan Didion was on the board of the building. That’s kind of amazing. Joan Didion using that giant brain of hers to decide if Cindy Crawford should be allowed to put wet over dry. (laughs) Somehow I figured out what building it was and I just dropped my thesis off thinking, “Well, it would be enough for me-if Joan Didion says that I’m a real writer, even if I never get a book published that would really be enough for me. So I asked her. Am I a real writer?” She wrote back. She has really scratchy handwriting but there it was in pen, on a flat grey card, “Yes Amy. You are a real writer”.
Scott: Paige, I think you come at the writing thing from a somewhat different kind of a trajectory, a background in acting, right?
Paige Dylan: I did. It’s funny because I took acting classes since I was in my early twenties, actually not because I was necessarily interested in acting, but more because I was interested in writing. In an acting class, you can gain an understanding of what works, what doesn’t, what seems natural. I ended up halfheartedly working a little bit, but that was never really my motivation.
Scott: Mainly it was to service your development as a writer?
Paige: Exactly.
Scott: I gather you two have known each other for twenty or so years. How did you meet, and when did you start thinking you would work as a writing team?
Paige: We have known each other for…God, Amy, how long has it been now?
Amy: It’s been like 21, 22 years. I think I met you in 1994.
Paige: It’s been a little over 20 years I guess. Our husbands were actually in the same business, and they were friends. My husband and I lived in California, and they lived in New York, and she came out one time on a trip with Brian [Koppelman]. We met, and I fell completely in love with her.
Amy: I remember actually the first time we met. I went to their house and Paige made a casserole with shrimp. She had this very beautiful little baby boy, but she somehow was able to make the casserole, and hold the baby, and drink a glass of wine, and I was just like, “Wow, you can be a mom like that!?” My friends that were moms were very starched and proper. There were two ways to do everything: bath, bottle, bed — a right way and a wrong way.
Scott: Was that before you’d had kids, Amy?
Amy: Yes, yes. That was before. And I remember thinking, “If you can be a mom like this, then maybe I can do it. You don’t need to be perfect.”
Scott: There you go, Paige. Motivation for bringing another mother into the world.
Paige: She didn’t get out much.
[laughter]
Amy: It was the way that she was with her baby- the way she lifted him into the air and he would smile at her, it was just really pretty.
Paige: Thank you.
Scott: That’s a nice segue into I Smile Back which is about a mother, a wife, a suburban neighborhood. Let’s talk about the movie which debuted at Sundance last January, screened in Toronto in September, got strong reviews, picked up for domestic distribution by Broad Green Pictures, and it’s coming out in theaters and on VOD.
Here’s a plot summary from IMDB: “Laney Brooks does bad things. Married with kids, she takes the drugs she wants, sleeps with the men she wants, disappears when she wants. Now, with the destruction of her family looming, and temptation everywhere, Laney makes one last desperate attempt at redemption.”
This is an adaptation, Amy, of your second novel, the same title, “I Smile Back”. The movie stars Sarah Silverman in what has been described by many reviewers as a breakout dramatic role, and directed by Adam Salky.
Let’s start at the beginning. Amy, what was the genesis of the novel, “I Smile Back”?
Amy: I knew I wanted to write about a woman who was motivated by fear. Really petrified, and scared — scared of her children and her husband abandoning her in one way or another. Because everyone dies, and she can’t handle that, she can’t handle how much she loves then. I was really interested in bipolar illness which I think was still called manic depression back then. This was 2001. Actually, the pacing of the book is supposed to mirror a full episode. There’s an urgency in the writing when Laney’s manic. And it slows down when she levels off.
Here is a trailer for the movie I Smile Back, screenplay by Amy Koppelman & Paige Dylan, starring Sarah Silverman and Josh Charles, directed by Adam Salky:
The movie’s website is here.
An excellent thought-piece in Elle on the movie.
Tomorrow in Part 2, Paige and Amy reveal their writing process in adapting I Smile Back, then delve into two of the movie’s most important characters.
Amy and Paige are repped by the Arlook Group.
Amy’s third novel “Hesitation Wounds” debuts November 3rd and you may learn more about that here.