Tag Archive for 'Dave Eggers'

Interview with Maya Rudolph- Away We Go

Published
by
Melissa Silverstein
on June 5, 2009
in Actresses and Comedy
. 2 Comments

awaywegopic2When I was in LA for the Away We Go junket I was able to interview Maya Rudolph about the film, SNL and a couple of other things.

Women & Hollywood: What was it about this script that spoke to you?

Maya Rudolph: I fell in love with these two people instantly.  I really loved them.  I loved the simplicity of the description of their relationship.  That it really wasn’t trying to say anything other than the way they loved each other.  It was written in a way that was very familiar because it was written by people familiar to each other.

W&H: You mean the writers Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida?

MR: Yes, they are smart, exceptional writers and funny too.  I loved the humor in their relationship.  And for me, the other side was that I had just had a baby so I remember the onslaught of extraneous and unsolicited advice where everyone is telling you what to do, how to do it, what you need to buy and how to apply it.  Telling you oh my god you’re huge and touching you.  It was so overwhelming.

W&H: Verona is a unique character, a partner to Burt and so well written.  We don’t see women characters like her too frequently.  Any opinions as to why women are ignored and underwritten in mainstream Hollywood films?

MR: I don’t know why that’s either untapped or overlooked or not done well because there is really no excuse for it.  This is a perfect example of it.  It’s not as if women don’t exist.  I will say that in general there is a lot of crap in the world.  It wasn’t until I was thrown in the water on day 1 of Saturday Night Live where they said you write for yourself.  That’s what everyone does.  I learned the enormous power of writing for yourself, especially now that people seem to be receptive to the fact that women can write.

W&H: I read an account that said that only 36 out of the 116 cast members on SNL have been women and only 20 have survived into their second season.  The guys seem to break out: Adam Sandler, Eddie Murphy, John Belushi among many others.  The women don’t seem to break out in the same way.  Where are Cheri Oteri, Jan Hooks, Ellen Cleghorne?  Has your experience been different?

MR: It has.  When I arrived at SNL that seemed to be the story but it started getting old because things changed.  Without a doubt in sketch comedy there are fewer women than men.  There are fewer women at the Groundlings today even though there are a lot more women than when I started.

I don’t know if comedy is a male sport.  I always wondered that.  There were always less of us than them no question.  As far as the group of women I started with at SNL, I came into an amazing powerhouse of women on that show and I feel like everything was macheteed out of the way for me and the girls I was there with.

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Tags: Away We Go, Dave Eggers, Vendela Vida

Interview with Vendela Vida: Novelist and Co-Writer of Away We Go

Published
by
Melissa Silverstein
on June 2, 2009
in Books and Women Writers
. 3 Comments

vendela-vida_392I knew nothing about Vendela Vida before I spoke with her a couple of weeks ago in conjunction with the release of her first film Away We Go which she co-wrote with husband Dave Eggers.  (The film opens Friday and I liked it very much.) I very much enjoyed the conversation and am now going to make sure I read all her books which includes And Now You Can Go and Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name.  She also co-edits The Believer magazine.

Women & Hollywood: Talk about how the idea for writing this film came about.

Vendela Vida: It started in 2005 and I was pregnant with our first (we now have 2 children) and I basically started taking notes. As a writer that’s how I process the world.  I go out and take notes of things that have happened.  I was basically surprised when I was pregnant at how much it was an invitation to start talking to me about their experiences with pregnancy and birth and give me advice that I hadn’t necessarily asked for on how to raise my child.  It was basically my way of processing other people’s reactions to pregnancy and also my own reaction.

I was taking these notes and a lot of them were about funny stuff I had overheard, conversations I had or things I read in books and didn’t quite know what to do with.  I would come home and tell Dave and we would laugh about it and say that would be a funny scene in a movie so we just started experimenting with dialogue for these two characters.  We knew the material lent itself more to a movie than a novel because there was so much dialogue.  It felt very cinematic to us.  We started writing scenes not expecting it to evolve into something we were just trying to make each other laugh.  It kind of just went from there.

W&H: Had the two of you ever written together before?

VV: No.  The screenplay format seemed to lend itself to the collaboration much more so than obviously a novel.

W&H: Did you write Verona intentionally as a mixed race woman?

VV: Yes we did and we wrote her with Maya Rudolph in mind.  It was important to me that she be mixed race and it was also important that she and her partner not have any conversations  between the two of them of her being mixed race.  Other people could comment on it but it’s never an issue between Burt and Verona.

W&H:  What’s the difference between writing fiction, non-fiction and film?

VV: I love writing dialogue and with film the pleasure and difficulty is that you are constricted by space.  In a film you have to make sure the dialogue is advancing the plot.  With a screenplay you are writing a skeletal outline and you know that the director and actors are going to bring so much more, whereas when you are writing a novel it is all on you.  Every period is one you.  Every quote is on you.  It’s fun to do a collaboration especially because when you are writing a novel you are spending so much time with yourself in your room with your thoughts.  I do love novels and they will always be my first love but this was a great experience especially because we started writing after I finished my novel Northern Lights Erase Your Name which is set in the Arctic circle.  It’s kind of a dark novel in many ways so it was refreshing to write something more lighthearted.

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Tags: Away We Go, Dave Eggers, The Believer