Ms. Dunham, recently you described yourself as a recovering workaholic. How is that going for you?
It’s funny, I think I may still be active! I think calling myself “recovering” was maybe just a little bit of a hopeful fit. I love work, it’s how I process experiences, it’s how I express myself. I come from a family of artists, and expressing yourself is sort of like the highest value in my family. Some families focus on sports, or some families focus on religion; for our family, it’s art and the way that art makes people see each other and come together. But it is interesting, in a meeting the other day, I casually said, “I’ve been doing this for 15 years,” and I went, “What?! I’ve been doing this for 15 years?!” (Laughs)
And you love making art as much as you did 15 years ago?
Yeah, I feel so lucky to have a job where the time passes quickly enough that I can’t believe it. It feels some days like just yesterday I was walking onto our set for the first time, and now I’m here. And the first day on set never gets less scary. Each film is a new challenge. I never feel like the experience repeats itself. I feel like I’m a student, always.
“For a long time, I did wish that my success came later in life, but now I’m realizing it’s complicated for anyone, whenever it comes.”
You were only in your early twenties when you created your wildly successful HBO series Girls. Do you ever wish you’d been older, or that your success had come later in life?
You know, I think that life prepares us for big changes and big swings. Yes, I was young, I was 23 when I made Tiny Furniture, and I was 24 when I shot the pilot for Girls, and I wasn’t particularly mature! But I’ve talked to people who have their first big public experience in their forties, and they’re equally overwhelmed. So I think for a long time, I did wish that, but now I’m realizing it’s complicated for anyone, whenever it comes. Because as artists, we might dream that people will see things and understand them, but then a certain kind of cultural conversation might come along with it that we aren’t totally ready for.
People were calling you the voice of your generation.
Yeah, I’ve always said that there should be dozens, if not hundreds of voices of a generation! Because a generation isn’t a monolith. It consists of so many experiences, and even in Girls when my character Hannah says that, she’s just contributing to this trope of young people kind of over aggrandizing about their own creative gifts.
I’ve always thought of you as the voice of your own world, because your work centers around your friends, your family, your daily life experiences… It’s very real.
I love that, that means a lot to me. The nice thing about working with friends is you have a shorthand. They understand your strengths, they understand your weaknesses, and they know how to step in and support you through those weaknesses. They understand your aesthetic. There’s also that expression, “You can’t make new old friends,” that when you’re younger, you don’t understand, but now I know that the world is full of people, I can make as many friends as I want and as I head into my late thirties, I realize just how important those old relationships are in work, in life. In this job of filmmaking, we work such long hours, and most of the time by the end of the day, you’re just laying flat, so working with my friends is a chance to spend time together and build memories, and I love that too.
Do they also inspire your work and the characters you write?
My relationships inspire me, sure. Janicza Bravo, who’s in my new show Too Much, she is one of my closest friends, and while the character that she plays, Kim, is not her, there are certain ways that Kim speaks, and a pattern to the way that reminds me of Janicza. So I had Janicza’s voice in my head as I was writing it, and then I knew that she would take this role and use her incredible aesthetic to build on it. Andrew Rannells, I met him in the second episode of Girls and we’ve been friends for 15 years. He’s a person who is just unmatched in his sense of humor. And so I knew that he would take this role and add a whole new layer to it. So yes, they do inspire me! And I often write with them in mind and and then go and make things with them. I love that.
“For me, it’s about the writing, the framing, the design… The act of filmmaking encompasses every craft that I’ve loved since I was a child.”
What made you decide not to take the lead in this project?
Even when I was doing Girls, I always said that I really understood the difference between what I did and what an actor did. It’s almost like I really knew how to say my own dialog. There are certain roles, like my role in the film Treasure, where I really wanted to experience that. I want to experience those people, I want to experience that place. But I love the experience of creating a character with an actor. And something that is amazing to me about true actors is they find something new on absolutely every take. And for me, it’s about the writing, the framing, the design… The act of filmmaking encompasses every craft that I’ve loved since I was a child.
Too Much
is also a much more positive story than the other films and series you’ve made. Where do you think that stems from?Well, this is a story about love and romance. I haven’t re-watched Girls since I made it but I remember that it came from a time of skepticism. Girls was a lot about sex, whereas this is about love. I also felt like this is a time where we really need to be spreading joy, and we really need to be creating connection. And the romantic comedy has always been a genre that does that beautifully. It’s something you can watch intergenerationally, you can crowd people onto a sofa to watch, so I wanted to take that genre and infuse it with the strangeness and specificity that I often try to go for. I was really asking myself at the end of every day, not just “Did we get the drama?” but “Did we get the jokes?”
You mentioned that you haven’t re-watched Girls since you made it… Would you be interested if you had the time?
I’m a very forward-looking person. When I’m making something, I read it a million times. Then when I’m editing something, I’ll have watched each episode 15, 20, 30 times. And so then I’m always focused on, “Okay, what am I making next? What am I doing next?” I think sometimes someone will send me like a someone will send me a TikTok that has a clip of Girls and it’s always also so arresting, because we were so young, and it evokes such a specific period in my life. I think if I were doing a project where I was trying to look back on that period, or if I was writing about that period, I might watch it. But watching my own work for the sake of watching it? I don’t think I could handle that!