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Nancy Oliver Gets Real
(Page 2)
MM: You seem to have mastered the art of uncomfortable comedy, the kind of humor where people aren’t sure where they should be laughing or not. I think certaintly in “Six Feet Under” that was the case, and I think with this film, too. So is it your intention to sort of challenge an audience or to invite an inner dialogue to happen throughout the film where they’re thinking to themselves what they would do if they were faced with the same situation?
NO: Not consciously… I don’t really worry about how people are going to react to it. How can you try to please or challenge 200 million people you don’t even know? So I feel like that’s kind of out of my control and it’s just my job to simply write the story. It was hard enough to get the story out. But I do feel that as a writer, I’m more interested in raising questions and teaching lessons and letting people draw their own conclusions. I’m not particularly into explanation, and I think that’s something we’ve become very used to as moviegoers over the past 30 years. In the 1970s, it was kind of different. It seemed like there was more room for ambiguity and that kind of decision. But we’re really used being told when to laugh and have those expectations clear, so I love disrupting that.
MM: And now you’re at work on “True Blood.” How is writing television different from a feature film?
NO: TV writing is group writing in that you sit down at a table with other people and brainstorm stories as a community so every decision is all about compromising and making the best of the compromises and being able to brainstorm with other people where feature writing is completely different.
MM: Do you prefer one over the other?
NO: No, I like all forms and I like switching forms, so I’m comfortable on television, I’m comfortable on feature writing and with plays as well.
MM: Are you still active in the theater?
NO: Not so much, just because it took me 27 years to get a job in television…
MM: And now you want to stay there.
NO: Yeah.
MM: Do you have any other film projects in the works?
NO: Yeah, I’m writing a movie called Handyman for Warner Bros. I can’t talk about it too much because I don’t want to jinx it because I have a draft due in June, but I would describe it as a “southeastern western,” contemporary southeastern western… I’ve been working on it for about a year and a half, but it’s only in the past few weeks that I’ve kind of moved through a big barrier and I finally have a much better idea of what I’m writing about so I’m hoping that it will move quickly. I’m kind of interested in this new direction that it’s taking, so I hope it doesn’t suck.
MM: The last question: Since our magazine is read by a lot of aspiring and working moviemakers, what’s the one piece of advice you’d give to people who are looking to become screenwriters?
NO: Write what you want to write. I’m sure I’m the worst example of how to get a career, but I found that when I tried to conform and be commercial, you could feel my hatred of it in every line of the script, which made it impossible—and very unpleasant—for people to read. But when I wrote Lars, it was free of any expectations. I didn’t expect it would get made, I wrote it strictly for my own amusement, and that really worked out. So I think it’s not going to be that way with every script, but I would just encourage everybody to just write what you want to write and see what happens.
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