Shira Piven is the director of Welcome To Me, a new indie film starring Kristen Wiig that was just released on DVD and Blu-ray this week.
The film stars Wiig as Alice, a woman suffering from borderline personality disorder who suddenly wins the lottery. What does she do with the money? She gets her own TV show, of course. It was written by first-time film writer Eliot Laurence and produced by Adam McKay and Will Ferrell.
Piven is married to McKay, who also produced her first feature film, Fully Loaded. Her brother happens to be Entourage star Jeremy Piven and she drops a hint in the following interview about a future project with him.
TheCelebrityCafe.com’s Daniel S Levine spoke with Piven this afternoon about the making of Welcome To Me, working with Wiig, and the situation facing female directors in Hollywood. You can also check out my review of the film right here.
TheCelebrityCafe.com: Welcome to Me, like your first film, was produced by Adam McKay and you actually have a bit part in Anchorman. How did you meet him?
Shira Piven: Well, I met him almost 20 years ago in Chicago and then we got married 15 years ago!
TCC: Welp, that's my flub.
SP: Yeah, we have different last names, but I don't care if people know that if we're married or not. He kind of has no interest in promoting my career at all. He just does his thing and every once in a while, I'll present him with material and he'll go, 'This is awesome! I want this to be out there in the world and he'll help me get it made, so that's nice.
TCC: Was that the case in this film?
SP: Yeah. With Fully Loaded, my first feature, he actually suggested - since I directed the stage version - that it would make a good movie and would help us get it produced. But we really did it on our own. It was such a very, very low-budget [film] and his production company did not really produce it. He just gave us advice and we had to raise the money ourselves...
With [Welcome To Me], Eliot Laurence, the writer, and I spent probably about six to eight months trying to get other people interested in it and we had some bites. I didn't let Adam read it for awhile and I felt that I needed to find a producer who really fell in love with the script in a way that I loved the script. That was my only mission - I loved the script passionately, I saw it as a movie and I wanted to find someone who loved it as much as I did, who has the skills producing-wise to get it made.
And finally, I gave it to someone in [Adam's] company, Jessica Elbaumm and also a former assistant of Adam's, Lauryn Kahn. They really, really flipped for the movie. They started talking to him about it and he asked me to read it! He was really the guy, he fell in love with it the same way I did. He was, more than anyone else who read it in those six months... he was like, 'I love this movie, if you hadn't brought it to me, I would have wanted to direct it! You have to make this movie.' So that's how it started.
TCC: Eliot Laurence is a first time feature writer... Was that a hurdle you had while trying to get the movie made? Do you think there was an advantage to having an unknown commodity?
SP: You're always at a disadvantage if you don't have a proven track record. But the writing was so original, that I think it helped us a lot. Actually, I would say that Kristen [Wiig] of course helped us get it made because she was cast so early on, but we had a company that was going to finance it before Kristen came on board... and unfortunately that company folded... Which was good, because it would have been a lesser, lower budget movie and I don't know how we would have done it. And also Kristen wasn't attached, so from there, we just started from scratch and we thought 'We're going to get an actress attached.;
Kristen loved the movie - we waited about three months for her to read the movie - and we kind of felt that she might really, really go for this because it's an amazing role. It feels right up her alley. And she really clicked with the movie in a way I did as well.
TCC: Were you surprised at all that she responded so positively to the idea of playing a character that's different from anything else that she had done before?
SP: I was surprised because I'm always surprised when things go right, because you're always feel in this business aspect of the world it's a roll of the dice. But I have to be honest, creatively, I really wasn't surprised. Creatively, I felt like it was different from what she has done, but it also felt very right for her. It felt like she would get the comedy elements and that she would be able to go, based on her performance in Bridesmaids... I felt that she could probably go to the depths that Alice would have to go to in the movie.
I've never seen [Kristen] go this deep - as deep as she goes in Welcome To Me - but in Bridesmaids, she plays a very believable and real person. In this, I think she gets to go even darker and even funnier. As great as she is in Bridesmaids, and as good a movie as that is, this is a different type of movie. But... ultimately, it is her movie and I think that the range that she gets to do in this movie is amazing.
I never thought about comparing it to Bridesmaids because it was different... but this, as far as a role for her, I think it didn't surprise me that she fell in love with it. It was also a shock that she actually sat down and read it and that she made that commitment to us.
TCC: On the Blu-ray, there's a little a little featurette where you talked about making it so that you didn't feel like the audience was laughing at someone with borderline personality disorder. You wanted it to be like you were laughing with her. How hard is it to do that, since it seems so hard when you're trying to make a comedy, but have such a serious subject.
SP: It is very hard, but I also think that, for me, the script was already there. When I re-read the script, I feel like it's a script that's never for a second making fun of this woman. I felt that... my job was then to tell this story and get actors to be able to tell this story as honestly as we could, while at the same time, really understanding the sensibility of the writing and not being afraid to go to the places that are funny.
In life, we laugh at all kinds of inappropriate stuff. I have an aunt who was schizophrenic. She was severely mentally ill. And there were moments that she did things that were extremely, extremely funny inadvertently. I think we all have relatives that do things that are kind of disastrous and funny at the same time. I think we all do them ourselves. I think that Alice is a character that we have to feel like we identify with her or that we know people like her.
I think my strength as a director as well is playing things as real as possible and helping actors get to the bone and really find the emotional shoes of something. ... When I work with improvisation, my way of approaching comedy is by starting with the truth... starting from an honest place and letting the comedy come out of the circumstance. In this movie, the comedy comes out of the circumstance.
TCC: It's kind of like 'truth is stranger than fiction.'
SP: Totally.
TCC: I wanted to ask about the supporting cast because when I look at the list of people who are in this movie beyond Kristen Wiig... it's kind of dizzying. Even in the tiniest parts in this movie, you have someone like Jennifer Jason Leigh, who's only in the movie for 10 minutes if that. Did these actors just want to be in it, no matter what part you had for them?
SP: Yeah, all these actors have really good moments. Maybe Jennifer Jason Leigh is the exception to that, but I think Tim Robbins has a really good role. Linda Cardellini has a very good role as [Alice's] friend. And Joan Cusack, even though she's in the control booth and shot for about three days, she is felt throughout the whole film. I mean, it's hard to imagine how that was possible... We just filmed all her scenes in a concentrated period of time...She's a very kind of seminal, touched to the film.
If you enjoy these actors, you'll definitely catch some good moments from all of them. I worked with Joan in the past. She's a very old friend of mine, as is Tim. I'm lucky enough that they wanted to work with me. I also know that this script, for all of these actors, [it] was so good and so unusual that they were really drawn to the script and also drawn to working with Kristen. The idea of working with Kristen for almost any comic or dramatic actor is irresistible.
I wouldn't downplay the attraction of the script as well.
TCC: Joan's part was important because she was the audience, since over time, she ended up believing in the show Alice was creating.
SP: I don't know if I agree with the second part of that, but I definitely think that you're totally right about her being the audience. I see her as someone who was concerned about Alice. Everyone else was trying to exploit Alice or was a little bit blind to what was going on with her. But I think Joan was someone who had been in her job a long time as... she was the technical director really. And she was empathetic and concerned. I think she saw that she was dealing with a woman with mental illness... I don't think she wanted to exploit [Alice]. So, I'm not sure she believed in the show so much as she cared about Alice as a person.
TCC: On the media angle of the film, it does remind me of something like Network or even Anchorman where you've got a character that takes control of the media... Were you trying to do any grand media satire here or was it really just about Alice more than anything else.
SP: I feel very, very strongly that this movie is really about what's going on in our culture right now as far as social media - Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr. All of these modes of promoting ourselves, communication through self-promotion, reality TV... I mean, there's a reality TV show that my 10-year-old daughter watches and the woman who is the lead of the show just last season had what looked to be an emotional breakdown on the air. And no one knew! Everyone is sort of oblivious, like 'What's she doing? Why isn't she showing up for our kids?' It was a show called Dance Moms. I watched this woman and she's having a mental breakdown and no one is aware of it.
So, I feel like it was a parallel to our movie in a lot of ways. What Eliot wrote is very timely and very much an expose of our self-obsessed, media culture and the kind of direction it's going in.
It also has a little more dimension than that... There's a piece of Alice in there that that is creative and artistic, someone who wants to express herself. In a way, we're giving ourselves as a culture the benefit of the doubt. There are less and less creative outlets [because] we mistake our creative impulses as our impulse to put ourselves on television, regardless of whether we have anything to say to try to promote ourselves or make some kind of show about ourselves.
We met people when we did screenings who have borderline personality disorder and several said they have their own webcast, they have their own podcast, they have their own variety show... it's amazing!
TCC: As you said before, there's a little bit of all of us in Alice... there's a little bit of that in all of us. We just need an outlet, whether it's writing or a podcast or a TV show.
SP: Totally. And I think there are more outlets and I think in a way, that's good. I think we see Alice realizing her creative side and the end of the movie connects with that. I won't give it away, but also the end of the movie connects back with her endless need to continue to televise herself. Some of us live our lives on Facebook these days ... It's pretty absurd what things you find on Facebook. ... We're all in our own world, trying to get seen.
TCC: Since you are a female director, I have to ask this. There's a lot of coverage on this, like the ACLU trying to look into Hollywood sexism. So, do you feel that male directors are being treated differently than female directors by the studios? You haven't made a studio movie, but do you feel that in the industry?
SP: I don't know, yet. My first film was very low budget and in the world of low budget film festival films... the male-to-female director ratio is pretty much 50/50 to my understanding. The higher the budget, the less female directors there are.
The statistics speak for themselves and I think a lot of it is connected with the fact that... studios are fixated on their young male audience and in stores that are about young men and a lot of action-adventure. Whether it's fantasy adventure or some type of violence involved, There is this kind of feeling that [these movies] are for men first, so they think that means by men as well. So... the statistics speak for themselves.
Personally, I come from a theater background and I haven't felt a real sense of discrimination in the theater. Starting out in film... I feel like I have to prove myself like anyone else. I'm excited to be able to perhaps be paving the way as a female director. But yeah, it's a good question. I can't really speculate, but if I were to go up for a job directing a feature tomorrow, I think I would probably have the fact that I am a woman working against me and the fact that I've directed two features and have less experience than probably many of the people that they would hire. So, it would be hard to say which one would work against me more!
I think that we all have to continue to do our work and do the work that we love and that's probably when we'll do our best work. Hopefully, [we can] bring a consciousness to Hollywood and try to nurture more stories and more movies that would invite more female directors... But, whether or not the stories change, definitely there are women capable of filming any of the films that are directed by men out there. It would be nice for there to be a real sea change for that to happen.
TCC: Any ideas for your next project?
SP: Yes, I do. Something I'm co-writing. All I can say about it is that it's based on a short story and my brother Jeremy Piven would be starring and also producing. It's some material that he's had for awhile that he and I have wanted to collaborate on. Hopefully we can make that film soon and I have a couple of other projects in the works as well!