Nancy Meyers is one of the most successful and long-working female filmmakers working in Hollywood today, having made bright, lightweight drama/comedies like Something’s Gotta Give, Baby Boom, It’s Complicated, The Holiday, the remake of The Parent Trap, and, most recently, The Intern, due in theaters this Friday. She started her career in 1980 with Private Benjamin, for which she earned an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Meyers’ films tend to be frothy, dreamy, and slick films about hard-working, rich people her own age. Crave was allowed to talk to Meyers about The Intern and her first film, Private Benjamin, about how she likes a challenge, and why she writes about her peers.
CraveOnline: I love Private Benjamin.
Nancy Meyers: Oh thank you!
That was your big breakout movie back in 1980. What was the inspiration for it?
I wrote with Charles Shyer and Harvey Miller, and the idea… often these things start as a comedy premise; a gal joins the army by mistake. Or a retired person becomes an intern at a startup. They start with fish-out-of-water kinda comedic ideas. But writing that is not really ever the goal. Just sort of writing a thin movie that just sort of goes on the comedy premise. There are characters. Once we had that – that “who is she?” – we defined her as a marriage junkie. And then by the end of the movie, the last act in the movie, she tosses her veil into the wind, and walks off. So she’s not that person anymore. Through her joining the army, she found herself. And you have to remember, in 1980, that was not something a lot of movies were about. [Laughs.] 35 years ago!
The same seems to have happened with The Intern. It starts as a broad generation-gap comedy, and becomes a much more serious movie.
Yeah. Because, I think… I remember when we did Private Benjamin, and they did Stripes. And I remember seeing Bill Murray on The Today Show. And they shot him to look like Goldie [Hawn] in the helmet. I remember that. I remember going back a very long time. There are versions, I suppose, where these films could have just been army jokes, or Millennial jokes, but I want to make movies that had deeper meaning and more layers and things that last with you. They work on, I think a good word would be a more “meaningful” level. They’re about real things.
Warner Bros.
You tend to write about people your age. It tracks exactly, looking back over your career. Are you tracking your own emotional journey, or seeking an audience of peers?
It’s because the material keeps changing! But I’m not premeditated. I don’t have a big game plan. I really don’t. This movie is as much about a 32-year-old founder of a startup as it is a 70-year-old retired man. But, yes. The fact that he’s in the movie is due to the fact that, as I get older, I think about that time of life. He, having a more conventional job than me, his job ended. Hopefully, my job can keep on going [laughs]. But it’s not that far away when I won’t be doing it anymore. And you do wonder what that’s like. I think we all do. As you get older.
So, yeah. When I made Private Benjamin, I was that age. When I did Baby Boom, I was that age. Father of the Bride, I was a mom with a couple of kids. So to track me as I was going along, it was nothing [on] purpose. It was just what I was thinking about, honestly. What I thought to write. I write on things that are going on in the culture and what’s going on in the world. And I feel most comfortable writing leads that I can relate to.
“I think if someone has a problem or somebody’s heart is broken, it doesn’t matter what’s in the bank.”
That’s a good approach for The Intern, as De Niro’s character is essentially complete when he enters the film.
That’s right. I don’t change him. He not a person that I start one place, and by the end of the movie, he’s a different person. I’m not teaching him a lesson, he’s teaching me. He does say at the beginning of the movie that Freud quote about love and work [“Love and work… work and love, that’s all there is.”]. At the beginning of the movie, he loves his wife, so he’s not in a love relationship, and he’s not in any kind of relationship with work. I feel like the movie gives him work, and I allow him to meet a new woman. So that’s the change. But he’s steady. He’s very steady.
He reminded me a little bit of Bing Crosby in Going My Way.
[Laughs.] Guess what? You’ve managed to come up with a movie I don’t know. I was thinking more Spencer Tracy. I never saw Going My Way.
Bing Crosby plays a priest who has no drama. He drops in to help other people. That type of character may be called a “benevolent helper.”
I see what you mean. He was inspired by no one in particular, but when I saw images in my mind of the character, I did, at times, think of Spencer Tracy. There was this interview that Katherine Hepburn did, and she was saying that he was like a baked potato, and she was like an ice cream sundae. And that’s, in her opinion, why they worked so well together. Because he was calm and quiet and regular and humble. And she was dizzy and whirling around and all dressed up. And I like that. When I heard that baked-potato-ice-cream-sundae analogy, I repeated that to Bob [De Niro] and Annie [Hathaway].
Warner Bros.
Is Anne Hathaway’s character any part of you?
Yeah. They both are, I would think. My kids are her age. But I know what it’s like to climb a mountain with work. Because that’s what making movies is. It’s climbing a mountain. And that’s what she’s dealing with. And I can relate to that very, very much. Where the job is so much bigger than you.
When you’re writing, it’s just you. It’s just you and your ideas for a really, really long time. And that’s what happened to her. She had an idea, she hired a couple of people to help her when she first started, and it went from a dozen people to a couple dozen people to a couple hundred people in a year and a half. And that’s the time it took me from when I started writing to when I got on set. Well, it took a little longer, actually. But you know what I’m saying. Suddenly, it turns so big. So you have to hold onto your idea. That’s why she’s the right person to continue doing that job.
If it’s such a mountain, why did you move from writing into directing?
Oh, I don’t mind a challenge. That wouldn’t stop me. For a long time I worked with my ex-husband [Charles Shyer], and he directed our scripts, so I had a very hands-on relationship with the films. I know I didn’t want to write and just give it to someone who wasn’t in the family, so to speak. By the time we had been doing it for about 18 years, I directed The Parent Trap, which was one of our scripts. It’s kind of like always being the passenger in a car. You kind of want to drive sometimes.
Warner Bros.
Most of your films tend to be about wealthy, upper-class people. Some critics have even criticized you for working in the milieu of the super-rich.
I think what has made the films work is their relatability, so I don’t think that matters at all. I’m not sure what they’re criticizing. I think if someone has a problem or somebody’s heart is broken, it doesn’t matter what’s in the bank. I guess I’m a pretty big fan of screwball comedies from the ’30s, and they were about very wealthy people. Not about working people that I write about. My people, all the women, everybody has a job. Everybody is working on something. Work is a big part of every character I’ve ever written. She earns the money to buy that house. That happens sometimes! Your work has paid off for you. But my films are never, ever about wealth or greed or possessions or wanting things. Nothing. That is never a part of the landscape.
So I think in the ’30s during the Depression, the screwball comedies they did so well was because everyone could make fun of the rich. Because no one could relate to them and the fact that they had all these problems was made fun of. I don’t want to ask about that too much, though, because I don’t think that’s what my movies do. The movies are never about that ever. I don’t think you can point to any of them, where wealth is celebrated ever.
What was the first record you bought with your own money?
Um… [thinks] “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” I went out of my mind when I heard that on the radio. I really went out of my mind. I heard it on the schoolbus. Some kid has a radio. I said “turn it up!” It was like something out of a bad movie.
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Witney Seibold is a contributor to CraveOnline and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
