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Lena Dunham Talks <em>Girls</em>, Boys & <em>Dawson's Creek</em>

Jen Carlson

Published Apr 4, 2012

Modified Apr 9, 2012

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Jen Carlson

Published Apr 4, 2012

Modified Apr 9, 2012

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On April 15th, Lena Dunham's show Girls (which is executive produced by Judd Apatow) will premiere on HBO, finally giving young women an accurate television mirror upon which to gaze, and it's about damn time. Where Candace Bushnell created an army of Manolo-wearing Carrie Bradshaw wannabes with Sex And The City*, Dunham has written for an audience that already exists. She is "the voice of a generation... or a voice, of a generation," as her character Hannah declares in the first episode of the show.*

So how did it take "us" so long to get to a point where female characters weren't over-the-top caricatures of real women? Yesterday we met up with Dunham to discuss her narrative style, Girls, Dawson's Creek*, "grown-up Brooklyn," and... did you know there is a woman who shows movie and TV productions how to accurately portray the subway lines? Not that Dunham really needed the pointers, she was born and raised here.*

What characters on TV have you liked and connected with throughout the years? That's such an interesting question! I like a lot of characters. I'll start from the beginning of my development: Clarissa from Clarissa Explains It All. I like Angela Chase from My So Called Life, I like Patsy and Edina from Absolutely Fabulous, I like Jerri Blank from Strangers With Candy, I like Phoebe Friends, I like Rhoda from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, I like Carrie from Homeland, I like Amy from Enlightened and I like Jess on New Girl.

Those are all very good, and I love Homeland! So, just to get the Sex and the City talk out of the way... your show is getting compared to that a lot, and it's mentioned in the first episode... We sort of felt we needed to... it's like if you have a giant birth mark on your face, you're like, I'm letting you know.

So it's compared to Sex and the City a lot, and I don't think the comparison runs too deep, it's just "women in the city" and that's the only thing, but do you have any feelings about everyone in media comparing them? I think it's super natural. Four female characters, New York City—why would you not compare it? While it makes absolute and total sense, at the same time there are massive differences—tonally and the phase of life we're exploring—but again, this show couldn't exist without Sex and the City both because of the place it carved out for women on TV, and also the fact that it's probably the reason most of these characters moved to New York.

Actually, the only thing that I've seen... the ad that's out there, the campaign, sort of has a Sex and the City feel ... It's hard. Sex and the City sort of nailed women in New York. Our poster has a little bit more of a down trodden, Brooklyn-y vibe...

You're not drinking cosmos! No. I love the poster. My only complaint about the poster—which I adore—is that I think my hair looks too smooth.

Oh I didn't check that out... I know! There's no reason why you or anyone else should be! But I was so happy with the poster. I'm very excited to show that poster to my grandkids or whoever is dealing with me when I'm old.

Did you ever watch Dawson's Creek? Yes. I loved it. I was so into Dawson's. I remember when it first came out it was a huge debate trying to get my parents to let me stay up and they wouldn't tape it for me on VCR so I could watch it at 4 p.m.

When was it on? I thought it was 8 o'clock? I think it was on at 8:00, but I was supposed to get in bed at 7:45 p.m. and read for half an hour. That's why I can't go to bed early now because I was forced to go to bed early for so many years.

I was rewatching it this weekend for the first time in however many years and that show and The O.C. and My So Called Life, which I also rewatched recently. My sister watched The O.C., I was never O.C. crazed. I loved the Seth and Summer relationship.

I think Seth pretty much carried the show for me. But rewatching all these shows, they all have these "after school special" feels to them. You know, "Jack tells the gang he's gay" or "Andie's addicted to pills." Jack's gay! And Andie did have a pill problem! Andie also had serious emotional issues. Wasn't she schizophrenic? Or was she bi-polar?

I don't even know if they ever said, it's sort of like in Love Story when she dies of... Unknown cancer?

Ali McGraw's disease. [laughs] Yeah, yeah, totally!

So looking back at it, you're delivered these very transparent lessons and you sort of feel tricked—these were the "edgy" shows, or at least I thought I was watching the "edgy" shows. In my head Dawson's Creek was so edgy! Jen was not a virgin!

Right, she was from New York! But she'd only done it once.

So there's all these "after school special" lessons in these episodes, but watching Girls it's not like, "A very special episode where Hannah gets HPV," or something. There's not a packaged-up lesson delivered. Is that something you actively avoided, or just didn't even think about? I think it's just not my narrative instinct and not the narrative instinct of anyone that I work with. We definitely tried, in the abortion episode (as it will hereforto be known), to really touch on the fact that despite all Hannah's joking about AIDS, it's a real illness that really affects women. Throw a couple trivia facts in there to raise people's awareness. I know I learned most of my STD knowledge from Salt-N-Pepa CDs. I want to be straight about the facts and I want it to be accurate but I don't want anybody to feel like they're being told to go get an HPV shot.

I loved the Forrest Gump line.... [laughs] Thank you! Real fear of mine, real longstanding trauma.

In middle school we watched the Ryan White story. Oh my god, the Ryan White story, we watched that too. And the video was introduced by Magic Johnson. Was it Magic Johnson? Is he the one with AIDS?

Yeah, I think? No, definitely. Which he got from doing it with girls in the locker room.

Did he? That's what he says. It's all so stressful.

Another Dawson's Creek reference, because it's in my head right now, there was a latecomer character played by Busy Phillips, and I actually didn't like that character, but she was sort of the first... Was she the one who fell off the dock and got killed?

Did she? Oh, no that was some two-episode person. She was there to fuck with someone.

But Busy Phillips' character was breaking out of that cookie cutter mold of "television girl," and so was Samantha on Sex and the City, this was at the same time. They weren't fragile characters, there weren't scenes with them where Sarah Mclachlan was lightly playing in the background, it was just them saying what was on their mind... but they sort of started being over-the-top caricatures of what these women were supposed to be in real life. Totally. They were the "zany sluts." Samantha Jones is the most quotable woman who ever lived! Or that ever fake-lived...

Was breaking out of this "television girl" mold and furthering the realness of people something that's been important to you? The girls in Girls are very real... Totally. I think it's my natural narrative instinct but anytime when someone started to feel like a caricature or some specific archetype we tried to take her in a different direction just because they're supposed to feel like real, fully-formed, living, breathing girls. That's something the actors helped with so much because they're such weirdos in their own right—in the best way—they were able to give this odd intonation and odd spirit to these girls that was really awesome.

Is there any improv in the show? We do do some improv. I mean, Judd [Apatow] is such a big proponent of improv and so I sort of learned from him that improv doesn't totally equal loss off control and I've just learned to go with it and learned so much in that department.

How did you start working with him? What a lot of people know about Judd Apatow is the bromance kind of thing so it's very interesting to see him get involved with Girls. He saw my film and he just wrote me a lovely email about it. So that's the way it began, which was unbelievable, and then we find ourselves here.

So, when new shows come out there are often these headlines that kind of pigeonhole who these characters are. For Dawson's Creek one headline called the characters "The Merchants of Cool." What would your headline be? Oh what a good question! I really loved the tagline they came up with for the poster, "Living the dream, one mistake at a time," because I thought it totally seized on—and that's HBO brilliance—what the show's about, which is these girls who have come to New York for something different than what they're getting but at the same time not giving up hope. I don't like to think about us as cornering the hipster market or it being necessarily about New York because, while it's a very New York show, these girls are universal and they'd be doing this sort of thing in Des Moines or wherever they might be. And also, I like the idea that it's about this particular phase of life and it's about them remaining hopeful in the face of it all, that's my idealistic idea about what they're representing.

So, since we're a New York-centic website, we often hear about "Not real New Yorkers," and obsess about how the city is portrayed on film... It's funny because we were so careful about trying to make it all make geographical sense. I was literally looking at a map of Brooklyn when I was writing. I know when I watched 9 1/2 Weeks for the first time it was amazing. They'd be in Chinatown, enter a building, take the elevator 40 floors up, and walk out on to a roof that led out onto a pier in Coney Island. The weirdest!

That stuff drives our readers crazy. I'm sure! When I went to shoot on the subway, this amazing woman who kind of loves shooting on the subway named Albertine—everyone should know about her, she's a New York hero—she's the woman who, if you want to shoot on the subway, you talk to Albertine. She will lead you to some clandestine location where you have to figure out what train you're using and why. When I explained to her where the character was getting she was like, "Well you can't use the F train! Do you know how insane viewers go if you've got characters going from Greenpoint to Coney Island on the F?" And I was like, "Yes! I do know! Thank you for guiding me!" Because the last thing I want is to have a native New Yorker with a very poor sense of direction. I think we really made an effort. When we were building the apartment, for example, we were like, no, this is going to look like a small apartment. This is not going to be a dream apartment. This is going to be a walk up in a building in Greenpoint. We looked at models and we were really committed to making those places feel real.

Yeah, that's very good, they looked accurate. So, I did also want to ask about the boys of Girls. Charlie is really cringe-worthy so far in the first three episodes that I've seen. But he's so handsome, though!

Yes! But in a way that I would never be attracted to. But I "get it"... [laughs] Totally! He looks like a model but yeah. When you see him, I think, episode four, he's got those bones right by his penis that guys have. I was like, "What? Where did those come from? What do you do to get them?" But yeah, he is totally cringe-worthy.

Adam and Hannah in Girls

Adam's like the nightmare that everyone dates at some point. So it's sort of like this Goldilocks experience of trying to find the right fit. Totally. Although I think Hannah thinks she can tame the nightmare and marry the nightmare. She does not understand that it's a phase we must all pass through but in fact thinks, "What if I were to tame the untamable beast?"

So when you're writing these boys, are they sort of meant to be background scenery and props, because the focus is on the girls relationships, which are adorable relationships, and I love... Oh thank you, I wanted to make sure that the girls felt like they loved each other despite the fact that they're torturing each other half the time. The desire was just to show these relationships with guys that were realistic and felt like.. I didn't want them to be 100% jerks and I didn't want them to be 100% angels, I wanted them to be like the guy that you date that's just as confused as you are and you're trying to work it out. I feel like a lot of relationships you have when you're 24 or 25 are like two people who work really well together but then can't get on the same page at the same time. I think that's a big part of it.

Where does Adam live? I can't figure that out. Adam lives in Prospect Heights. So, the neighborhoods they live in—if Gothamist is interested in this: the girls live on India Street in Greenpoint, Jessa and Shoshanna live on Elizabeth near Broome in NoLita, Adam lives on like St. John's Place [in Prospect Heights], and then the gallery where Marnie works is on Delancey... it started out at the Meatpacking District, so, it's a little confusing because they take a long walk to the High Line [in one scene], it was a little bit of a geographic leap, because you see an exterior look at Delancey and then you're at the High Line. That's the one I'm going to make you guys forgive me for.

I loved that scene at the High Line. I love the High Line, for me it's like a symbol of new New York and waspy sexiness.

Do you have any New Yorker pet peeves? Like people get annoyed at people blocking subway doors... Well, I learned the expression when I was pretty young "don't block the box." I just get so frustrated when someone is in the crosswalk. I'm just like, "This is my time. As a pedestrian, this is my time to shine. Why is this going on?" I also have a lot of trouble avoiding street soliciters, I'm always the person who ends up with 11 pamplets in my hand, because I can't say "no" to anybody. Also, when off duty cabs stop and ask you where you want to go, and an on duty cab's behind them, they're blocking them, and they drive away, and then the off duty cab is like, "no I can't take you to Brooklyn Heights."

They cab-blocked you. Yeah. I think it should be illegal, I'm so mad about it!

Tagged

girls

HBO

Lena Dunham

Jen Carlson

Jen Carlson is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.

Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations

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