Interview: Diablo Cody (Juno)

Despite of the current strike, Diablo Cody’s skyrocketing career is one of those phenomenons that could fit perfectly into a Hollywood script: Girl without big ambitions is looking for money and takes a job as a stripper. From her experiences she writes a book, Candy Girl, a Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper. Then starts a blog. Some guy who would later become her manager, reads it, finds out about the book, gets it published and suggests her to try her hand at scriptwriting. She hesitates, but finally throws herself into it while working as a sex phone operator. The outcome is called Juno and has nothing to do with sex although the whole plot is based on a pregnancy. A director, Jason Reitman, reads it and falls in love with it. The rest, as they say, is history.

This week she was awarded the Best Original Screenplay Award by the National Board of Review. Not a bad start for a newcomer who never thought about working in the movie business. She has gone from a cold and uncomplicated life in Minnesota to writing for Steven Spielberg in Los Angeles in less than two years. (After he saw Juno, he hired her to develop a new tv series, The United States of Tara, that will open in 2008 on Showtime).

In the meantime Diablo, 29, is enjoying her new glamorous life of festivals, trips, awards and media attention. The story about the pregnant teenager with a mouth big enough to make adults feel like children has captivated audiences and critics alike. The same witty, sharp and fun language that plagues the movie loads Diablo’s conversation. No wonder she has become the sensation of the year among the press. After all, it is not easy to sit in front of an interviewed who is not afraid of talking about sex. Surprisingly enough and despite the rumors, she talked about almost everything but sex during the New York media day last week.

Q: Can you talk about the germ of you writing screenplays as opposed to blogs and novels?
DC: I never wanted to write a screenplay. To me, writing is this wonderful, indulgent activity where you just fill the page with words. Screenplays look like they have a little skeleton. It's very mechanical. I love films, but I never wanted to write a screenplay, and it wasn't until I was encouraged to do so by my manager actually. He got my book published lickety-split, so I thought, “Ok, this guy means business. I'll try writing a movie.” Because he kept dangling this carrot in front of me, saying “If you write a movie, you won't have to go back to work, you won't have to go back to work,” and I hate working so I decided to give it a try.

Q: How long did it take?
DC: A couple months. I didn't know any better. Now I realize that I can take my time and nurse a script for six months if I want, but at the time I didn't know that people did that. I thought, “Well, a movie's two hours long, so how long can it take to write?”

Q: Did you read screenwriting books?
DC: No. I've never read a screenwriting book. I'm really superstitious about it too. I don't even want to look at them. All I did was I went and bought the shooting script of “Ghost World” at Barnes and Noble and read it just to see how it should look on the page because I like that movie. So it was kind of a weird coincidence that the producers wound up producing “Juno” as well.

Q: When you see the film now is it just what you had hoped for or envisioned?
DC: It's better. Jason Reitman is a better writer than I am and a master of tone and an amazing director, so he took what I believed to be this sort of raw quivering mass of material and shaped it into something that people seem to be really enjoying.

Q: Can you talk about how the script changed after you met Jason and the rewrites and things involved?
DC: I was so lucky in this part because there wasn't this massive development process. There was never a formal rewrite from the beginning, which is really weird. I feel like a lot of the editing of the script happened in post-production. I was on set, which I know is extremely rare for a writer, but Jason is a really collaborative person. He wanted me there, and there were certain things that I tweaked on the set, which, to me, is the greatest way to write ever, under the gun like that, spontaneously. For someone to say, “Go write a joke, ” and you do it and then they shoot it. I think that's one of the things that appeals to working in TV for me. That fast turnover.

Q: Ellen’s performance in comparison to the character you wrote, where did she surprise you and bring something that you didn't really see coming?
DC: She’s so awesome. I can't even imagine what it must be like to inhabit such a relaxed body. I'm so tense. There are certain lines that I imagined being very distinct that she'll run together sometimes, and that just worked so well. It actually sounds like human beings talking and not like nerds sitting at their computer. And I think that the dialogue I wrote had the potential to be too snappy. If someone had given it a sitcom delivery it could have been really gross, and Ellen just nailed it.

Q: In what ways is Juno like you and in what ways is she’s not?
DC: She is kind of guarded emotionally and hides behind her facility for language and her wit like me. But unlike me she wears a lot of sweater vests and button-up brown shirts, which is an Ellen thing. I'm kind of more into goofy T-shirts.

Q: The choice of location seemed to play a role. Why the movie doesn’t happen in a big city like New York. What was involved in that?
DC: Partly ignorance and xenophobia because I grew up in the Midwest and that's all I know, so if I had written a movie about New York it would have been really corny like “Wow, look at the tall building.” I tried to set a movie in Los Angeles once, and I failed at that too and I wound up having to move it to Michigan.

Q: Where in the Midwest did you grow up?
DC: I grew up in Chicago, and I lived there for the first 25 years of my life, and then I moved to Minneapolis for the next four years, which was where I started writing. Now I live in L.A.

Q: Did the production design and those great locations enhance your vision of what you wrote?
DC: For me that was one of the most intense aspects of the entire experience because I had written it a certain way, and you always assume that your little vision, as pretentious as that sounds, is going to be exclusive to your own experience, and then to see how faithfully it recreated the landscapes of my adolescence is creepy and cool. Juno's bedroom especially. The first time I saw her bedroom I just cried. I cried a lot. And I also love the subtlety in the composition of how he shot the different seasons. It's one of my favorite parts about the movie.

Q Why did you choose the subjects of teenager, pregnancy, etc. as a first screenplay?
DC: That's a tough one. I think it was less the pregnancy that appealed to me than it was the interaction between this very outspoken, unusual teenage girl and these two very kind of conventional antiseptic yuppies. I liked the idea of that girl interacting with that couple, and then I tried to think, “What's a fascinating way that that could happen?” and I thought, “What if they were trying to adopt her baby?”  To me, the entire movie sprang from that image.

Q: Can you talk about the idea of the film as a “meditation on maturity,” as you have said before?
DC: That’s just me exercising my own inner demons. I think every script is a catharsis, to some degree, of its author, and I just have a lot of issues with maturity.

Q: Are you afraid that people will think this is an anti-abortion type of film?
DC: That does worry me in fact. People are entitled to love the movie for whatever reason they want to love it. I just want it to be loved, but I am pro choice so for me to have the movie perceived as some right wing propaganda would be a little weird.

Q: Juno and her friend have such dynamic, great dialogue. Was it all scripted or there was any room for improvisation?
DC: The two of them fell into that so easily. And, in fact, there were some scenes, that will hopefully be on the DVD, where the two of them just go at it because they also have this great relationship in real life. And not much is said about Olivia Thirlby who plays Leah, and I think it is actually because her performance is so natural and so good that it doesn't draw attention to itself in an obnoxious way. She's a really good actress. In high school movies it's always about the clichés like the popular girls and the burnouts and the nerds. My high school wasn't like that. My best friend was this very conventionally beautiful cheerleader. She was like Leah. She got the guys, and I was the little freak in a band, and we were inseparable, and that happens. So I just wanted to convey a friendship like that. That’s why I love Juno and Leah the characters.
 
Q: So what happened to your band career?
DC: I suffered from a lack of talent.

Q: Do you see yourself acting or directing?
DC: I want to direct. I should never act.

Q: What would you like to direct?
DC: I would like to be a horror film director.

Q: Could you talk about the projects you have coming up like Girly Style? DC: Girly Style is a big college sex comedy but told from the female perspective because I am a huge fan of Judd Apatow. I love “Superbad.” I love Knocked Up. I love 40 Year Old Virgin. But that genre has been called the “bromance” for a reason because its men telling male stories, and women are kind of accessories, which is what he's doing. Good for him. I love those movies, but I wanted to kind of try and discuss those issues from the female perspective.
 
Q: What about Jennifer's Body?
DC: Jennifer's Body is a horror movie. Jason Reitman is producing it. I wrote it. 

Q: Is it a horror movie with comedy?
DC: Yes. It's like “Juno” with cannibalism. I was sitting around thinking “I've always wanted to write a horror movie, what is scary to me?” and I immediately flashed on my teenage years, again and I thought about the sort of jealousy between teenage girls and about the sexual jealousy in particular. This girl stole my boyfriend once, and I actually wanted to kill her, so I thought “Let's do a movie about this girl who's actually consuming boys.”

Q: Now that you are living in Hollywood and you look back to your stripping life does it look like a different person's life?
DC: Yeah. It's a completely different life. I was at a strip club the other night with someone involved in this film that will remain unnamed, and we were watching the strippers and he said, “Must seem like a hundred years ago for you?” and we hadn't even been talking about my stripping, but I think he knew that it weighed heavily on my mind, and I said “Yeah it does.” It seems like such a long time ago. It's odd to me that it was like four years ago, three years ago? Not even. But, it really wasn't so bad.

Q: Will we see it in a movie?
DC: Eventually, I think.

Q: What are you currently working on?
DC: Right now I'm working on a second book. It's due pretty soon. The events of my life in the last few years have been very intense and weird and often humorous. Look at me I'm like blurbing my own book. So, I am writing a book about all of that, but I'm not naming too many names because, you know, career suicide!

Fox Searchlight released Juno in NYC and Los Angeles on Wednesday and will expand the film in more theaters in the weeks to come.