My Interview With Nora Ephron

Sad news  about the death of Nora Ephron at 71.

Here's my interview with her in 1992 on her directing debut, "This Is My Life."



View/Submit Comments for this story

Nora Ephron is after those flashes of truth in movies, when suddenly there's a shock of recognition and you think, "That's me."
    "What I really love are those moments that feel so real that it's not a movie at all," the screenwriter-director says.
    Appropriately enough, her first film as director is called "This Is My Life." It opens at Connecticut theaters today.
    The film, based on the Meg Wolitzer novel, stars Julie Kavner as a working single mother from Queens who moves to Manhattan and tries to make it as a stand-up comic. The film has a split point of view between the Kavner character and that of her two daughters, who must cope with their mother's rapid rise to fame and fortune.
    It's a film that Ephron can relate to in several ways.
    It's a film about sisters. (Ephron has three, including Delia, with whom she co-wrote the script.) It's about a single working mother. (She has two sons from her former husband, journalist Carl Bernstein.) It's about being the child of celebrity parents. (Ephron's parents, Phoebe and Henry Ephron, were a playwrighting-screenwriting team.) It's about having parts of your childhood appropriated for art by your parents. (Nora's life was the basis of several of her parents' Broadway plays: "Take Her, She's Mine" and "Three's a Family.")
    "I picked very carefully the movie that I wanted to make for my first directing job," says Ephron as she nibbles on a Mento candy mint. "I didn't make a movie about the Peloponnesian War or something that I'm not an expert on. I know about being a single mother living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan."
    She also knew a great subject for a film. Her instincts, for the most part, have been right on the money in the past.
    She wrote the screenplay for Mike Nichols' "Silkwood," for which she received her first Oscar nomination. Nichols also directed "Heartburn," based on Ephron's popular novel, which was a just-barely fictitious account of the break-up of her second marriage, to Bernstein. She had a couple of flops: "My Blue Heaven," starring Steve Martin and directed by Herbert Ross, and
    "Cookie," directed by Susan Seidelman. But it was the smash hit "When Harry Met Sally" that gave the 50-year-old Ephron her second Oscar nomination and the clout in Hollywood to direct.
    "She's born to direct," says Kavner, who makes her starring debut after many films in which she has had memorable supporting parts ("Awakenings," "Radio Days"). "She's so damned smart. You have immediate confidence in her. And she's open to everyone else's creative input. It's not like this smart person who is afraid to ask if they don't know something."
    Says producer Lynda Obst, who is also a close friend of Ephron: "I knew she could be a director several years ago because she is so decisive and so comfortable in authority. Part of being a director is being a general and having a very strong point of view. And Nora is like that in spades."
    Ephron would be the first to agree.

    "Being a wuss is not part of the job description," Ephron says. "What you do all day long on a movie set is make decisions. You make millions of decisions. Should the character wear a red shirt or a blue shirt? Should this room be 2 feet wider? Blah blah blah. Almost none of those decisions really matter. But you make all of them as if they did, as if people's lives depended on them.
    "The biggest surprise is that everyone told me directing was going to be the most arduous, difficult, impossible, ruinous-to-my-health, blah-blah-blah experience that I would ever go through. And nobody told me it was going to be the most fun that I would ever have."
    Despite her no-nonsense decisive manner, she says she sought collaboration from others.
    "That's what I loved about working with Rob [Reiner] in `When Harry Met Sally.' Previously I was a person who went insane if someone changed my lines. On `Silkwood,' Cher used to come in with these sort of dirty ad libs, and I'd go crazy. But when you make a movie with Billy Crystal and he comes in with an ad lib and it's really better than anything you could ever have dreamed of -- at that moment you go, `It doesn't matter where it came from.' Pride of ownership is a very stupid thing in a movie. Just make it work. Just make it better. That's all that counts."
    Take the famous orgasm scene in "When Harry Met Sally," she says.
    "It was originally written by me and Rob. But it was Meg's [Ryan] idea to have the orgasm, and it was Billy's idea for that woman to say the line at the end. So who did it? It doesn't matter."
    Ephron is apprehensive about how her modest little film, budgeted at about $10 million, will be presented to the public.
    "The studio doesn't know what this movie is," she says. "They don't know how to advertise, promote it and open it."

    But Ephron is buoyed by the success of smart, personal films such as "Grand Canyon" and "Fried Green Tomatoes."
    "These are movies made for people who are literate," she says, "not for people who are subliterate. This movie is not going to play in Third World countries. It's just not. It's not going to be a bang-bang Arnold Schwarzenegger thing that doesn't have to be translated."
    And how does smart, cool, controlled, decisive Ephron handle
    the pressure of filmmaking and its promotion?
    "I do have stress," she says. "In fact, right now I am completely exhausted. I can't think of a time when I was more exhausted except maybe when my marriage fell apart.
    "But I have a husband [author and screenwriter Nick Pileggi] that I would like to practically lend out to people when they are going through tough times because he's so great. And he's extremely good at reminding one that almost all of this doesn't matter. In two days it will be a distant memory. It's sort of like the luge. You work and work and work, and it's over in 2 minutes."
    But not all memories are distant ones. She says one aspect of the movie that especially hits home was that of a person who exploits friends and family for professional gain. It happened to Ephron by her parents. And she did it to her own family, most notably in "Heartburn."
    "You balance the good and the bad," she says. "And sometimes you do it wrong. Sometimes you write something, and you're sorry that you did it for the laugh. Two years later, you think, `I didn't need that joke so badly I had to hurt someone's feelings.'

    "But writers are predators by nature. They really are. And you have to be very careful when you're friends with writers. I'm glad I never had an affair with Philip Roth -- who never asked me, in any case. But I'm sure I certainly would have lept at the opportunity at an earlier point in my life. But it would have been very foolish because you certainly know what you're in for. If you go on a date with someone who continually writes about his love life, you do know what you're getting into."
    Ephron knows exactly what she's getting into as director.
    Her next film is "a weird little movie" called "The Night Before Xmas," about a group of people at a suicide hotline on Christmas Eve.
    In "This Is My Life," one of the characters says the world is divided between Bettys and Veronicas, the two girls in the Archie comic books. Betty is the basically good girl for whom life is not so sweet. Veronica is the privileged girl life has given a kiss.
    Ephron says Mike Nichols once told her there are two kinds of people in the world: the people who have wonderful things happen to them in the first half of their lives. And those to whom life is good during the second half.
    "But it's hard for a Betty to later become a Veronica because you always have the kind of bad Betty stuff perfuming your Veronica-ness," Ephron says.
    And who is Ephron, who was named for the independent character in Ibsen's "A Doll's House"?
    "I'm a former Betty," she says. "Now I'm a Nora.