EDEN WURMFELD Jennifer Westfeldt and I had known each other for 12 plus years. She and I were living just down the street from each other in L.A. We were kind of running partners. She borrowed my Book of the Rules before she went off to New York to develop the play with Heather. When they decided to develop this into a screenplay, I became one of the inner circle of people who was reading draft after draft after draft. I loved the material, really loved it. They quickly were picked up by Interscope so they were at the studio. (She said some things she had been working on.) So I was in this indie world that was separate and apart from the studio. It was one of these situations where I kind of… it was kind of like you have a crush on someone and you know that they are dating someone else. It’s not really appropriate to let them know because it’s not going to go anywhere at that time but you are kind of waiting in the wings for when the breakup happens. So I was reading drafts for about a year and a half. In the summer of ’99, when their option was about to expire at Interscope, Jennifer called me and said, ‘We’re thinking that maybe we should renew the option because we don’t know if it will ever get made at the studio. We’re wondering if you think this could be made independently.

EDEN WURMFELD Yes. At that point the film was or set out to figure out a strategy and so on. We had hoped for around a $2,000,000 budget. I was like, ‘I can’t do the darn thing.’ I’m just tired. There are only so many times you can go back to people and ask them to work for just a song. We were all gung-ho that we were going to make this indie film for $2,000,000 in New York. The other issue was a few of us had wanted to make it in Toronto. It was abundantly clear to me that New York was a like a character in the movie and it had to be made in New York.

EDEN WURMFELD Absolutely. I had never done a film in New York. I had worked in Philly and L.A., even though I am a New Yorker. I had a bit of a learning curve shooting in New York. That was how I originally got involved.

EDEN WURMFELD In terms of physical production, I would say yes. Of course, basically, it’s the same drill. In terms of physical production, that was the most difficult.

EDEN WURMFELD I mean day-to-day of the 23-day shoot. There’s no question that it was hugely challenging after working exclusively in L.A., where everything is catered to the movie industry and you can get anything 24 hours a day. Space is not at a premium, parking is not at a premium. You don’t have to worry about getting equipment up a five-storey walkup or what you are going to do with your production vehicle.

EDEN WURMFELD Not all of them.

EDEN WURMFELD Oh, in L.A. It’s just a completely different landscape. It’s apples and oranges. When you are groomed on a town where everything is catered to the movie industry, and then you come to a place like New York where by and large some people are excited about what you are doing or stop and ask you what you are doing. Basically, people want to go on with their daily lives. They don’t want to be interrupted and it’s a pain. There are lights in the middle of the night that are disturbing them or sounds. Literally the physical parameters that we were working in, formed a lot of what the movie looks like. It formed our day-to-day experiences on the ground. It was exciting but it definitely was challenging.

EDEN WURMFELD Oh my God! Two of our prime locations were selected for aesthetic reasons. We started to storyboard and then we found that they were in the middle of what the Film Commission called Nagasaki, which was like the Hot Zone.

EDEN WURMFELD No, where they had been over-shooting, like the neighborhood had decided that they didn’t want productions coming through because they were just ‘productioned out.’ The film commission gave us permission to shoot at one of those locations but not the other because we begged and begged and begged.

EDEN WURMFELD It was on the upper West side. Literally, the first morning that we were shooting there, I was walking up to the apartment and I could already see that someone was in an altercation with another individual who has nothing to do with our shoot. I go up and they asked, ‘Are you the person in charge here, the producer?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘You can take your movie magic and shove it up your ass.’ That was the start that we got off to.

EDEN WURMFELD It was like, ‘Nice to meet you. We’ll try and make this as pain free as possible.’

EDEN WURMFELD He was upset about our presence and I can’t say that our presence was very large.

EDEN WURMFELD No, we didn’t have a huge presence, but at the same time, our lighting and grip truck was rather sizable and then we had an art department vehicle and a production cube and the caterer guy who sets up his truck… We’ve got a few vehicles and take up maybe half a block. On the upper west side where people leave early… There’s this new thing where you can call in if you are taking a car out of a parking spot. You call this number and let it be known that a parking spot is becoming free. If you are parking, you can call this same number and find out where someone may be getting out of a spot.

EDEN WURMFELD It’s so tight. It’s so much at a premium that people are just at each other’s throats. I didn’t know whether to shoot in New York or go blind because I was so flabbergasted at what was going on. I feel that if we had five or fewer fender-benders or problems in one day that was a good day. In this very kind of logistical way, it was extremely stressful. This was on top of my needing to be by the monitor and there for other things.

EDEN WURMFELD Yes, but at the same time, I would not change a thing that we did. It was difficult, but it was also incredibly rewarding, so worth it. The movie looks great. As many as we had difficult times with people, we also had delightful times with New Yorkers. We were kicked out of a location and we didn’t want to lose the day and it was on a weekend. We couldn’t get the permit officer to issue us a new permit so we were supposed to have been in that location both Saturday and Sunday. We were trying to think how we could creatively use this two-block area where we were permitted to be to shoot every other scene that we could think of that could possibly be accommodated by what was around here. We were running into shops and restaurants begging people, ‘Would you let us shoot?’ For example, the scene when Helen, Heather’s character, comes to meet Jessica at the dress shop… It was called Jennifer Tyler Cashmere. We dressed the whole thing; it was completely last minute. I think it is one of the most beautiful things in the movie. It’s a corner shop with windows on both sides. It just worked really nicely. It was totally by the seat of our pants.

EDEN WURMFELD Charlie and I worked countless hours storyboarding, which I think was valuable. My mantra on the low-budget stuff that I have done is that we’re too low-budget not to be completely prepared and as professional as a big studio movie. We cannot afford to be shut down. We cannot afford to throw money at problems that we didn’t think of beforehand.

EDEN WURMFELD Sure, every day.

EDEN WURMFELD Like being kicked out of a location where we had a signed contract, to a production assistant hitting a pedestrian in the street with a car.

EDEN WURMFELD It was definitely trying and I know that these stories are probably a dime a dozen. Every low-budget production probably has trials to share.

EDEN WURMFELD There’s not really that much to say beyond the fact that she was driving from the ending… Like she had gone to the lab, the editing room and was due back in the production office. Then we got a hysterical phone call. It’s a nightmare. On top of everything else and trying to make art. I literally lost sleep not knowing exactly what happened to this woman. We only found out about a month later that she actually had a broken leg. They wouldn’t let us get in touch with her. We didn’t know what hospital she had gone to. It was just terrifying.

EDEN WURMFELD We met through a mutual friend, probably while we were sophomores in college. Someone I had met in childhood was in a group with her in college. It was kind of happenstance.

EDEN WURMFELD No, this mutual friend went to Yale with Jennifer and that’s how I came to know her.

EDEN WURMFELD Basically what happened was that his presence allowed us to confirm Charlie as a first-time director. He had in a letter promised to mentor him and look at a few cuts and basically allowed us to get approval… It kind of sealed the deal for Charlie to have Doug come on in this capacity. To be honest, he probably did less than he set out to do because he was […] foreign identify, which we knew was going to happen anyway between you, me, and the wall. He did attend a few readings beforehand. One thing that I think was invaluable to our pockets was that he conducted many, many readings with the girls playing their parts. It was development because we got to hear the script, hear where it was working and where it wasn’t working. It was rehearsal because we never really had enough built-in rehearsal time although we did have some. It was also fundraising because we would invite investor types to these readings. It was really like this incredible old tool for us. Doug did come to several of these readings and he talked to all of us about various story points. I know that he and Charlie talked about storyboarding and they talked about hiring a D.P. sound man. Doug, Charlie and I grew up together. I have known Doug since I was 11. The way that I got involved in Swingers was that he came to visit another set, this low-budget movie that I was doing in San Francisco. When Swingers came around he said that we have to get Eden to come show us how to make a movie on the cheap because she has done it. The movie that I had done before was like 60 grand.

EDEN WURMFELD We did Swingersfor like 250 or 270. He and I went on with another producer from Swingers to do another low-budget feature called See Jane Run. So we’ve been working together, intermittently, over the years and I’m sure we’ll work together again.

EDEN WURMFELD I think that for me and Charlie, without question, the kind of shorthand that we have, the kind of trust that we have, the ability to just hear one another is invaluable. Certainly I never would have been involved in the project if I hadn’t had this long-standing friendship with Jennifer. I can’t really say whether that long-standing friendship did Jen and me in good stead or not. It was not an easy process. We’re probably less friendly now than we’ve ever been.

EDEN WURMFELD We spent a long time looking for a director. I don’t know if you heard about that but Charlie wasn’t on any of our lists. We had an A list, a B list, a C list. We had a romantic comedy with a gay second act, two unknown leads. Maybe we can get a director that has some bit of experience or his name might mean something. Maybe he had done one feature that was at Sundance. We quickly realized that doing someone else’s passion project was not something that any director with any experience wanted to do, particularly as our budget came down. It’s like, ‘I’ve been there, done that. I don’t want to go back to that under $1,000,000 harrowing thing if I don’t have to.’ We had many, many, many people who we went through before we got to our list of, like, scrappers – like, people who had been to film school, people who had made a short, people who had done something that we could look at that would lead us to believe that they could make this leap. When we got to that place, that’s when Charlie’s name was really in the mix. I think the decision was made… officially he was on board about six months before we started shooting. I can’t remember when officially but it was – in the spring of 2000 at some point, March or April maybe. We started shooting in September, but we started pre-production in July. He had been working with the girls, he had been meeting with them kind of unofficially. You may have heard the story… I was part of this leader’s group of drafts and he was crashing on my couch. I would give him the script to read after I had read it. Over time he was so excited about the project that he would have these coffee dates with Jen and Heather. They would talk shop and story and this kind of thing. As the story goes, I was never at these meetings, they would say, ‘Oh, we love you so much. We wish you could be our director, but it will never happen.’ I think that my big thing is managing expectations, both in terms of my own and other people’s. Because I love my brother so much and we’ve been so close and we have worked together before, I didn’t want to give him any kind of false hope about this job. So I was incredibly negative; not negative, just less than optimistic. When the time finally came to make the decision, I put in my two cents about Charlie, but I actually took myself out of the voting. I just said these are the reasons I think he would be great and I don’t want to be involved any more on the decision because I’m completely biased. The thing that could be a downside of working with someone that you are incredibly close with, I think I managed to rein in. I wouldn’t say that there was tension between us due to our sibling relationship per se. I am protective of him and I am looking out for his best interests, but I think that is also the job of the producer. Maybe he makes me even better at what I do because I’m going to protect him as much as I possibly can.

EDEN WURMFELD During the production or before?

EDEN WURMFELD I think the best way to put it is that I was the sweat, he was the equity. He wasn’t really around very much. I think he came to the set a couple of times.

EDEN WURMFELD Before the production I had met with him in, I think it was, October of 1999. He came from the internet world, where I think that things in the hey day of the dot-com boom happened very quickly, as opposed to the movie world where things…

EDEN WURMFELD It was actually kind of thrilling because I had a breakfast with him in Santa Monica one morning. We talked for an hour or so. I gave him a copy of the script. At four o’clock in the afternoon he called and said, ‘I’m in for at least $250,000. That was fabulous because the first money is always the hardest to come by. It was a real boon to our fundraising process to have someone who was committing at least a quarter of a million dollars. He was our first investor. I can’t say that I had a very involved relationship with him.

EDEN WURMFELD There’s no question. I completely related to Jessica’s character; I was like the terminally single person. In fact at some point in the script there were bad dates that were from me and she asked me if it was OK if she used them. We were always exchanging these stories so I completely related. I remember when I was 15 actually saying to my mother that I wished that I were gay because I had such great relationships with women and I didn’t seem to click with boys. On top of my own personal connection to the subject matter, the story in terms of Helen’s trajectory actually mirrored quite exactly my brother’s coming out process. It was something that our family had gone through. It was kind of this two-fold appeal in terms of my connection to it. I thought it was fabulous. What more could I ask for than something that was funny, poignant, and deals with issues that most people don’t want to think about or deal with in a way that is so palatable that they can’t help enjoying themselves and they also can’t help having a stimulating conversation afterwards. This was a project that I must usher to the screen. That’s really the way that I have to feel about something that I get involved with because it takes so damn long and it’s so tough.

EDEN WURMFELD Obviously if it hadn’t been smart, it wouldn’t have worked. It’s a given in this milieu. I’m not saying it’s a given at large, but yes, it’s funny and smart.

EDEN WURMFELD To be honest, one of the things that appealed to me was that I felt it took the paradigm of the classic romantic comedy and kind of turned it on its head. It’s not really three acts. It’s kind of three acts and a prologue. Where the typical Hollywood romantic comedy would end is with the lovers together. They are always going to walk off into the sunset. That’s where the movie ends. That’s what audiences are trained to want. Clearly, we’ve gotten feedback from every direction and there are those people who feel that as far as its power in the gay community, it should have ended there. At the same time, I think that the most powerful thing I’ve heard again and again from gay audiences, which I think is so right-on, is that I may not relate to Jessica Stein, but I dated her. I may not be seeing myself in that character, but damn it if I haven’t gone out with her. I think it is very common, whether we all are aware of who has experimented with what, who has dabbled where, that there are a lot of straight women who have had gay relationships. I always saw it in this art marrying life, life marrying art way, that for Jessica, this relationship was a huge learning curve. It was a stepping stone for her to really come to terms with herself and who she is. For Helen’s character, the relationship is an epiphany and that’s the reason she is having all these unsatisfying sexual relationships with men prior to meeting Jessica. It’s really somehow not right. She comes into herself and comes out to renew a relationship with Jessica.

EDEN WURMFELD For sure. That was very important.

EDEN WURMFELD I felt that it was, as I put it, a lose-lose situation. We ended up leaving it up to the studio. I don’t know how much of this story you have heard, if you have asked every person, but I felt very mixed about it. I felt, on the one hand, that the last thing I wanted was for people to be taken out of… These buildings were now imbued with a meaning that had nothing to do with our movie and that was extremely sad and profound. It had nothing to do with this simple romantic tale that we had set out to tell. So, in that regard, I felt it was really inappropriate to have them in because it would take people out of the story. On the flip side, I also felt that this movie was made at a certain time that reflected certain kinds of values. It was clearly a pre-9/11 film. It was tough. I didn’t feel doggedly that we had to remove them, but I also felt that to leave them in could really be a mistake. The release of the movie was going to be too close to the events that had occurred and that all anyone would see when…

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Chris Neumer