CHRIS NEUMER: I think that came through in the final product. I first saw the film last year at the Chicago Film Festival in this little dingy screening room with three rows of chairs in it and there were two other people in the audience. And I just had a blast. It was one of the most fun screenings I’ve ever attended. I just loved the film. I think that passion on all of your parts comes through. One of the things that stuck with me–five minutes after I walked out of the theater I was so upset about the ending. I was like "Why the hell didn’t they end up together?" What the hell is going on here? Three or four days later I started thinking about it and it really was like that first time you see a sports movie and the team doesn’t win.
JENNIFER WESTFELDT: Yeah.
CHRIS NEUMER: I can’t remember if it was Charlie or Heather, but one of them compared Kissing Jessica Stein to Annie Hall, I didn’t necessarily make that connection while I was watching it, but it stands out as a movie that in ten years people are going to look back on and say, "This is the first movie like that."
JENNIFER WESTFELDT: That’s nice. Thank you. Because certainly our ending caused a lot of controversy, some people thought "That’s the only ending you can have, the only truthful way to end it" and other people were like, "How could they not end up together!"
CHRIS NEUMER: I can see that.
JENNIFER WESTFELDT: It was both that we heard. And I think for me and Heather we really wanted to–we didn’t want it to be fairy tale. We wanted it to be positive and real and maybe bittersweet. Life doesn’t always work out. Two people have the same revelation at the same moments in their lives and walk of into the sunset. I get a little bit frustrated–even though I love some of those classic Hollywood movies–looking at people who are ridiculously gorgeous having total trouble finding people and then everything works out at the end.
CHRIS NEUMER: So you’re not going to be in line to see Sweet Home Alabama, then?
JENNIFER WESTFELDT: Right. I think those movies have a place, but I get frustrated that real people aren’t presented as much as they might be. And the real favorites of mine, speaking of classic romantic comedies really are about real people working it out. Recent examples include Jerry Maguire and As Good as it Gets and Rushmore. All of which have bittersweet and hopeful endings. Jerry Maguire has a big happy ending, but it has an unhappy path to get there. They get married and it’s not that good. There are so many more complications in those films and I feel like that’s more realistic and gives people an associability that sometimes I think is lacking. Everything works out perfectly in movies, you know?
CHRIS NEUMER: Oh, I’m with you. You’re preaching to the choir. Everything-works-out-perfectly movies are starting to annoy some of the movie going public. You’ve been there, done that. You go to the theatre and know how you’re going to come out feeling. That’s not necessarily a good thing.
JENNIFER WESTFELDT: Right. At least you’d like to be surprised on the ride, even if it does end up happily. I don’t know. I think we need to have more truthful characters up there for people to relate to. I love that in As Good As It Gets Jack Nicholson is loathsome (laughs) at the beginning of the film. He still says all of the wrong things and finally he says something kind of okay and they kiss awkwardly. (laughs) that’s where you leave the film. To me, that’s a little more interesting.
CHRIS NEUMER: No, it is. There are certain films where everything is not tied up neatly in a big package, like Gosford Park. And as a person who sees more than his fair share of movies, that is appreciated. There’s interesting different–the good guy gets killed at the end–but you can’t market that very well and there’s interesting original which seems to be what you’ve got. It has an element of reality to it. That’s nice to see. When you reshot your ending, Scott is out there wearing that T-shirt with God knows how many holes in it that he had snaked off that crew member, which added a lot to the scene.
JENNIFER WESTFELDT: That’s actually my boyfriend’s T-shirt. It’s funny. I realized that Scott came not wearing the right thing or something and I was like, "Baby, do you have a T-shirt? That’s good. With the holes, that’s perfect." So that’s Jon’s T-shirt.
CHRIS NEUMER: (laughs) Yeah, that T-shirt says, "Hey, I’ve given up." Everyone’s been there when you’ve bumped into someone wearing some clothes that you shouldn’t be wearing, but are.
JENNIFER WESTFELDT: I think that’s everyday for me out here. You’re just going out to grab a paper and you run into three casting directors or whatever.
CHRIS NEUMER: You could have shaved this morning, you could have decided I’m not wearing that shirt from freshman year in high school, but you didn’t think about it.
JENNIFER WESTFELDT: You just don’t think about it, right.
CHRIS NEUMER: Touching back on the Annie Hall comparison. When you were shown in the bad dating montage, it did come off slightly Diane Keaton-y as she was in Annie Hall, what with the hat and stammering, was there ever a conscious choice to play it that way?
JENNIFER WESTFELDT: No. It was actually surprising to us that we heard so many people who said that I reminded them of a young Diane Keaton. I guess in our minds, if anything, we were trying to create a female Alvy Singer. Because she’s just so neurotic. Annie Hall wasn’t neurotic at all. She was actually a completely wide-eyed girl.
CHRIS NEUMER: Free spirited.
JENNIFER WESTFELDT: I think Jessica’s defining characteristic is being too smart for her own good. And that’s the opposite of Annie Hall. In that, she was too dumb for him, she had to go to school.
CHRIS NEUMER: That’s boiling down all the fat away from that one.
JENNIFER WESTFELDT: No, I could see–we put that hat on simply because we wanted to show seasons changing. Originally the bad date montage had more bad dates, like you saw on the DVD. We basically had a sequence written in our script where it was like, "Now she’s wearing an overcoat, now she’s wearing this or this scarf." We were trying to show time passing. And then of course, once we cut a bunch of dates it didn’t really come off anyway, so that was frustrating. We started intercutting. There used to be a series of bad dates where we showed maybe six months passing. You’ll notice that after the bad date montage Joan is very pregnant.
CHRIS NEUMER: That’s true!
JENNIFER WESTFELDT: So the point was that those dates were over many months. All of that was very conscious to show, all of the outfits and all that were to show "This is fall", "this is winter" and it didn’t come off because at the end of the day we cut material and then intercut the dates anyway. That was the reasoning behind that.
CHRIS NEUMER: It’s interesting that all the things you ended up cutting or that were shot at the end of the day, none of it really affects the final product.
JENNIFER WESTFELDT: Oh, bless your heart. It does to my eyes. I still see all the compromises and the locations that weren’t right or whatever went wrong, but thank you. But, for example, what I told you about the hat, even in Chicago a couple of people said, "I don’t understand the timeline issue. One time we see Joan and she’s not pregnant, the next time we see her, she’s very pregnant."
