02/26/08
Text: Broek Johnson
Photographers: Jack Dylan
Some guys have all the luck, some guys have all the pain, some guys get all the breaks, some guys do nothing but complain. True, Rod Stewart, true. And sometimes that guy having all the luck and getting all the breaks isn’t some guy, but a girl. A girl like Diablo Cody. A Midwestern girl who started a blog and wrote a book about being a stripper, and then appeared on a talk show after Letterman read it…and then a Hollywood agent read her blog, and asked for a script, which was made into a movie—Juno, 2007’s bittersweet comedy about teen pregnancy, starring Ellen Page and Michael Cera. Oh, and if you happened to miss it, Cody also won an Oscar this week. Now she has multiple projects up and coming: there’s a Showtime series United States of Tara, produced by a certain Steven Spielberg, a horror flick (Jennifer’s Body) and a college sex comedy for girls called Girly Style. We spoke with Cody a few weeks back about her newfound fame, the joy of Ellen Page, and why cinema needs more weenies.
Hi this is Broek from Anthem, is this Diablo?
My real name is Brook.
I know. I’m actually calling you on behalf of all the Brooks of the world to ask you why you turned your back on us.
That’s awesome—it’s like a Brook on Broek throw down. No one had to drudge up that detail. I never turn my back on the Brook.
You really seem to be hitting the jackpot. How are you coming through?
Lucky me. I’d like to credit it to my own genius. But…I really think I’ve been very fortunate.
What’s up next?
Time and a Half, which is my 20’s hipster identity comedy. I wrote that one a couple years ago. I’ve been extremely busy. [Then] Jennifer’s Body. I’m producing it and I wrote it and I am just thrilled because horror is my favorite genre. So this is, for me, sort of a turning point. We have Megan Fox for Jennifer’s Body and she’s just the femme fatale of the millennium. I’m very excited about that because this character is lecherous evil and sexy. We have Toni Colette doing United States of Tara, couldn’t get any better than that. I would like to work with Ellen [Page] again, selfishly—because Ellen could do a soup commercial and you’d cry.
Are you writing your characters any differently now?
In the case of Juno, I didn’t know what I was doing. I can talk more intelligently about what I’ve written since, because I was doing it more consciously as a working screenwriter. Juno was really this crazy whim. I had no idea it was going to be produced and that I was going to be a writer. It was very unconscious and very free. I have so much trouble answering questions about how I wrote it because really I had nothing to lose and I just went for it. Whereas now, perhaps I should think about Jungian psychology. I am totally trapped now. [laughs] No, I’m not—I still try not to over think things.
Since people liked Juno so much, did you have this feeling of “I better hit the ground running”?
All of a sudden people wanted to hear more from me. And I’m no dummy—I didn’t want to go back to my old job. thought to myself, ‘I better get going.’ Luckily, I sort of suppressed a lot of my creative instincts for so long that I had all these movies inside me. I wish I was as prolific as a year ago or two years ago because all of a sudden the whole year has sort of been consumed by Juno. I want to get back to that place where I am just writing frantically.
You get a fair amount of attention for your strong female roles. How do you start writing—with a character in mind, or with a particular situation?
I think about dialogue first. If I think of a line I’ll try to think of a scene I can insert that into. And I’m also interested in relationships. Romance is interesting to me. To me, the central theme in Juno was not the pregnancy but the relationship between Juno (Page) and Paulie (Cera).
The movie made me miss high school. It made me nostalgic for those days because I had a friend like that…he even looked like Michael Cera.
So did my boyfriend! And it’s funny, because how many women have or had a Paulie Bleeker in their life? To me it’s a good thing. Teenage guys in cinema are typically very aggressive and very…kind of gross and horny. They’re little Axe body spray dudes. In reality so many of us knew sweet, sensitive geeks in high school who just kissed our feet. So let’s get some weenies in movies. Honestly, I’m a fan of the weenies. I always say it’s good thing I didn’t know Michael Cera was going to play Pauley Bleeker, because then it would have been Paulie Bleeker: The Movie.
