Tamara Jenkins is ensconced in an LA hotel room. The sun is shining but she wouldn’t know how warm it is because she’s been inside all day talking about her new film, Private Life. “At some point I will feel the heat.” She laughs.
Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti are a couple in their 40s struggling to have a baby. From hormone injections to surrogacy, they consider it all after the natural way doesn’t work. It’s a story we’ve all encountered, whether it’s our own, our friends, family. I tell Jenkins that this story is my friend’s and she captures it with that balance of honesty, comedy and drama.
It’s been eleven years since Jenkins made a film. She of course, happy is the mother to a young girl, but Private Life is now streaming on Netflix and in select cinemas in NY and LA, it’s a film that is worth the wait, to find the love and laughter in fertility issues.
Okay, the first thing I want to do as a 43-year-old woman who does not have children but has friends who have gone through this story is to tell you, this is my story in a way, my friends, people I’ve known, so, thank you for telling this story.
Thank you so much for saying that. It’s been so interesting how women and men have come up to me at the screenings. Especially with some of the men, I’ve had interviews with some of them and the last time I was here, I had an interview with a young sounding man over the phone and he said, “I just have to tell you, this is really weird and too much information, but my wife and I are doing this right now and we’ve just had a failed thing and we had to stop the thing because her FSH levels were too low and I made her watch this with me.” I was so touched because it was so clear because he had absolutely never ever ever talked to a stranger about this.
Is that the reaction you’re finding from people?
I had my own version of this story myself. I fictionalized it and it’s become a piece of fiction. When my husband and I were going through our fertility stuff or infertility stuff and we were trying to have the baby and it not working out the old-fashioned way, it was a little bit later than I realized but it was kind of an epidemic in my circle of friends but it gave me a license to openly write about it. It is so private, maybe less so now because it’s over ten years ago and I have a nine-year-old, but people didn’t talk about it. Women talked about it a little bit. There’s the weird invisible talking about it because online there are all these forums and a whole world of people dealing with fertility stuff. A lot of people have come up to me and talked about it.
I don’t really think of the movie as an issue movie, but it’s interesting depending on what angle you’re coming at it from and how you respond to it. Some people respond to it as a metaphor for marriage and that it’s about a mid-life crisis, some are connected to the fertility struggle.
It’s so personal and so private. At what point was it okay for you to write the story and say it’s okay to share the story?
There’s always a weird translation that happens. I have my own version of this. I have a close friend who is a documentary filmmaker and she’s one on my confidantes. When I talked to her about the trials and tribulations with this stuff, she said I had to write this stuff down. I was so repulsed and there was just no way. Obviously, it’s not true because I did. Ironically, that friend herself was in that exact position and really seeing it become more prevalent helped me start thinking about writing about it, but I was also getting further away from it.
I was thinking about the idea of it and had this bigger understanding of conception about this heterosexual’s couple inability to conceive was really an ancient story that has been told in Shakespeare, The Bible and in Greek Mythology and in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and in a lot of things. It hadn’t been talked about with the advent of artificially reproductive technology. It’s not new, it’s a different take on it. It existed in movies, in broad comedies and in extreme versions, but I’d never seen a human scale treatment of it before.
Was it therapeutic to put it on paper?
Writing is never therapeutic because it’s so hard and torturous. I don’t think I ever experienced that feeling. It’s too painful to feel therapeutic, but there is something there when it’s really finished or when you’re actualizing a scene with actors, sometimes it can have a feeling of the rush that you’re talking about. Or there are circumstances when you’re depicting things and you’re getting them right. There’s just this weird detail that I was very fixated on getting right from the Middle-aged marriage perspective, from the IVF perspective, from the New York City perspective. There were things that were important to me to tell very precisely and correctly and not do a shorthand version of it.
Like with the waiting rooms, those are very specific and all the people are waiting. Everybody knows why everybody is there. There’s that strange public-private feeling and the hushness of those rooms and what it feels like. That’s an example of wanting to get it right.
You mention New York, that screaming match on the sidewalk. I’ve seen it. You captured that.
[laughs] People are having these really profound private things in a public setting.
Exactly. You get it so right with New York at that moment.
If it were a Los Angeles version of the movie. They’d end up having it in a car. What would it be? Maybe it would be in a garage on the way to the car? The car would enter the picture a lot faster.
It would absolutely be in a garage, they’re arguing.
You’d have that garage echo but at some point, you’d make it to the car.
Yes.
You’d finish it off there. I don’t tend to write in a linear way. I can write scenes in order and go for them in the way they come up. If I have an idea, I go down that road because it might disappear. I think there were aspects of that scene that I had in note form. I remember thinking it was a landmark within the movie. t was one of the reasons I was even interested in doing the movie. There’s a weirdness to that conversation which I’ve never seen happen before. To be talking about egg donation and to have her say, “We’d never do it and have her draw the line at science fiction and he says they do it all the time on farm animals and she tells him she’s not a goat.” Just all of that, I’d never seen that before. It’s so primal and strange and yet modern, but primal like. It’s about something so human and raw. I think that’s what really drew me to the subject matter. It pushes the humans in this situation to very intense feelings that are unmediated by etiquette or normal behavior. They’re talking about things that are so basic and raw. You don’t get to do that if the movie was about something else.
It was a human story, it had comedy, it had the drama. Molly Shannon’s comments and her opinions.
Those opinions and everyone had them in the social fabric of where they are. The title came later. At first, the movie was called The Middle Ages and I had that on my computer for a very long time thinking I was going to do the movie and it’s about this infertile movie. Forever in my brain, it was called The Middle Ages, but then I saw there was a column in The New York Times and I thought it was terrible. I couldn’t use that title. I stumbled into the title of Private Life and the movie does that so much and it’s taking something so private and it throws it out there into the public sphere. It’s happening in the waiting rooms, in the street and everyone has an opinion about it. You’re talking about something so intimate and you’re talking about your genitals with doctors and social workers. This thing, when it’s under sheets and done the old-fashioned way, no one judges you about it, but as soon as it’s not working that way there’s all this judgment and opinion.
You take us right in with the injections and you know what’s coming with the opening. Was that always the entry?
It was a very early scene that I felt was metaphoric for the whole movie because it starts from this very intimate place and it feels like it’s going to be a bedroom scene and sexual and erotic and it suddenly switches to medical. I had that for a long time.
Being plunged into the story in the middle. I wanted you to be thrown into the story. I guess that’s what’s considered better writing because you don’t have to have the backstory that explains, you catch up to it. It’s something I aspire to.
I was telling Kathryn Hahn that if this was a bank heist, and what’s the best bank heist movie? Dog Day Afternoon. You just show up and they’re about to burst in, you don’t know why they’re doing it or the motivations why? But they’re in the middle and there’s that urgency and you catch up and that to me seems the better way of writing.
You mention Kathryn, but your entire cast, Molly, Paul, Kathryn are superb. We think we’ve seen every side of Paul but then you give us this.
Oh, that makes me so happy. I am going to lure you in here and I’m so excited to see you get to play all the notes. I felt this was an opportunity for him to play with all the colors in his crayon box and I was really excited about it. I’m so glad you said that because it’s one of the things that excited me about the movie and him playing it. I think he’s so incredibly lovely.
Netflix is the film’s home. As a filmmaker how did that work for you?
They ended up rescuing the movie because it was originally at a different studio but they couldn’t finance it at the budget that would allow it to shoot in New York. The only way we would have been able to have made the movie would have to shot it in Montreal and that was terrifying and upsetting. I felt like these characters came out of the soil of New York and their neighborhood and I wasn’t willing to sacrifice that.
They were kind enough to give us the movie back, and they were gracious and fantastic but then we were out on the street. We were ready to shoot and the actors were ready to go. Scheduling was hard because when you get them, they’re ready because they have other work to do, but Netflix said they were going to do it and in New York.
I’m glad to hear that it was shot in New York.
Can you imagine? Are we going to pretend that’s New York? When I talk about the waiting room and getting that right. The socio-economic aspects of these people and delaying adulthood is because of the style of the lives they were leading, they were artists, journalists and it’s a very specific breed of people. They’re holding on to their ability to live in the city by the skin of their teeth and all of that stuff was all mixed in with the condition that they find themselves in when we meet them.