PARKER POSEY: It was a walk. It was a promenade. So then she caught the train and he goes, ‘So how was it?
How do you think it went?’ She goes, ‘You know, we’ll see.’ And he goes, ‘I know what that means.
’ She was like, ‘JESUS CHRIST!!’ She just walked away.
‘Well, we’ll see.’ ‘I know what that means.’ Oh my god.
I need to duty date. That’s what I need to do. Q: What do you think of that concept?
That was pretty hilarious. I mean in a way I always tried to date guys and it didn’t work out and then finally I was like, ‘Okay. My name is Zoe.
I’m encased in glass. You can’t possibly touch me or feel any emotion from me. You can see me but I’m so not available for you.
’ I think that once you start to get hurt, you start to build up a shell and you know, it never really worked out very well for me but you put yourself out there again and you give yourself a possibility of some sort of connection instead of just… You know you can get really bitter and really scared when things don’t work out so you got to do it I guess. PARKER POSEY: Yeah, I think it’s important to just remain open, right? Just keep yourself open.
Even the gesture for yourself of doing that, ‘Oh, I’ll go.’ I kind of had a blind date the other night. It was nice to just meet a certain guy and to have a conversation and to get to know someone briefly and … ZOE CASSAVETES: You don’t have to marry them on the first date.
ZOE CASSAVETES: But you think that you do sometimes.[wavering voice] I’m going to [inaudible] if I don’t go out with that guy. [resumes normal voice] It’s like you can or you can leave.
PARKER POSEY: And the thing about Loren is she falls in love with everyone that she meets. PARKER POSEY: She leaves herself open to be so hurt. So yeah, I think duty dating is good and a recommended thing.
Q: You talked about the film being shot out of order and that you guys went to Paris first before you did a lot of the romantic stuff in New York. That scene at the end of the movie…. PARKER POSEY: Was the first scene that me and Melvil did.
That was wild. I mean that’s the thing. Well he speaks English and he understands it, but… I had already been working and had traveled all the way over there.
Our first day is the subway scene and the bar scene. And that was wild. You don’t know what people bring and that’s why love stories are so fascinating when they work like this one does.
Like, oh he must have had some kind of similar journey. When I see Melvil’s performance in this, I think ‘He found himself. [Laughs] He has this kind of resolve within himself.
This is meaningful to me.’ And you can’t really direct that. You’ve just got to cast it.
That certain thing has to come alive. So that was pretty wild, that was amazing. They have so much more of a respect for acting, a seriousness and focus.
How nerve wracking was IT SHOOTING THAT FIRST SCENE when you know the whole movie hinges on that relationship? ZOE CASSAVETES: So many other scary things happened before that, I was like, whatever. We had a small visa problem and that’s why two days before we started shooting we had to rearrange the whole schedule in a day and a half -- which meant maybe that I wasn’t shooting my movie.
And I drank a lot of tequila that night and stayed up all night, and went in the office at 5am. My excellent crew came in, my AD came in. She’s like, ‘I’m slipping my surgery gloves on, I’m gonna change the schedule!
’ I was like, [scary voice] ‘Okay!’ He was in NY. We were ready to shoot.
PARKER POSEY: We were going to shoot that Monday. I got back from doing Boston Legal on the Thursday, had wardrobe on Friday. We were going to start shooting on Monday.
Then this whole visa thing happened and he had to go back. But we ended up shooting a little bit. He had to go to Cannes.
He had made this kind of experimental movie about himself that was in the Directors Fortnight there. So he took off and it doesn’t take just a day to get a visa either. It was like ‘Does anyone know Bill Clinton!
?’ [Laughs] It was kinda one of those days. I was really happy Parker had a few extra days to recover from Boston Legal.
PARKER POSEY: Because we were going to shoot on Saturday… And we’d been shooting, so I knew what I was getting out of her was what I wanted. You kinda go to sleep the night before you start shooting and you’re like, ‘I wonder what it’s gonna look like, I wonder what it’s gonna feel like…’You don’t really know until you go on that journey and do it. We shot that first day with Gena and Parker.
I was sitting under the camera and I was watching Parker do her thing and I was like well if this is how it’s going to go, I guess we’re going to be okay. We shot the movie in 20 days. So we were like, [snaps fingers] ‘Ready?
Let’s go. Okay good, that’s good, now let’s move on. Let’s have this location and let’s have the next location be next door, so we don’t have to move any trucks and consider the time.
’ We were in our rhythm by that point and Paris was really fun. It rained every day of our shoot in every place we were. Not to mention the Israeli Day Parade Band was on the block that we were shooting on.
Anything that could happen every day did happen. We just all put our cheerleading outfits on. I learned a lot from Parker because she was so—we didn’t have any rehearsal time.
I came out to LA which is where Boston Legal is shot. We sat on the grass and talked for like 8 hours about how the movie was going to be. PARKER POSEY: Literally, like for 8 hours.
ZOE CASSAVETES: We got to know each other and got to trust each other. By the end of that conversation, I knew that she and I were on the same page and knew what we were going to do. I was really lucky.
PARKER POSEY: And then Justin Theroux, like we had Josh Charles. ZOE CASSAVETES: No, we didn’t have anyone for that. And Parker is the kind of girl who’s like, ‘Well, should I just call Justin and see if he wants to do it?
’ And I was like, ‘Yeah!’ He had just finished directing his own movie. I met him in the park on Hudson Street with his dogs, hand rolling cigarettes, ‘cause you know, you’re nervous when you want someone to do something!
[Laughs] He couldn’t have been nicer but he had that full mohawk. And he said, ‘I gave myself this Mohawk because I wasn’t going to take any acting parts.’ And I was like, I can make this work.
I can totally make it work. You can be like this Choctaw or something. Everybody had the right spirit.
Everybody was a really good actor so it wasn’t like I was going to have to reshape everything that was going on. We did our thing and I would kinda guide them through whatever. Parker amazed me because she would go in and we’d be sitting out on the corner, having a coffee, doing your thing, they’d be setting up, I’d be chatting with them, she’s be like, ‘Ha ha ha.
’ I’d walk in and she’d go [using a cowering, scary voice] ‘Ha,ha,ha.’ [Laughs] I was like, ‘How do you do that?!
But thank you!’ It’s hard to shoot a movie out of order when you have a very emotional arc in a movie like that. So the first day we started shooting I sat down, I’m like, ‘Does she know her lines?
’ I know Gena knows hers because I grew up with that. It wasn’t like I was doubting you, but you were just like ‘Is this going to go on right now? Are we going to do it?
’ It was just like a big treat for me. How was it like working with Drea? How is she going to be as a mom?
ZOE CASSAVETES: She is one of the most generous, lovely, sweet, amazing human beings I have ever met in my life. She couldn’t be more there, more present. I call her the tough as nails, with a heart of gold.
She’s a broad, but she’s the sweetest person in the world. I think she is going to be an amazing mother and her boyfriend is an amazing guy too. They don’t flaunt it, but you can just see it and enjoy it and it exists.
I can’t wait to be Auntie Zoe. your mother in the film says a good man is hard to find at your age. Do you think that’s true?
Right now, I’m looking at early 40s guys that got married and had kids early and then got divorced. We’re lucky we live in America where there are so many diverse choices. PARKER POSEY: It was a walk.
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