Afterward, I emailed her immediately. “Hey,” I wrote, “if you ever need someone to help you screw up your career, call me.” The next day Lena emailed back, thinking that I was one of her friends goofing on her. I soon found out that she had just begun to develop a television show for HBO with my friend Jenni Konner. They asked if I wanted to come on board and help, which led to one of the greatest creative experiences of my life: working on Girls.
Lena Dunham is one of the few people on earth who I have never gotten into a fight with. Even in the throes of a production, when deadlines are looming and people are exhausted and unpleasant, every moment with her has been a joy.
Judd Apatow: So.
Lena Dunham: So.
Judd: I wanted to ask you where you feel like you’re headed, after accomplishing so much at such a young age. You’re in this position of getting to say a lot with your show and your book and everything else you’re doing. How do you feel about what you’ve been able to express so far?
Lena: It’s mind-blowing to me. And because so much of the stuff I’ve been able to make is so personal, there’s always the fear that you’re going to run out of gas. But in the past few years, to my surprise, I’ve become more politically and historically engaged, which has given me this whole other area of human stories to explore. I have all this stuff percolating in my head now which, for the first time, isn’t just about me—and that’s an exciting feeling. All of the projects I’m thinking about now, none of them are about a twenty-seven-year-old girl who’s pissed at her mom. They all share my concerns, in a way, but on a different scale and in a different time period. I’m excited by the idea of moving out of super-confessional stuff.
Judd: When you started, it almost felt like you were writing about your life in real time. But then your actual life started veering pretty dramatically from the character you were writing about.
Lena: Totally. And my life also became my work, which is the thing I’d always wanted—to be a person who worked so much that I wasn’t even available to go to dinner. It’s not like I’m out on the town every night, collecting crazy new experiences, but I am expanding my brain. I feel so hungry for information. I go home every night and I read like half a book and three magazines and some old articles from the Internet. It reminds me of college, when I would go into the library and check out ten Criterion Collection movies and then watch them all over the weekend. I remember coming out of those weekends, feeling like, I’m a radically different person than I was on Friday….
Judd: What do you think people have taken from Girls? Do you allow yourself to think about what kind of impact it may be having?
Lena: It’s impossible for your own brain to comprehend that other people are seeing this stuff, translating it, analyzing it, outside of your own bedroom or whatever. But I guess the thing that’s most exciting to me is when men, particularly fathers, tell me that the show has allowed them to understand their wives or daughters better. That, to me, is a really moving compliment.
Judd: I imagine that’s especially true for parents whose daughters are going to college.
Lena: Yeah, and who feel like, What is happening to my child? Is she ever going to have a job? And what does her sex life look like? In a way, my work gives them more things to panic about, but it also gives them a sense, I hope, that she’s part of something. I also like when women tell me that the show made them feel more comfortable and strong both with their body and in their relationships, that it has given them more authority.
Judd: We thought, in the beginning, that people would have debates about the show, for sure, but I don’t think that we thought there was much of a political statement being made. I first realized the debate would happen in the second episode, when we were talking about whether Jessa was going to get an abortion.
Lena: Yeah.
Judd: And I said, maybe she shouldn’t have an abortion in the second episode.
Lena: Your quote was, “There’s Jerry, there’s George, and then there’s their crazy neighbor Kramer—and you’re having Kramer shoot someone in the face in the second episode. And I’m not saying abortion is like shooting someone in the face, but I am saying we’re asking a lot of the audience if Kramer gets an abortion.”
Judd: Right. But then, after the first season, when you realized that people were dissecting it and debating it and trying to figure out your politics, it never felt like any of that got in your head or affected your writing. One thing I always tell people is that, when we’re in the writers’ room, all that talk doesn’t affect you negatively. It doesn’t impact the creative process. Why do you think that is?
Lena: I think it’s because the writers’ room is the place where I feel most comfortable. That’s the safe space. And so I think I was always determined not to lose that. I wish I could be the person who never reads reviews, but I totally check out what’s happening online and I have a pretty good sense of the dialogue around the show. But at the same time, you can’t internalize it. That is just gonna kill whatever is exciting or thrilling or organic about the process. There were definitely times where you and I talked about trying to respond to criticism that we found frustrating, but doing it in kind of a wink-wink way.
Judd: Like when we had Donald Glover on the show and you revealed to him that, on some level, you liked dating him because he was black.
Lena: It was thrilling and it added to her image of herself as a liberal woman who came to the city to have certain kinds of experiences.
Judd: I don’t know if I ever quite landed on what my official position was about making the show more multicultural. Some people say, Well, New York is multicultural but there are plenty of people who go to school and, if they’re Caucasian, they have mostly Caucasian friends. Whether that’s healthy or not, it’s not misrepresenting the world. But what’s really wrong with television is that African American show runners are not being encouraged to create shows. What some networks do is try to make themselves feel better by jamming some “diverse” characters into their shows.
Lena: What I always say—and it’s kind of my stock answer because I think it’s the true answer—is that I’m grateful that the conversation around diversity is happening, period. We’ve introduced characters of color, and we’ve done it in a time frame that makes sense to us. What was hard is when people were saying, “You’re racist and your family’s racist and look at you and your racist show.” Being assigned a label like that, especially when you consider yourself to be a liberal person, is distressing.
Judd: I didn’t expect Chinese filmmakers to represent the Jewish nerd experience on Long Island.
Lena: And you shouldn’t! But what’s interesting is that what people were also responding to—which is a real criticism and one I take seriously—is that, if you look at the show, it doesn’t look like the New York I know. So we’ve been more attentive to that, trying to look at each neighborhood and go, Okay, who lives here and what would it look like and what feels real?
Judd: So much of the conversation about diversity on TV should be about subscribers and advertisers. If the networks thought they could make more money creating shows with diverse casts they would do it in a second. They’ve clearly decided there’s not enough money it. Every once in a while they throw a bone to the idea of diversity, but it’s not a high priority.