Nicole Holofcener calls the state of indie filmmaking "obscene"

Last week, we wrote about how Nicole Holofcener—the director behind small-time gems such as You Hurt My Feelings and Enough Said—was the only filmmaker to ever crack the code on Julia Louis-Dreyfus movies. But in the current indie landscape, even a wizard such as her can barely get funding to continue making the work she actually wants to make. At this point, this state of affairs isn’t surprising. Still, that doesn’t mean actually thinking about the art and culture we could have had if the system wasn’t so messed up has gotten any easier.

“Independent movies when I was coming up in the ’90s were really exciting and open, and studios were willing to take chances on me—weirdos. I was at Sundance with Todd Solondz and Quentin Tarantino,” Holofcener said during a Q&A at the Czech Republic’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, which honored her with a career retrospective this week (via The Hollywood Reporter). “Everyone was starting out at the same time, and now, I think, everybody’s running scared. And there are generally six actors that will get you the financing you want.”

While she didn’t elaborate on who these six actors actually are, the whole thing is clearly a sore spot. “Right now, it’s really hard to get movies seen… And then when they end up on streaming platforms, there are too many little pictures. You don’t know what you’re going to watch or why,” she explained, later lamenting the fact that “so many theaters in New York where my movies used to play are gone.” These shuttered arthouses might have helped You Hurt My Feelings, which she says “didn’t make any money, which I don’t understand.” “Maybe someone’s getting rich. But that’s really disappointing,” she elaborated. “Of course, I want to make money from what I love doing the most.”

“Really, I make money from directing television and doing writing jobs, like adapting books or rewriting something,” the director, who has also penned screenplays for films such as The Last Duel and Can You Ever Forgive Me?, explained. “Three weeks of writing on a Marvel movie paid more money than making three films. It’s obscene!”

While that state of affairs is objectively devastating, Holofcener was at least able to get her deserved paycheck and work in a few shots at the mega-corp. Working on a Marvel tentpole was “fun because I get hired to make female characters better… because men don’t understand women or whatever,” she said. “So on Black Widow, I worked on Scarlett Johansson’s character and Florence Pugh’s character, just making them more human, giving them a little more depth. And it’s not hard, especially when they’re written just like cardboard characters.”

As if this wasn’t bleak enough, the director also suggested that characters—and the entities writing them—could get even less human in the future. “I don’t think they’re hiring robots to write scripts yet… I think they will. It will happen,” she said, referring to the aftermath of the WGA’s strike-ending deal. “From what I understand in terms of the deals that we made, it’s good for writers to have more jobs, but at the same time, some of it doesn’t make sense. So it’s a mess. A lot of television writers that I know are struggling, really struggling to make enough money and to get work.” But hey, at least when the robots do take over, there will be so many more cardboard women to completely rewrite from the ground up. Hooray?