Interview

EGGERS: It’s very natural. Your hair is working, even with the product. But the sweater’s not so good. You have to be at least 70 to be wearing a sweater with a zipper.

ENGLANDER: I have replaced all my sweaters with zippy-sweaters. I just love them. You can move the zipper and it’s almost a new look—

VIDA: Lower it an inch, and it’s a new sweater.

ENGLANDER: Sometimes jealousy does manifest as teasing. Anyway, get used to it. I’ll be wearing this sweater for the next 10 years. It used to be important in high school to have a different outfit every day. Now, I decide a pair of jeans are my favorite, and wear them until they fall off.

EGGERS: Vendela does the same thing.

VIDA: It’s because I went to an all-girls school where I wore a uniform every day for nine years. I’d wear the same uniform all week, and then my mom would wash it, and I’d wear it the next week, and—

ENGLANDER: Did you have an outfit to wear while it was in the wash?

VIDA: A nightgown.

ENGLANDER: [laughs] A nightgown? Really, that was your stand-in?

EGGERS: I’ve turned into one of those people—it’ll be five o’clock and I’ll realize I’m wearing the same clothes that I slept in.

ENGLANDER: So, let’s get to the movie. I kind of remember you saying you wrote this movie while you were in labor with your daughter.

VIDA: More during pregnancy.

ENGLANDER: That’s funny. I always thought you wrote it in the hospital, in, like, eight hours.

EGGERS: No!

ENGLANDER: Because I always think everyone else can do stuff like that.

EGGERS: Everyone else can. But we didn’t.

ENGLANDER: What was the genesis of the film?

EGGERS: We were at home together a lot during the first pregnancy.

VIDA: We stopped being able to travel after a certain amount of time, and we were home kind of waiting for this event to happen. Even if it’s five months away, you’re still waiting.

ENGLANDER: Do you not usually both write in the house during the day?

EGGERS: We’ve had all kinds of different routines, and this happened to be a period when we were in the same space. And we were just laughing about so many aspects of the pregnancy that we’d never been warned about—a lot of disgusting things and a lot of comical things. And we started taking notes. At the time, I was still working with Spike Jonze on the screenplay of Where the Wild Things Are.

ENGLANDER: Is Where the Wild Things Are the first script you worked on?

EGGERS: Yeah. I had no experience at all, and, even during that process, it’s not like Spike and I used a guidebook or anything. It was really organic.

ENGLANDER: He just asked you to write it?

EGGERS: We’d been friends for a couple years.

ENGLANDER: From when you were a skateboarder.

EGGERS: From when I was deep in the skate scene and doing a lot of ollies and handplants and inventing lots of other names for my maneuvers.

ENGLANDER: That’s why we’re in a parking lot.

EGGERS: This is one of my old skate haunts, yeah.

VIDA: You don’t skateboard.

EGGERS: No, but I’ve picked up some of the lingo. But it’s not like I had learned much about screenwriting that was applicable. Because, again, Spike and I were sort of making it up as we went along. Vendela had a little playwriting experience.