Interview

VIDA: With plays, they start at the last possible moment, and that’s what I love about them. You just start with someone who walks into the room—something happens.

EGGERS: The real beauty of screenwriting is that it’s so skeletal. You know that there are going to be all these other collaborators who will fill it in for you. It’s like drawing the outlines of a coloring book and then handing it to a bunch of other people to fill in. I had seen actors on Where the Wild Things Are improve everything and improvise on top of what had been written to such a degree that I thought, Well, if we just put down what we know, just paint some of the funnier scenes that we’d heard about or experienced . . .

VIDA: I’d read in a pregnancy book that some men could tell when their women were pregnant just by the way they tasted during oral sex. I thought, That is perfect.

EGGERS: That’s how the movie opens—that’s right when my in-laws will walk into the theater . . . and out again.

ENGLANDER: I’m glad you could see the next question. I was thinking, Your family is going to see this! Have you ever written together before?

VIDA: We’d never written anything together. What was fun for me about it was the immediate feedback. Usually you have to write a chapter and show it to somebody to see if it makes sense, but when you’re working together you get that feedback right away. And the advantage of working with someone you live with is that they can be honest. We could just be candid and say, “No. Bad idea.”

EGGERS: Writing alone in a room should be fun—and every so often it is fun—but a lot of times it’s torturous.

VIDA: I don’t think it should be fun.

EGGERS: Well, you should enjoy the process of writing. And, so many of us, when we’re writing books, spend so much of that time thinking, I would much rather do anything than this. I’d swab the deck of a merchant-marine ship . . .

ENGLANDER: [laughs] I love that you got us to swabbing.

VIDA: At the end of a book, when I’m trying to finish, I think, I’m never doing this again—fully aware that I will.

ENGLANDER: Do you really have that feeling?

VIDA: Every time, I think, “Never again. This is it. It’s taken everything out of me. I’m never, ever going to do this again.”

EGGERS: For me, that’s how it is at mile 21, if you were to think of a book as a 26-mile thing. In the middle of everything, you’re breaking down and all of your organs are failing and you really just want to collapse into a bush. With the screenwriting, when it was the two of us together—we’d just have a blast the whole time and try to make each other laugh.

ENGLANDER: I declare that to be sweet.

EGGERS: And you think, Finally, it’s fun the whole way through. It was never not fun. And when we finished it, and it would still make us laugh when we read it, we thought, Okay, there’s something. When you wrote that fable for McSweeney’s, Nathan, Poor Little Egg-Boy Hatched in a Shul, it sounded like you were having fun.

ENGLANDER: Yeah, I had a good time.

EGGERS: We should all be writing screenplays and children’s books. I think we would have much happier lives.

ENGLANDER: For the small percentage of the population that won’t run out to see a film at the mention of oral sex, would you like to say anything else about what happens? About the couple you created?

EGGERS: We wanted to distance the couple as much as possible from ourselves. And so, even the stuff we went through that we thought was funny—there’s almost nothing in the film that we actually experienced ourselves. It ended up being a younger couple, a first kid. They’re unmarried, sort of living a grad-student life.