Interview with Nicole Holofcener
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Nicole Holofcener
New York-born writer and director of Walking and Talking, Lovely and Amazing, Friends with Money, Please Give, Enough Said and The Land of Steady Habits, and co-writer of Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Source: BAFTA Guru on YouTube
These answers are taken from Nicole Holofcener | BAFTA Screenwriters' Lecture Series on BAFTA Guru's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What was your very first experience with filmmaking?
I think my relationship with Woody Allen is completely overblown in so many publications. He was not my mentor, he was not a close friend. When I worked on Hannah and Her Sisters, I was an apprentice editor. I just synced the dailies, which us old people will know what that means. I interacted with him, and he was a family friend-ish, but I was inspired by him just like everybody else. It's not because I knew him. I just loved his movies, especially the older ones.
What drew you to a career as a filmmaker?
I love movies that are about the movie business. I love The Player, and Day for Night, which I have not seen in a really long time. But that made me want to make movies.
Mike Leigh, Albert Brooks, a lot of filmmakers who wrote really personal stuff. You could feel it was personal. All that inspired me. And seeing Sex, Lies, and Videotape when I was in film school really blew me away. I don't know if any of that stuff happened to Steven Soderbergh, but it was so normal and regular and slow and quiet, and it felt so real. Those kinds of movies inspired me too.
What do you enjoy most about making films?
When I'm reading something I've written and I'm laughing, or I think, "I'm clever, this was good." And having finished it is the most satisfying. It's so terrible how much it affects my self-esteem and my worldview. If I had a good writing day, I feel really good.
When I'm writing, I feel alive and valuable and grounded, and when I don't, I don't feel those things very much. Making movies helps me feel that life, in all of its f***ed-up beauty, is more than the sum of its parts.
And it's cool being able to direct your own writing. I can change it. I can do whatever I want to it.
What was a great moment for you as a filmmaker?
There's a scene in Enough Said that is basically about me taking my kids to school. I cried while I was directing that scene. Actually, a few people on the crew did as well. It was just so emotional watching her performance, and I kind of can't even watch it now. My kids have gone to school, but I'm still wrecked. Did it lessen the drama when I actually took my kids to college, because I shot this before? No, it did not. Unfortunately, movies are movies and life is life.
When it works, when I feel like I've written something that moves people, whether it's funny or sad, then it's absolutely worth the exposure.
What advice do you have for new filmmakers?
I don't want to give advice, except to say the cliche: follow your own voice. Because I don't really know anything else. I only know what's worked for me, and I didn't even know I had a voice until other people told me I did. I'm writing what I want to write about, and if you're doing the same and not trying to fit into somebody else's idea of what a good story is, your voice will appear. Or at least it should. And it doesn't have to be autobiographical for it to be your own.
No one should ever listen to anyone anyway. As William Goldman said, "Nobody knows anything," and it's absolutely true. There's no right or wrong way. There's only your own way.
Think about a demanding producer, actor or crew member. What made them difficult, and how did you work with them successfully?
Casting is really stressful. Some actors take forever, or I can't find what I want. The worst-case scenario is that the studio wants me to cast someone else and I don't want to cast somebody else, and I'll make a compromise. Like, okay, I'll offer it to that big star and that big star, but not that big star, and then they don't get back, or they're busy, or they want more money.
The Land of Steady Habits was at Fox Searchlight, and I developed it there, but we couldn't agree on a cast. I said, "I want Ben Mendelsohn." They were like, "He's a great actor, but we can't do that." So Netflix agreed to do it. When Netflix said I could cast anyone I wanted, I didn't care about the theater anymore. I want to make a movie I'm proud of, and I got to do that.
I don't want to put somebody in the movie just because they're famous. They have to be really right for it.
Has your filmmaking career progressed the way you expected?
My goal is, I want you to like all the characters in the end. I love these people, and they're highly flawed and they mess up big time, but I have compassion for them. It's probably why I have a small career.
Over the years, people have said to me that I should get out of my own head and life and write about things I don't know. "Why don't you mix it up? Challenge yourself. Write a thriller." And it makes me question myself, like I'm not a real writer unless I make everything up. But if it's so satisfying for me to write the way I do, why should I do it someone else's way? Yes, if I make bigger movies, then I'll have more money and better goody bags. I love goody bags, but I'd rather stick to what I'm doing.
How do you keep your cast and crew communicating well on set?
I'm open to changing things while we're shooting, and if someone says something terrific or funny, I'll take it. The way an actor will say it is different, and usually for the better, because I've cast people I really want. Sometimes it's exactly as I pictured and I'm thrilled. I generally try to keep it to what I've imagined.
When I direct in TV, I'm directing somebody else's material. The writers and producers are right behind me. So after every take, or at the end of a scene, I'll turn around and say, "Can I move on? Are you happy with that?" And if they say yes, then it's not my fault. Plus I get to meet new people, new actors I want to work with, and other crew members.
Who is your favorite filmmaker, and why?
I loved Woody Allen's movies, especially the older ones. Sorry, Woody. But they're still unbelievably hilarious and beautiful, those older ones. And many other directors, like Mike Leigh and Albert Brooks, filmmakers who wrote really personal stuff.
When I cast, usually I want to cast like Mike Leigh. I want bucktoothed people and the zits and whatever. The real thing. But I can't.
Describe your filmmaking style.
If you've seen my movies, you know they're all kind of personal. I write about my problems, my friends, my lovers, my fears, and of course, my mother. Because I write about myself, I feel exposed a lot of the time.
I would call it comedy-drama. It's great to get a laugh, but if I can move someone to tears, then I'm really happy. I can't help being funny. I write a sad scene and suddenly I've made some jokes, and sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. I guess I like to lighten things up. I hate melodrama.
I don't plot things out, so my scripts reveal themselves to me as I go along. In the beginning I tried to follow what I was told in school: the 30-page first act, the wants, the protagonist. Those are valid things, but if I plotted it out and put the cards up on the wall, I got bored. I like ambiguous endings. Anything that's taboo to talk about, like money or race or politics, is really fun to write and really fun to direct. I stick to the human details.
Tell me about a production that was hard to pull off. What was it and why was it challenging?
The Land of Steady Habits takes place in Westport, Connecticut, and I don't know from that. I'm Jewish. It's very WASPy, and men wear shorts with little whales on them. So I had a costume designer who did a bunch of research and showed me pictures, and every department really helped in that way. I really wanted the houses to look very different: Edie's house is warm, the family house with history, and his place is cold and sterile and new.
But I was also very limited in terms of exteriors, because we shot New York for Connecticut. We couldn't shoot in Connecticut, and it was freezing, so we didn't do that much. I'm thrilled when people say, "Oh, it really feels like Westport, Connecticut."
And it's much darker than my other movies in terms of what happens. I totally understand when people say they don't forgive him, or they couldn't get behind the character because he was so unlikable. I knew when I was making it, it was like that.
Where has your work been shown, and what was the biggest audience it reached?
I'd much prefer to have my movies in a movie theater. With The Land of Steady Habits on Netflix, it is a very strange experience. It's sort of like I made a movie and then it blew away. I don't see people watching it, and they have a very different model of press and long-lead advertising. Nobody knew this movie existed a week and a half before it was released. People said, "You made a new movie?" There's no trailer months in advance. They blast it all at once, two weeks before it's released, and then it goes away.
I might go that route again, because it let me make a movie I'm proud of. The landscape is good and bad. Obviously anybody can make a movie now, and that's great. It's not so elitist and hard to break into. But nobody's looking at each other, and the movie theaters are going away.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your filmography.
My mother adopted a baby Black boy when she was in her 50s, so he grew up in a family of white people, mostly women. I wondered what that was like for him, and it inspired me to write Lovely and Amazing. I turned my brother into a girl for a variety of reasons. He actually really loved the movie, but he was unhappy that I made him overweight.
I like to volunteer, and I've had many experiences doing it that turned out to be completely unhelpful and even detrimental. I once carried an old mentally ill woman's groceries to her apartment and gave her my number in case she ever needed anything. She left threatening messages on my answering machine for weeks, convinced I was trying to kill her. And once my mom and I went to a mental hospital on Rikers Island to sing Christmas carols to cheer up the patients. It was so sad I ended up in the stairwell sobbing. I wrote a scene in Please Give to make fun of my own useless and harmful attempts to be good.
In which area would you like to improve as a filmmaker?
It's always a struggle. I guess discipline. I feel bad when I'm not disciplined. I find myself pushing it off, and that makes me feel bad. So why don't I do it every day? I don't know. It's a conundrum.
Having raised kids, it's hard, and I will avoid writing in any way possible: the laundry and whatever. Now there's online shopping. My ideal thing, and I've done it from the start, is to get up early and write for a couple of solid hours. That's a good day for me. When I'm rewriting something, I can sit there a lot longer and time goes by faster. But writing an original is so depleting.
What are some of your professional goals for the future?
I've definitely been tempted to write about Hollywood, but I haven't come up with the story yet. I had an idea about a famous person's stand-in, or an assistant to a crazy actress, which would be really fun for about 20 pages, and then I don't know what's supposed to happen next.
I love a lot of famous people and I would love to work with them. Melissa McCarthy and I wanted to work together for a really long time. I love Emma Stone. And I sometimes want to work with other people, but I'll come back to Catherine and Julia, I hope.
Nicole Holofcener's Full Biography
Nicole Holofcener was born on 22 March 1960 in New York City, New York, USA. She is a director and writer, known for Enough Said (2013), Friends with Money (2006) and Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018). She was previously married to Benjamin Allanoff.