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Looking at all the facts in front of me, I am surprised to find that I don’t hate Lena Dunham, the 24-year-old whose movie, Tiny Furniture, won the Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature at South By Southwest this year and was just picked up for distribution by IFC. Or maybe hate isn’t the right word: I’m shocked that I don’t even envy the insanely talented writer/director/and star of two feature films (Furniture and Creative NonFiction), two popular web series (Nerve’s Tight Shots and Delusional Downtown Divas), and countless shorts, despite the fact that we went to college together, she’s younger than me, has famous artists as parents, and is infinitely more successful than I could ever hope to become. It’s impossible to dislike Lena, because she’s a goddamn inspiration. Not just to young writers and filmmakers, but to every woman out there who wanted to write comedy but thought “Yeah…but chicks just aren’t that funny.”
Tiny Furniture Trailer from Lena Dunham on Vimeo.
I caught up with Lena after reading the New York Times article about Tiny Furniture...btw, not the first time the Times has done a profile on her, but at least now she’s out of college. She had to be the youngest person to ever write, direct, and star in a film picked up for major distribution, right? Not according to her. “I don’t think so,” Lena told me on the phone in a cab, which she now calls her personal office, “There was a 21-year old French boy who wrote, directed, and starred in this movie called I Killed My Mother that was at Cannes last year. He was like 18 or something when he made it, this very beautiful little gay boy who made this very accomplished movie. He had much more of a theatrical release than I’m going to have.” (Oh yeah, she’s modest too…something you wouldn’t expect from a chick who had just finished a commission of Divas for the Guggenheim, including hosting its 1st Annual Art Awards Ceremony, and whose interview with Sarah Silverman is currently on the cover of Paper Magazine).
So what’s her backstory? Tiny Furniture, which gets its New York release at BAMcinemaFEST on June 11th, is a 3/4ths-autobiographical film about a girl named Aura, coming to live with her parents post-college after her boyfriend breaks up with her at Burning Man. Her mother, artist Laurie Simmons, plays her mother, an accomplished artist. Her sister, Grace Dunham, plays her accomplished artist sister. Despite being one of the most prolific, hardworking people in show business, all of Dunham’s films and shows have her cast as the shlubby girl, surrounded by those more successful at life and love than herself. Seriously, that takes balls. You can say what you want about Judd Apatow and Jody Hill‘s crew and turning guys like Seth Rogen into sex symbols: you never see those guys stand in front of the camera and take the place of their goofy avatars. To do so as a chick is not only ballsy as hell, it’s unheard of. What 20-something wants to make themselves look like the loser on a national stage and then populate her cast with friends and family? It hits so close to home its basically Greenberg for young chicks.
