Kissing Jessica Stein is a laugh out loud, romantic comedy that touches on the frustrations faced in the persuit of true love, confused sexual identity and the opinions of family and friends thrown in for good measure. Kissing Jessica Stein is the brainchild of first-time writers/producers Jennifer Westfeldt and Heather Juergensen. Tiffany interviewed Jennifer and Heather shortly after the film’s original theatrical release:Tiffany N. D’Emidio: Why don’t you start by telling me about what went into making this movie.

Heather: Well, Jennifer and I met at a theater workshop sponsored by Ensemble Studio Theater which is an off Broadway house in New York and every summer they have this lab up in the Catskills where writers, directors and actors kind of converge for a week and work out their craft. We noticed that we were kind of writing a similar theme namely dating hell and men and women and the disconnect and all that stuff and Jennifer had to fly back to LA to shoot a TV show that she was on at the time…

Jennifer: Suddenly my shooting got pushed back two months and it was really miserable in LA and I missed New York and I missed the theater and I just decided that I was going to spend those two months in New York and I called Heather kind of out of the blue.

HJ: I was actually delighted when she called because I thought she was the most talented person there. She was the best one.

JW: Aww! I was so excited she was free. I was like AWESOME! You know. So we basically started writing and before we knew it the scene night morphed into this play. We were only scratching the surface and excited about it and all of this debate would ensue after every performance and all of these women would sort of download their experiences to us that were similar to what we were exploring in the piece.

HJ: There was definitely a buzz somehow in this piece or with the audience. People left chatting. It seemed like the subject matter was intriguing to people and that what we were dealing with was exciting, people not only I think left debating the issues they also left saying “yeah, yeah I did that once” and friends would be like “you did?” It brought up; I think, in people the desire to share, at least with us, the stories.

JW: Yeah and I went back to LA and within a day my agents called and said “like 20 studios have called me about your play” like all of these people want to option it and make it into a film.

So Heather came out to stay with me in Los Angeles and we started taking meetings with a whole host of people a lot of people interested in it even though they hadn’t seen it they just heard about it. We just thought that was ridiculous we really need to write a screenplay before we make a deal with anyone. So we did that on my Christmas break.

We were just sort of learning the language of film because the dialogue came so easy to us as actors. We had a million scenes we wanted to write but that wasn’t ever the problem. It was just how do you make it visual, how do you make the characters more different, how do you put it into shorter scenelets rather than the long way we might have at the outset.

A studio bought it with us attached to star very soon after we wrote the first draft which was at that point I think it was February/March ‘98 and then we started developing the script with them for almost two years. Hired a director there and at the end of that time had written kind of every which way you can imagine and kind of realized that they sort of wanted to make a different film than what we wanted to make.

HJ: So when the option ran out and we able to take it back and turn it around…when I say able it’s more of a theoretical construct when you’re dealing with the studio. They’re not always so generous it was actually quit a legal tangle for a while for us to negotiate that and you know eventually we did and we still owe them money, that should be pointed out but hopefully if the film does even a little bit at the box office that might tidy itself up.

But yeah, it was definitely the kind of thing that we needed to act on our own timetable. Hollywood, especially Hollywood studios works in dog years when it comes to making films. It’s like a year, what? That’s how long it takes to set up a lunch and hire a director. And then the next year we’re going to fix the script and then the next three years will be about casting and it’s just crazy.

JW: We were like we’re going to be the Golden Girls doing Kissing Jessica Stein by the time they want to make it you know.

HJ: And in fact from the point of getting it back in turn around to having the film in the can was like nine months because we just went fast and furious and we just…We were just diligent that year in asking people and attracting investors and we greenlit ourselves by the skin of our teeth, but we managed to start rolling film. Then once we had something in the can and we were able to show people cut scenes or little trailers then we got the rest of the money to finish because we didn’t have enough at that point to even finish post production.

TND: Once you were able to get the movie back were there changes made that were taken out previously which you really felt passionately about?

HJ: I think the big difference was we were with a great director and great executives at the studio so a lot of what they taught us and asked us to do was really instructive and we became much better writers when we were there. But I guess in tandem with that when you have a lot of opinions being listened to and you kind of have to listen to them, we would often say “well that, what they say there is actually very smart” and “we can do it this way and it will be interesting”.

Other things we were like that will never work but we’d have to write it anyway and then show it to them and they would be like yeah maybe that’s not it. But I think ultimately the big difference in terms of what they might have wanted or what we wanted was that the studio probably wanted more of a mainstream Hollywood film maybe like an “In and Out” or something like that. And the director we were working with wanted it to be a pure art house movie with none of the like broadly comic things we still have in the movie.

We kind of thought can’t you have both, can’t you have some mainstream comedy and attract a wide audience but also have it be quirkier and more off beat than most Hollywood comedies. Obviously we weren’t stars. That’s already pretty quirky for a romantic comedy. They said that would never work, you’ll lose both audiences and gain neither. And we thought hey, why can’t you get them both, why can’t good just be good if you make a good movie people will come even if you’re nobodies. We kept sort of kept saying “look at The Blair Witch Project”, “look at The Full Monty”. We would use these examples of movies with no stars in it that made money because they were interesting to the public for one reason or another. So when we were our own bosses we could say “that will work” or “that won’t work”.

JW: I guess we felt like we were pretty discerning people and if it holds our interests or whatever or there must be other people who might think so too. We developed a little community of people. You know the other thing is we never stopped listening to audiences. We always had reading of this as a screenplay, as a play every step of the way. As we were screening it while we were looking for the right cut in the editing room 18 hours a day we would still have screenings once a week and get opinions and do questionnaires. We never stopped doing that. Now it remains to be seen whether people actually pay money to see it, I don’t know. That’s a whole other hurdle to leap.

TND: You’ve got a big fan right here so…do you think you’ll do it again?

HJ: I don’t know. Do you mean producing and all that?

TND: Yes.

HJ: Maybe, I mean, it depends if the right project comes along.

JW: I think we both are like ready to be hired as actresses. [laughter] I just hope that if we did do something grassroots again that the money would already be there because that’s the part that’s corruptive. That’s the part that makes hateful times and people short with one another and sometimes I think what would it have been like if we had the money from the start because then it would have been more purely creative.

You know, we would leave 18 hour shoot days just to go meet some investment bankers and try and look cute so we could possibly get a share for the movie or hold screenings with like bad sound so maybe we could finish the editing. That was the part that felt humiliating as opposed to the rest of it, which was a little like David and Goliath, but it wasn’t, it didn’t feel like oh this is pathetic. You know what I mean?