Lemondrop

Is there a time simultaneously more terrifying and exhilarating than those first few months after college? The infinite possibilities are enough to make your head spin, but sometimes all you want to do is run home and regroup before facing the world.

Filmmaker Lena Dunham has captured that angst in her critically acclaimed film "Tiny Furniture," which the 24-year-old wrote, directed and starred in. Oh, it also won the Best Narrative Feature award at SXSW this year. And now she's been profiled in The New Yorker.

"Tiny Furniture" follows Aura (Dunham) as she moves back in with her mom and sister (played, respectively, by Dunham's real-life mom, Laurie Simmons, and her sister, Grace Dunham) and tries to navigate this new chapter in her life.

We talked to Dunham about what it was like to direct her mom, move apart from her best college friends, and shoot a whole bunch of scenes in her underwear.

Lemondrop: How did the idea for "Tiny Furniture" come about?
Lena Dunham: My starting point for anything I do is always going to be pretty personal. I was in my first year out of college and looking at my experiences and the experiences of girls that I knew and was trying to tell a story of that -- an honest depiction of that floaty, period of life.

One thing we noticed about the film was that it had all kinds of female friendships. There's the underminer, the college friend you might outgrow, and the "blast from the past" you go back to because she's comfortable.
None of them were a specific person that I knew, but all of [the relationships are] a specific female dynamic that I noticed playing out all the time in which women are very supportive of each other, but are also complete underminers. I was thinking about the way that girl friendships can be so deep and intense in college that when you separate, it's almost like a breakup. The intensity of that is also really specific, and that was a jumping off point for me.

For me, that movie is mainly about female relationships. There are some male relationships in there, but that's not what the film is about.

What were some of the biggest challenges of directing your mom and your sister?
I wish I could say that there were more challenges, but they're both such total dreams. I mean, my little sister is my favorite human on the planet, and I think my biggest challenge was scheduling.

My mom has a busy career [Ed. note: She's an artist] and my sister's a busy student, so it's not like they stopped their lives to do a movie. Once we were doing it, it was always a pleasure; it was just a matter of getting ourselves all in the same place and making it all possible.

Was it really odd filming in your own house?
You know, it wasn't odd when we were doing it, but then I definitely had some surreal moments where I'd be asleep in my bed and convinced that someone was holding a boom pole over my head. The line got a little bit blurry sometimes. I would hit snooze on my alarm clock and think, "I'm just going to do another take of sleeping!"

One thing about this movie that we love is that it's so fearless. You spend a lot of time on camera without pants!
I do! There's a lot of pants-free action. It was kind of an accident. I do it in one scene, and then we decided continuity-wise to do another and it just went from there. It's funny, some people reacted like it was a brave move, and a there are a lot of things I've done and thought, Oh, that was brave, but the pants-free move wasn't one that freaked me out so much.

So much of your work is autobiographical. Would you ever want to make a feature that's purely invented?
Yeah, I think I will. I mean, I don't really know how to write in a way that isn't personal, but even when I'm telling a story that isn't my own, I still employ that way of thinking. To me, the stories that are close to home and the ones that are far away from home all come from the same place. There's not as much of a distinction. I think I'll move back and forth between telling stories that are mine and telling stories that aren't but always working from my own perspective.

Do you have any fear that because "Tiny Furniture" is getting so much buzz that people will mistake you for Aura?
I mean, yeah, I try in both my personal and professional lives to differentiate. She's definitely a part of me and is a character I love and a character that aggravates. I feel about her almost the way you would feel about a pesky little sister. But I think that it's an interesting thing to deal with -- to write a character who's close to you but isn't you and to try to navigate that ambiguity.

Is it difficult to have this much success so early?
You know, it's been a really amazing year because really this movie is the thing that pulled me out of that post-collegiate phase that the movie is about. I don't really think about it in terms of success or pressure, but more the fact that this gives me the chance to do what I love all the time. That's an amazing gift and also a responsibility I take really seriously.

I don't focus on the praise, which I appreciate and love that anyone likes the movie, and I just keep my eye on the prize, the prize being making more work and getting to express myself this way. There's definitely stuff to navigate when you're a young person doing a job like this, but I also just feel super lucky.

Are you still living at home?
Totally! I'm still there. I haven't gone anywhere. You know, moving requires a certain amount of time and attention that I haven't been able to give. There's also something really wonderful about having your family right there should you need them.

I'm sure that at a certain point -- I'll be 25 in May -- I should get a move on, but at the same time, it's such a lovely gift to have my family so close to me. So for now, it's working. There are two things I need to do: learn to drive and move out.

Do you have any advice for college graduates?
It's so funny whenever anyone asks me that question because my own path to this was so unorthodox. What I did was I got a job that had nothing to do with what I wanted to do so that I would have the emotional time and space to work on my own stuff, and that worked really well for me.

I think the biggest thing is just to understand what a transitional time it is and to revel in it. I'm still doing that because I know it will soon be over. Much of the things that make your 20s so painful are the things that make it the most exhilarating, quickly changing, shifting time of your entire existence.