Oscar-nominated writer-director Nicole Holofcener on why she cast Seinfeld star Julia Louis-Dreyfus in her new film about lies and love

Oscar-nominated filmmaker Nicole Holofcener talks about the pros and cons of little white lies in life, love and marriage.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Nicole Holofcener on the set of You Hurt My Feelings.

Little white lies. We all tell them: Think of the profuse thanks you offered for the battery-operated Christmas candles you were never going to use, or the time you told a child their excruciating flute solo was much better than it was.

In writer-director Nicole Holofcener’s latest film, You Hurt My Feelings, it’s that same social balm – the comforting white lie – that precipitates a crisis in the otherwise serene marriage of protagonist Beth, an author played by Seinfeld and Veep star Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Beth’s relationship with her husband Don, portrayed by The Crown and Game of Thrones alumnus Tobias Menzies, is shaken when she overhears him say he dislikes the novel she is working on. Over the course of “a million” drafts, Don – a psychologist quietly questioning his own professional prowess – has assured his wife he loves her work-in-progress.

“I am never going to be able to look him in the face again … He’s a liar,’’ fumes Beth.

In a Zoom interview, Holofcener says Beth’s rage “is totally justified’’, because her husband has lied to her for so long. The Los Angeles-based director and Oscar-nominated screenwriter admits: “It would be very difficult for me, at least, if my partner didn’t like my work … I often make the mistake of thinking my work is me, and that gets me into trouble.’’ She quips: “I’d walk around humiliated all the time if I knew he (any partner) thought I was a dumb dumb.”

Interestingly, Holofcener’s stepfather, Charles H. Joffe, was a mover and shaker in Hollywood and a producer of Woody Allen films including Annie Hall and Manhattan. Joffe once wondered aloud, after seeing a student film by Holofcener, whether she should switch careers. Now an internationally-respected screenwriter and director, she recalls how Joffe’s brutal honesty “was deflating. I made a bad movie and by the time he said that, I think I knew it was pretty bad. But I didn’t listen to him, I kept going.”

Joffe soon changed his tune – she points out he paid her fees to study film at New York and Columbia universities. Her stepfather ended up a fan of her movies, which include closely-observed comic dramas that excavate the subtleties and tensions of intimate relationships and female friendship.

You Hurt My Feelings sits comfortably within that genre. A comedy of modern manners set in New York, it reinforces just how common white lies are, despite Beth’s distress at her husband’s dishonesty. Her sister Sarah (Michaela Watkins) tells her husband, Mark (played by Succession’s Arian Moayed), he is a wonderful actor, even when she thinks he has performed poorly. Holofcener agrees such lies have a place “as long as people are good at it. It certainly avoids confrontation. I pride myself in thinking I know when they’re lying.’’

However, her film suggests a childrearing style of the modern era – relentlessly supportive parenting – can be damaging, as it shields children from their own limitations. Beth and Don’s only child, Eliot (Owen Teague), an aspiring playwright who works in a marijuana shop, tells his mother “you set me up to fail” by falsely insisting throughout his childhood he was brilliant at everything he did.

Holofcener is a mother of adult twins, and she tells Review one of her sons reckons she was at times guilty of being too supportive. “I love ’em to death; what am I gonna do?’’ she exclaims warmly. The filmmaker also reflects how “I had some of that (boosterism) from my mother” who could also be highly critical.

She worked with Louis-Dreyfus on the 2013 rom-com Enough Said, which also featured The Sopranos star James Gandolfini. In that film, Louis-Dreyfus – who rose to international prominence as Seinfeld’s perpetually perky singleton, Elaine – played a divorcee who fell for Gandolfini’s character – but allowed his ex to undermine their romance. “She’s like a human trip advisor,’’ she said in one of the film’s most memorable lines.

Tragically, The Sopranos star died suddenly before Enough Said was released, and Holofcener says of working with him: “It was great. He was a three-dimensional human being and not always game.’’ As if channelling his mob boss alter ego, she says he was “hesitant” at times about scenes that, in his view, made him sound “like a bitch in the kitchen … such a Tony Soprano thing to say, and I would have to reassure him”. She says he was “very self-effacing” and, poignantly, felt he wasn’t sexy enough to be a leading man.

Ultimately, the filmmaker says Gandolfini “was an enormous pleasure to work with” and his death was “absolutely a big loss’’ for the acting profession. “It was shocking; devastating. I couldn’t believe it,’’ she says, as she had seen him only a fortnight before he died.

Holofcener wrote You Hurt My Feelings with Louis-Dreyfus in mind. “After Enough Said, I found Julia becoming somewhat of a muse for me,” she explains. “ … I also knew she could evoke all the subtlety of Beth’s self-searching, as well as play the more comedic side the way only she can. In my writing, there’s never drama without some comedy, and vice versa, and that’s also true of Julia’s approach.’’

Julia Louis-Dreyfus, left, and Michaela Watkins in You Hurt My Feelings

In the film’s press notes, Louis-Dreyfus returns the compliment, explaining that Holofcener’s “microscopic view of human behaviour is such a delicious experience for an actor’’. An 11-time Emmy Award winner, Louis-Dreyfus says she identified with the sudden unravelling of Beth’s happiness. “I’ve been married for 870 years,” she jokes. “I got married young and I’ve stayed married to the same really good man, so I identify with the comfort of Beth and Don’s relationship … But that comfort only makes Don’s breach of trust more gutting for Beth.”

As for that playground lament of a title – You Hurt My Feelings – Holofcener says “it was a joke at first”. She mocked it even as she ran it past her team. “Wouldn’t it be pathetic?” she chortled. However, they liked it, so it stuck.

Since launching her breakout film, Walking and Talking, in 1996, Holofcener, 63, has written and directed seven films, and directed top-rating television shows including Sex and the City and Gilmore Girls. In 2018, she wrote and directed the Netflix comedy-drama, The Land of Steady Habits, starring Australia’s Ben Mendelsohn and she directed an episode of the just-released futuristic climate change drama, Extrapolations, for Apple TV+. When asked whether she prefers directing or creating original films, she says without hesitation: “Oh, my own thing, of course.’’

In 2018, she was jointly nominated for an adapted screenplay Oscar for Can You Ever Forgive Me? a film about a struggling author (Melissa McCarthy) who forges and sells letters by dead writers. Oddly enough, the movie that made her an Academy Award nominee was beset by crisis: she was originally slated to direct and write it, but she and the original star, Julianne Moore, departed from the production due to their creative differences. Holofcener told US journalists this experience was “traumatic” and “terrible”, although she gave the subsequent director, Marielle Heller, her blessing.

Actor Jennifer Aniston in a scene from the film Friends with Money.

She collaborated with Hollywood heavy hitters – director Ridley Scott and superstars Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Jodie Comer – on 2021’s The Last Duel, a medieval sword fight saga set in France. This high-profile project was “completely out of my wheelhouse’’ but she enjoyed the challenge of crafting a period script. She wrote Comer’s part, although little was known about her character, the real-life Marguerite de Carrouges, whose claim she had been raped led to the titular duel. “I loved writing her, giving her a voice and standing up for her,’’ Holofcener says. “Watching Ridley Scott, I was in awe of battle scenes and the violence and the choreography.’’ She jokes that because relatively few people saw the big-budget movie – released during the pandemic – “I didn’t get rich, like I thought I would.”

In contrast to The Last Duel, her feature films often have an intimate quality. She wrote and directed 2006’s Friends with Money, which starred Jennifer Aniston and Frances McDormand and depicted Aniston as a house cleaner whose closest pals are wealthy – but not necessarily happy.

The Hollywood writers’ strike continues to make headlines as screenwriters push for better pay and the filmmaker says she is “very sympathetic to the writers’ demands. It seems absurd that we have to strike … It seems a very logical progression to compensate writers commensurate with the times and what the big streaming services and networks and studios are making.’’

Holofcener doesn’t claim to have answers to the questions raised in her movies, which are “really a bunch of smaller ‘oh my God’ moments that often make up our lives’’.

Louis-Dreyfus agrees that “part of what makes Nicole’s work so special is that she allows all her characters to be so very, very human. She’s real about the fact that we can’t help but struggle with all these endless tiny, narcissistic dilemmas, even while her films are acutely aware of the larger stakes we face in the world. That honesty is refreshing.”

You Hurt My Feelings is in cinemas on June 15.