In Tiny Furniture, New York-native writer-director Lean Dunham, a 2008 Oberlin grad and YouTube video artist whose mother is the photographer Laurie Simmons, plays New York-native Aura, a recent Oberlin grad and YouTube video artist whose mother is a photographer (played by Laurie Simmons). Aura’s growing pains are witty (on the strength of the film Dunham is currently working on an HBO pilot with producer Judd Apatow), and so demographically acute that some have mistaken the film as merely “relatable,” when a better word would be “resonant.”
After initially taking the title of the movie more or less for granted I started thinking that Tiny Furniture is interesting and telling—the reference to your (and Aura’s) mother’s distinctive photography perhaps suggests that this is a movie that’s specifically about a young woman struggling to find her artistic voice, at least as much as it’s about more general millennial quarterlife angst or somesuch. Or perhaps the artistic and personal aren’t even that separate from one another?
That’s an aspect of the film that doesn’t get very much play but is very present. Aura knows she wants to be a creator (for lack of a better word) but isn’t yet sure what to create. Her search may superficially be for a boyfriend or for a job, but actual satisfaction will only come with making something that does more than garner a few embarrassing Youtube comments.
Somewhat pursuant to the above, the cinematography, which is widescreen and compositionally assured, seems a statement that you the filmmaker have a better handle than Aura does on how to transmute experience into art—what kind of ideas did you have going in about how the film would look?
I had a few images that I’d carried with me since the outlining phase, but I was mostly just excited to collaborate with Jody Lee Lipes, whose work as a filmmaker and DP had really captured my fancy at SXSW 2009. Jody has a very subtle but somewhat subversive style—he’s rather coverage-averse (or maybe a better word is sparing) which I love because it leaves a lot of room for performance, for natural hiccups and pauses, something that you rarely see in comedies. He introduced the widescreen concept, and also encouraged a lighting approach that really mimicked the feeling of being in the space where we shot, rather than turning life punchy colors. I also knew I wanted the film’s look to have some kind of relationship to the work my real/movie mother makes, which Jody understood immediately and almost wordlessly.
In a piece you wrote on web video series for The L’s website in 2008 (I was just looking back at it, it still seems pretty salient), you observed the freedom implicit in creating for a smaller audience, while also noting that “the fact that so many web shows center on socially awkward, web-dependent hipsters is just evidence that content creators are keenly aware of their core audience.” Does Tiny Furniture also have a core audience that you’re aware of?
I’ve been really pleasantly surprised by the wide range of people who have responded positively. I expected it to fall squarely into the “women’s interest” zone or maybe just the “women-my-age-with-similar-issues-interest” zone. But the intergenerational relationships have resonated with sort of a motley crew.
Are there any unique logistical challenges when directing oneself in a sex scene?
Jody had to be frank and tell me that a blow job I simulated looked junky. I have always relied on the kindness of strangers.