Q&A with Diablo Cody

T&A and soft-core freaks people out way more than violence does.
It’s true. Which is upsetting. I never understood that. Like when I was a kid, I was never really sheltered from violence, but god forbid, if one tit appeared on screen my father would literally get up and turn off the television.

Right.
So that’s always been absurd to me, but I have a feeling my parents fancy themselves libertines these days now that they have the notorious ex-stripper daughter.

Back to this comedy cycle that we’re in right now. It’s a very teenage boy sensibility, but now they have a girl that can do it. But you wrote something on your blog, where you were on a panel on “females in film” . . .
Oh, that was mortifying. That was in Telluride. None of the women who had been selected to the panel were real cheerful about that. But to paraphrase one of the participants—and this is such a terrible thing that you may not want to print this, but I’ll tell you this—one of the women on the panel whispered to me, “This is like the Special Olympics.” Cause it kinda felt like that. It felt like, (English maid’s voice) “And here are the ladies in film.” And the title of the panel was really insulting, “Is There a Woman Behind Every Good Film?” Like we were the suffering wives of cinema. I mean there were people up there that I really respect like Tamara Jenkins and Jennifer Jason Leigh, and we’re all just sitting there, like, OK?

There’s no tokenism with Jennifer Jason Leigh.
Yeah, it was strange. And Jennifer Jason Leigh said, “I don’t understand why in 2007 we’re still having panels like this at film festivals.” But honestly, I don’t get asked to participate in the female-centric Hollywood events, just because I’m kind of thought of, as I don’t know, I think I swing my dick around too much, so to speak. I’m not really thought of as traditionally feminine in a lot of ways, so I don’t really get invited to, you know, a luncheon where everybody is sitting around wearing pearls and drinking mimosas.

At the same time, you wrote a teenage pregnancy movie. And my sister, who’s a single mom living in Maplewood, underlined meaningful passages in Candy Girl. How do you feel about being an inappropriate role model?
You know, I like it. I’ve always been such an avoidant person, and kind of a misanthrope; I never ever thought that I would be in a position where people would be reaching out to me, or that I could like make them happy. And so the response that people have given me to the book or to Juno, it’s like, I don’t even know what to do. If somebody comes up to hug me because they love the film, it’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced. It’s so out of my realm of experience, it’s strange.

You were a television critic for City Pages. You were good at it.
Well, I appreciate that. I never really felt like a true critic. I was more just a cynic sitting on a couch.