KISSING JESSICA STEIN
Q&A with Jennifer Westfeldt and
Heather Juergensen 		Search all of phase9.tv






Movie Interview by Kris Griffiths

PHASE9 attends a Q&A at London’s Screen on the Hill with the duo that wrote, produced and acted in KISSING JESSICA STEIN - Jennifer Westfeldt and Heather Juergensen.


What was the reaction to the film in the gay community?

JENNIFER WESTFELDT: Generally the reaction has been pretty good. We’ve had a lot of responses basically thanking us for making a film about gay people that actually has a lot of humour in it and doesn’t end up with the women dead, on heroin or in jail. Then there is a small but very vocal minority that voice their opinions over us raising some tricky issues, which we do raise, namely the gender and sexuality issues, but all we are trying to say is that we should be living in a world where whatever you feel about your sexuality you should be able to express it without a problem.

HEATHER JUERGENSEN: A few gay women have come up to us after screenings and said the ending was exactly right and did it all justice. We just really wanted to explore the complexities of your sexuality. Most of the response in the gay community has been positive while there are some who felt that certain political issues weren’t dealt with appropriately.

JENNIFER WESTFELDT: There are always people with strong opinions that are going to be disappointed, but ultimately the film is just a story about two individuals, flawed like the rest of us and with similar issues. We’ve heard a lot of unique and utterly different stories from lots of gay people. While on a press tour of America we met a reporter who told us she was a lesbian but had been married to a man for twenty-five years and was so miserable and everything. Likewise our story is just about two different and unique experiences.

How long did the whole thing take to shoot?

HEATHER JUERGENSEN: We shot it in only twenty-three days. It was a crazy shoot. It was actually a kind of silver lining for us after we’d had such a lengthy development in terms of writing and looking for money, because the one thing we never suffered from was our script.

JENNIFER WESTFELDT: It was weird when finishing a take so quickly for a scene, only one short take after three years of writing. Our takes would have been done a lot more differently than in your average Hollywood movies. When you have limited resources you have to tackle scenes in different ways and at certain points things were looking a little threadbare. We had to do our best to make sure that things stayed cheap somehow.

HEATHER JUERGENSEN: Most of the time spent on the film after writing it was actually the editing stage. We spent about six months editing it afterwards and even that was done quickly because we wanted to get the thing out to the world so quickly. Things are done a lot differently on a small budget.

Continued on page 2


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