When Jenny Met Gillian, 'Obvious Child' Was Born

32-year-old Jenny Slate was born in Milton, Massachusetts, so her recent stop in Boston during the press tour for "Obvious Child", a film which finds her in a starring role for the first time, doubled as a homecoming. She was joined by Gillian Robespierre, the director and co-writer of the film, which was spawned from a 23-minute-long short film of the same title that the two made a few years back.

Finding a lot of success with it on the festival circuit, the two inevitably decided to expand their story of an aspiring comedienne. Slate plays Donna Stern, a twenty-something stand-up who works topics as intimately personal as her sex life, and as dirty as the discharge on her day-old underwear into her standup act. A drunken one-night stand finds Stern pregnant with few means of taking care of herself, leading to the unfair label this comic movie has attracted: "the abortion comedy," a description that both Slate and Robespierre rightly reject.

"We made the short in the winter of 2009," says Robespierre. "We shot it for 4 days in Brooklyn, and we didn't have any money, and the boots that Jenny was wearing had holes in them, because we were using our own wardrobe. When I had a 30-minute rough cut, it just felt like it could be a feature. But, we didn't have a script for a feature. We didn't have anything except this short, so we put it out there. And it did really well, and the dialogue -- the sort of chatter on the Internet -- encouraged me to sit down, and turn this into a feature.

"And, four-and-a-half years later," she remarks, "we're in Boston with you! I wrote the feature 100 percent for Jenny," she continues, obviously proud of her star, "and I think it was just an organic way that we turned the short into the feature."

Like camp

"We only had 18 days to shoot this movie," says Slate, who has a cute way of ending every sentence as if she's asking a question. "That's not a long time, and I think we were a small bunch, but we all wanted to be there, a lot of us, for really personal reasons -- a lot of us were doing things we hadn't done before -- and we were with people who cared, so it sort of double-mattered -- to me, at least -- that I did a good job. Not just for myself, but to show everyone else who cared just as much, that I cared just as much, too.

"It felt a lot like camp, I guess. I went to camp for eight summers," the actress remembers, "and apart from that, this was probably the best experience of my life, making this movie," she says, adding "Yeah!" as her own form of punctuation.

Did growing up in the Boston area influence Slate's comedy, or her performance in the movie?

"My childhood in Milton influenced everything about me," Slate explains. "And most of my standup is about my childhood and -- I don't know -- what you would call my formative years, I guess, and how they have affected me and made my personality into my adult personality, which is just a... big version of my child personality? Thank God? I think my family's really smart and open-minded, and liberal," she continues, pointing out that her grandmother has 'keep abortion legal' stickers in her kitchen.

"I think I've always thought of human rights and personal rights as something that should just be a given, and didn't really think about it until I was old enough to realize that some people don't have what other people have. Like, my best friend," she says, talking about her gay co-star, Gabe Liedman. "If he falls in love, he couldn't get married wherever he wants to," she pointed out with frustration.

Very funny

Still, "the number one reason that I wanted to do this movie is because it was very funny, and because I play people who are funny on TV a lot, but a lot of them are not very emotionally complex? And a lot of them don't show vulnerability, because there just isn't a place for it in those projects. And I wanted to do both. But, the message, also, is really, really important to me," she concludes, adding, "I'm really proud, really, really proud of it."

The standup comedy scenes are a big part of the film; were they a part of the script, or were they improvised?

"Um... yeah," says Robespierre. "I wrote standup for Jenny and for Gabe, who are both professional standups, and they were very sweet and kind, and they giggled at it, and they said, 'this is good -- but this isn't standup comedy.' So we workshopped for a day with a grant we won -- we were flown out to San Francisco -- and we worked really hard on the comedy. A lot of jokes were born that day," she continues. "We went back home to Brooklyn, and cobbled together a comedy set, and it was way too long, and when it came to shooting, we shot that day with two cameras, because we shot at 5 in the morning, and I wanted the comedy to be as natural and organic as possible. "So," she says, "we shot with two cameras, and Jenny knew the points that she had to make during each bit, and really created the set from what was on the page, and what was in her brain, and took what was on the page and made it a trillion times better."

Written for Jenny

Adds Slate: "And then Gil would yell to me, 'Go back to the discharge!' So, we were just kind of circling through it with each other, which is really the way that I prepare to do my own standup. I have, like, a notebook," she says, "and I usually just write a list -- and I write it, and write it, and write it -- compulsively -- but don't actually write out what I'm going to say until I have a basic roadmap... And it was important to us for this standup to seem really, you know, alive, and for those rhythms to be real, and real enough for you to laugh at the standup, and feel that it was standup."

"The script was written for Jenny," stresses Robespierre, "and also for Gabe, who plays her best friend, Joey. Jenny and I were talking about who to play the other best friend, Nellie. And Jenny said, 'how about Gaby Hoffmann?' And I was like, 'Yes, please!' We sent her the script. She loved it. She said, 'yes,' and the rest of the cast came together with a casting director that we had in New York City, and she's amazing. Her Name is Jess Kelly. And we really lucked out! All we had to do was send people the script, and tell them that Jenny was gonna be in this movie, and they all said 'yes'!

'Just let me do everything'

"It was 100-percent scripted," the director stresses again, "but I consider filmmaking to be very collaborative, based on the actors that you choose to work with. You want to work with them because you want to hear what they have to say about the characters, and know what they want to bring to the character. So, when we were doing takes, if somebody changed a word around, or a sentence, those were all really amazing moments that happened, and they're natural."

"It takes a confident, very confident, focused person to let people mess up what she worked so hard on," says Slate, concluding that "it's why she's so fabulous."

Slate, who's probably best known for playing Mona-Lisa on TV's "Parks and Recreation," really enjoyed stretching herself as an actress with her role as Donna. "I guess the way that I would describe it is, you have one body, but you can do a lot of dances with it -- if that makes any sense -- depending on the rhythms that you're given. So, I come in with this stuff all of the time, and I just don't use all of it always. And playing Mona-Lisa is much more athletic, it's much more explosive, and I have very, very little time to do it. You know, it's TV. You get 4 takes and that's it, and it takes a part of me that is at once playful, and pretty -- I have to be pretty doubtless when I'm doing it.

"Whereas, playing Donna, I have, like, a longer time, but it's still all the same stuff. It just is. It's just using it in a different way. I didn't go to acting school, so sometimes I feel like I don't know how to speak about what I do, and I tend not to over think it, because I don't want to ruin it, or fetishize it, but whether I'm playing a character or being myself, I'm just like, 'just let me do everything!' Like, I wish I could just tell everybody everything about me. So, playing Donna is getting to do as much as I can."

Jewish humor

There's a lot of Jewish humor in this film, which comes from a long tradition, from Vaudeville, to radio and the movies.

"I mean, I like being Jewish and culturally Jewish," says Slate, who nevertheless points out that "I don't like going to synagogue. I do think that it's boring, and I get really scared on Yom Kippur -- I feel like I'm not gonna get inscribed in the Book of Light, every year. I don't know, I just think of myself as a human, and usually my humor is just about being a human... But, I mean, my grandmother -- my dad's mom -- has always said to me, 'you have to have a sense of humor.' That's the bit of Jewish humor that I connect to, is that you have to have it. And I don't understand it when people don't have senses of humor. And I certainly don't like it when people are like, 'why can't you take a joke?' Because, usually, that person is an asshole," she laughs, "but the thing I guess that is Jewish to me, a lot of times, is that humor is a necessity. I think that... being Jewish is just part of everything... that I am! I can't help it, I didn't choose it."

So, what's next for Slate and Robespierre?

"We just got here from Chicago," says Robespierre, "and we're going to a lot of other cities promoting this movie, and then when I'm done, I'm gonna sleep for 5 days," she jokes, adding "and then I'm gonna start writing again. I'm writing a movie that takes place in New York, and it's about divorce. And I'm writing a role for Jenny..."

"Yup, I'm sticking with Gil," says Slate. "I have a TV show coming out on FX also, (it premiered on July 21), called "Married." Speaking of Jewish humor, I'm married to Paul Reiser in it, which is just really depressing," she laughs. "I play a very dark woman who has a little bit of a drug problem, and some daddy issues, and she married a man who is her father's friend. It also stars Judy Greer and Nat Faxon, plus Paul Reiser and John Hodgman, and it's pretty good, and I think it's funny and nice. In general though," she concludes, "I'm just gonna stay alive and enjoy life."

"Obvious Child" is in theaters. For more information about the film, visit its Facebook page.