Standing on the roof of the parking lot at The Grove, writer and director Lena Dunham Absorbed by the lavish details of Friday’s VIP-packed presentation of her new Prime Video “Catherine Called Birdy,” he’s visibly pleased with the Ren-Faire-Meet-rave vibe Amazon created to capture the film’s blend of 13th-century and contemporary tone, Resonance.
“I don’t do all the activity on top of it,” said an enthusiastic Dunham, wearing a blue scalloped skirt that precluded sitting but complied with the old and new spirit of the event by prominently displaying her tattoos. “I just went and got some engraved jewelry.”
Dunham’s immersion in the world of Byrdie dates back to reading Source Material – Karen Cushman’s beloved 1994 novel – for the first time when she was ten years old.
“There are certain books when you are a little kid that make you feel capable of taking on the world and that is what this book was for me,” she said. diverse. “From the moment I read it, I found the character likable and crazy. I like that she didn’t possess any kind of superpowers or sword skills. Her superpowers are only the same.”
“I’ve been obsessed with books and the genre I’ve always loved has been historical fiction,” she explains. “I wasn’t obsessed with fantasy and science fiction. I wanted to disappear into life, but into other people’s lives. And so Catherine Cold Birdie’s book is one of five or six books I can remember that was truly legendary in my lineup and propelled my fantasy life.”
In fact, the book stuck with her and she found her way back to it as she ended her twenties, a turbulent period during her hit HBO series Girls and the often polarizing and ascent of her public profile.
“I came to a place where I needed to feel good,” Dunham says. “Life got really big all of a sudden and I was trying to go back to the things that gave me that sense of security. And I literally found the book back on the shelf when I was still living with my parents at 24. And I was reminded, ‘Wow, that was really formative for me'” .
It took nearly a decade after the writers picked Dunham’s book to finally realize it on screen. “I was trying to make the movie at a time when YA movies were all about kissing vampires or having a sword,” she says. “So the fact that we’re here now and there’s a kind of hype for the book that meant so much to me as a kid is pretty fierce.”
Having written her own stories throughout her career, Dunham found new advantages in adapting someone else’s work.
“You can express a lot of your inner life clearly,” she said, “but you do it with this kind of armor.” “And this definitely made me realize the beauty of adapting is something that can be very deep and personal even if the work is born out of someone else’s head. Thankfully, Karen, the author, has given me a kind of carte blanche to embrace these characters and fill them with aspects of myself.”
Now, Dunham says she’s started meeting young people who have taken as much inspiration from her work on “Girls” as she has been from her favorite creators. “I’ve definitely had experiences, especially in the post-pandemic period because the kids were left on their own to watch a lot of TV, from going, ‘Oh my God, I’m so old. This person is telling me [this] Too young and too old! I laughed. “If the thing the ‘girls’ can do is tell a lot of different people that they don’t necessarily have to wait for their story to be told and that the fact of their private lives is important, that’s enough for me. “
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