Nancy Meyers On Women In Hollywood

On the eve of the release of The Intern - which is not a romantic comedy - Nancy Meyers talks about what's happened to women in Hollywood, what's happened to men everywhere, and whether Hillary Clinton will get a Meyers-worthy third act.

- Amy Larocca

THE MOST SUCCESSFUL FEMALE writer and director in Hollywood lives in a pretty stone house straight out of one of her own films. It’s surrounded by lavender and olive trees and filled with comfortable chairs, well-loved books, and vases of fresh flowers. Nancy Meyers’s success is striking not just because she is a rare woman director, but because she has produced a stream of hits about a subject Hollywood says no one is interested in: women in late middle age, discussing how they feel.

In Meyers’s new movie, The Intern, out September 25, the protagonist is younger (played by Anne Hathaway) and her foil is older (Robert De Niro), and it’s not a love story. But it is as radical in its insistent focus on the female experience as ever. We sat down with Meyers at her home and again at the Farmshop in the Brentwood Country Mart (which looks a lot like the place where Meryl Streep taught Steve Martin to make a chocolate croissant in It’s Complicated) for a conversation about what it’s like, and what it means, to occupy such a singular position in Hollywood at such a complicated moment.

In The Intern, De Niro plays a 70-year-old widower who goes to work as a lowly intern at a fashion website run by a 30-ish Anne Hathaway. Where did the idea come from?

I actually had the idea when we were shooting It’s Complicated 1. I was driving to work one day, and for the life of me I don’t know why, but I got this idea: What if an older person took a job as an intern? It just made me laugh. And then it became, well, who’s the guy? And then who would he work for? A woman just seemed like a logical good idea—never for a second did I ever want it to be romantic. And when I started thinking about interns, I started thinking about guys, about what’s happened to men.