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Right. But there are no females telling this kind of story.
Jason Reitman: "There's Mary Harron, who didn’t seem to be interested in this either. She directed American Psycho and Bettie Page. There is Jane Campion who’s not interested in it. There's Andrea Arnold, the British director [who] directed Fish Tank. She's great. She's not interested in that. No, you know what? She is a little bit interested in that."

I haven't seen Fish Tank.

Jason Reitman: "Fish Tank just come out. It’s spectacular. She made a short film called Wasp that won an Oscar, and then she directed something called Red Road or something like that. Fish Tank is out right now. It’s amazing. It does actually deal with that a little."

Does it?

Jason Reitman: "Wasp does it. Wasp is a wonderful short film. It won the Oscar. It’s about a woman who's in her mid-30s, she has three kids, she's a single mom, and this guy she went to high school with comes back to town and they run into each other and he kind of asks her on a date. And you can just tell this makes her feel beautiful in a way that she hasn’t felt in a while. And now they're going to go on a date, she has no one to take care of these three kids - it’s a really tough film. She goes on this date at a bar with him and she leaves her kids, including an infant, in a car in a parking lot next to the bar. She's trying to go back and forth making sure the kids are okay. And it’s about this struggle of, 'I want to be a mom, I want to be good to these kids, I just want to feel sexy for one f--king night of my life.'"

"She's going into the bar and she's with the guy and the guy doesn’t care. The guy's just, like, single and he's not conscious of the fact of what's going on outside. And then the baby gets stung by a wasp. And it’s just great… It’s just about desire and it’s about being responsible, and also having desires and feeling guilty for having desires and all that kind of stuff. It never says that, it’s just about that. And Fish Tank deals with similar issues about growing up that are really interesting."

"But I think the reason why you don't see it onscreen is because it’s not very marketable. I think the people who say yes to films are generally guys. You know, they greenlight the movies and people generally don't see them. Lots of films about what it’s like to be an adult aren’t made in general and then the few that are, are about men. So I don't know. That's all I have to say about that."

Audiences are not going to dramas. They just want to escape.

Jason Reitman: "The people who want to make movies about adults have generally become independent filmmakers who make movies for nothing that play in art houses. And what I do has become fewer and far between, which is a film that is supposed to play for a wide audience but it’s about adult themes and is made for adults."

How do you sneak these in?

Jason Reitman: "I was very lucky. My second film grossed $230 million dollars, even though it was made for seven."

Which is awesome.

Jason Reitman: "And I got George Clooney. And I've proved three times in a row now that despite the fact that I like tricky subject matter - like cigarette lobbying, a teenage pregnancy, and firing people - that I make my films in an accessible way, that I like the audience."

Do you really like the audience?

Jason Reitman: "Yes. I think I make my movies very audience-friendly. They're very cognizant of the fact that there's an audience watching. They make people laugh; they make characters that are unsympathetic sympathetic. They're short. My movies aren’t long. My movies are kind of very trim. My first two movies were 90 minutes long. I don't believe in scenes that only slow the movie down."

Anna Kendrick is a revelation in this. How did you figure out she could handle this role?

Jason Reitman: "I wrote it for her. I saw her in a movie called Rocket Science and in her saw this series of women that I’d fallen in love with in my life. Girls who were too smart for their own good, frustrated by their own brilliance, who were always in a room going, 'Why isn’t everyone as smart as me?' And I've always loved these women. My wife is one of these women who are hyper-articulate and completely not self-aware, and I wanted to write about that kind of character. I saw Rocket Science and I was like, 'Oh, that's her.' And then the only question was is it really her or was it like she did it once and was only able to do it once."

"I had her audition - I didn’t tell her I wrote it for her. She auditioned against 30 of the best actresses of her generation who all wanted to play this part, and she's the only one. It was just like night and day. She came in and it was just like she started doing it and I had to stop myself from giggling because I was having such a good time finally watching dialogue be said the right way."

She just stands out when you're watching her on that screen.

Jason Reitman: "Yes. It's great because I think there's multiple generations of women who see themselves in her and are excited to see her onscreen because they feel that they haven't seen themselves portrayed in a loving way. That even though she's annoying and she doesn't know, and you want her to just kind of get her comeuppance, you know I love that girl. You know I love her for all her eccentricities, and I guess that's a commonality in my films. I take people that are normally portrayed as a villain onscreen and I try to portray them as human beings. So that by the time they show vulnerability, and Anna has that kind of wonderful moment of vulnerability when she breaks down in the most public embarrassing place, in the hotel lobby, you just love her. You want to grab her and you want to hug her."

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