Actress Ellen Page Goes for the Heart in Screenwriter Diablo Cody’s Comic and Touching Juno

By Lee Shoquist

In person, Ellen Page is startlingly petite for a young actress who looms with such command onscreen. In both last year’s Hard Candy, as a vindictive, cyber-stalking teen, and in the moving new comedy Juno, as a pregnant teen coming of age with a few unexpected extra pounds, twenty-year-old Page projects smarts beyond her years, tossing around tart-tongued bon mots and disarming cynicism that eventually yields to a lovely, endearing lessons in life and love.

Penned by colorful first-time scribe Diablo Cody and directed with an appealingly modern comic rhythm by Jason Reitman, Juno is the freshest, smartest and sweetest American film of 2007, sprung by accident from the blog of its novice screenwriter, a warmly likeable former stripper and phone sex operator with a keen ear for the ironies and heartbreaks of teenaged—and family—life.

As Juno MacGuff struggles to make sense of her condition and forge a connection with a troubled adoptive couple (Jason Bateman, Jennifer Garner), she re-evaluates her place in her family (Allison Janney, J.K. Simmons) and affections for the nerdy guy next door (a winning Michael Cera), a best buddy and father of her unborn child.

I caught up with certain Oscar nominees Ellen Page and Diablo Cody recently to talk about Juno, its smartly-written women, unlikely screenwriter, refreshing and heartfelt performances, "disgusting" celebrity entitlement complexes and our mutual love of underrated movies.

Lee Shoquist: What are you feeling like right now? It’s no secret that you guys are on the top of every "best of the year" short-list out there.

Diablo Cody: I know a certain lady who deserves an Oscar.

Ellen Page: Yes, Laura Linney. I love her. She’s flawless and so nice. She came to the Juno premiere and she is delightful.

LS: I’m sorry. You seem so low-key. The opposite of how you are onscreen.

EP: Well, I’m an actor. (Feigning French accent) This is what I do!

DC: I remember when we were recording that awkward thing with the cue cards for the DVD, and you were sitting in the chair showing me how you "do" Juno. It was really magical. You did it a million times on set, but the fact that you can just do it is mystifying to me because I can’t act. To me, acting is the coolest skill anyone could have.

EP: Really? To me, it’s painting. Good painters…

DC: Also music is really incredible; someone who is like a virtuosic musician. But I think acting is comparable.

EP: I don’t know. Musicians get to be wacky and actors get to be…less wacky.

LS: But can actors trash hotel rooms? That’s the question.

EP: All of that behavior is disgusting!

LS: Can’t get away with it anymore.

EP: I think that shit is disgusting and anyone who has attitude like that… I can’t stand it. Anyone. I don’t care who you are…

LS: That’s a lot of people…

EP: I really don’t care who a person is. I just find that disgusting. It makes me want to stab myself in the eye with a fork when I hear stories I’ve heard about people. I don’t understand. It makes my brain explode.

DC: Entitlement complexes are pretty revolting.

LS: But artists are kind of expected to be extreme in a way.

EP: It’s cyclical in that people do put them on pedestals and treat them really well and don’t say anything when people are acting like idiots, so of course they’re going to keep acting like idiots. There is personal responsibility, you know? There are a lot of people that are famous that are super cool. Like a certain person in our movie who is really famous and always in tabloids and she and her husband are really down to earth and grounded awesome.

LS: That person is really spectacular in this film. It is a career-high for Jennifer Garner.

DC: I’m really glad you just said that!

EP: We go on and on about her performance. Thank you!

DC: I think about her performance all the time. I think it is just hilarious and touching.

EP: And subtle. F**king good, man.

LS: I love the scene where she is sitting there at the table with the glass of wine.

DC: My husband and I quote that scene at each other sometimes because the line that she delivers is so heartbreaking: "Thanks for making the call, I guess."

EP: "Aren’t you the cool guy?"

DC: Oh, Jennifer Garner we love you!" "Aren’t you the cool guy?" just kills me, and the reverse shot of Jason Bateman who just has this sort of wry, remorseful smirk.

EP: You can picture it just sort of carving into his gut.

LS: How about the women in the film? You’ve got three incredible women: Jennifer, Ellen and then of course, Allison Janney. Diablo, I was actually not sure before the film that you were a woman. I really thought you were a man and I was sitting there thinking that whomever this guy is, he sure has a great handle on the way the women speak to each other and relate in this film. They are really real.

DC: I appreciate that. Thank you! I didn’t think of it as this trio of women. I do feel a responsibility to write complex roles for women. I feel like a lot of our greatest female actors are being squandered, and are treated like static.

EP: Accessories. To men.

DC: They are there to define the men instead of being multi-dimensional characters in their own right.

EP: For example, I choose roles by having my heart react to a script. My heart is going to react to something honest and whole. So I feel like I am playing honest, well-written young women. But every time I do a film like Juno or Hard Candy, people say, "Wow, you play such strong female roles." If I were a guy you would not be saying that to me. If I were Emile Hirsch, you wouldn’t be like, "Oh, Emile Hirsch plays such strong male roles." I mean it’s obviously a sexist question.

LS: It’s something about the way you play it though. I mean, I don’t even know how to define it really because it is just great acting. But I would say that it is a directness that you possess, or a way that you dominate a room or a scene when you walk into the frame. It’s a command and security in a scene. In this case it is a great combination of writer and actor.

EP: And director.

LS: And your director, Jason Reitman. How much would you say that he contributed to the tone of the story?

DC: He is a master of tone. He created the tone. I’m not sure I knew exactly what this movie was and I wrote it. it feel like Jason Reitman knew this film even deeper than I did, like on a sub-cellular level. I have so much respect for him. I thought of he and Ellen as their unit in how they worked together, and the same with myself and him. And the most I got to know Ellen, the more I felt a connection between the two of us and it was a just a very interesting little triad.

LS: So you were not a screenwriter before this. You wrote a book. You were writing a blog. And then you fell into this.

DC: Yes, I completely felt like that. I would say that most screenwriters, and power to them, have to claw their way to the top of this heap. It’s very competitive. SO the fact that I came about it by accident is very strange. But yes, I was encouraged to write a screenplay by a reader of my blog. He turned out to be the producer on the film and the one who got my script out there and I would not be sitting here with any semblance of a career and would probably be sitting chained to a desk—or a pole—somewhere if I had not met him.

LS: There is something about the dialogue, right away in the film that… I saw this in a press audience and most of the time they are so hard to win over.

DC: I know it is.

LS: We are always on guard. We’re like a room full of guys who sit in the dark and talk about nothing but movies.

DC: Sounds like a pretty good life actually!

LS: From the very first scene there was loud laughter. It’s the way you have written it. I guess I could say it was the tone. But it is so funky and endearing and out there and I have to wonder if all those characters are inside of you. You wrote them like that, of course. I don’t know if you can talk about the edge to this film. It seems to have this very special quality. We listen to the dialogue and that’s really something in an age when dialogue in most movies and is forgettable. I found myself taking notes and writing down a lot of Ellen’s memorable lines and then I realized I was literally transcribing the film. Just zingers and jokes that were so funny, coming from her, but truly, humanly funny—not situation comedy funny. Was it really such a simple process, as you described, to write something this rich?

DC: I cannot thank you enough for that string of compliments that you just…..

LS: Not compliments really, just the truth.

DC: But thank you so much! Writing in general comes easy to me. I always try to sort of entertain people, and maybe that is a defense mechanism. I was, like, 27 when I wrote the script and I probably had 27 years of training in verbal warfare. And I guess I feel like because I had nothing to lose at the time that I wrote it, because nobody expected me to write a quality script, especially myself. I think that benefited me and I felt very liberated in the process and I just went for it. I figured if it goes over the top, they’ll pull me back. And they didn’t pull me back. They wound of making the film as I wrote it. I’m so glad that people are enjoying it.

LS: Ellen, it’s really clear how much you love this character and there is not as memorable of a character in any film this year as Juno. I was surprised in the final third of the film when we start to really see inside of her, like the scene where Juno sits alone, in the car, and several others. What did you respond to in her?

EP: First and foremost she was a character that didn’t exist. A teenaged female lead that we had not seen before. She’s incredibly unique and articulate and mature and all of those things. But she is also really young, and she is also really arrogant and a smart-ass and hides behind her sarcastic wit. And I think she is incredibly genuine and she’s unapologetic with a lot of the things that she says in the film, but she also fesses up to a lot of things after going through an intense journey.

LS: Diablo, what is it like for you watching her deliver this memorable of a performance in a role that you banged out on a keyboard?

DC: It’s an honor. I never imagined that an actor of Ellen’s caliber would be delivering these lines. I didn’t imagine that an actor at all would be delivering them! People always ask if I pictured specific actors in the roles or imagined how they looked. No, to me that would have been wildly unrealistic. I never imagined the film would be made. I was just creating my own little world. So on the first day that I came to the set, the first scene I watched was Ellen and Michael together. The two of them were so great that I couldn’t believe how fortunate I was.

LS: Ellen, this is such a disposable business if you don’t select projects carefully. You’re on the cusp of something huge. What will you do to ensure that five or ten years from now you are still in this business, able to do what you want to? Someone told me that careers are made by what you turn down rather than what you accept. I imagine you are getting a lot of offers right now.

EP: I am an actor because I love to act. And I do it because it’s something that I’m passionate about. And I pick roles that make my heart jump. Because if I’m not passionate about something then I will suck and feel depressed. As much as I take it very seriously and I’m a hard worker and I love being in films that I care about, I’m definitely not going to take myself so seriously that I attach my happiness to being an actor. That’s why my home base is in Halifax. And that’s nothing about not being grateful or going for my shot. But I don’t believe in that, "work, work, work." It’s obvious from people’s careers that are still in existence that they did not do that, and that they dared to have an aspect of individuality and take risks.

LS: It seems like now is much more cutthroat than ever before.

EP: Yes. Definitely I wish I could be like a Sissy Spacek in the 70s. It’s not that time. So I’m going to do what makes my heart react and if people stop putting me in movies in two or three years, then I will leave. I’m definitely not going to lose myself it because my general interests don’t really blend with that world.

LS: Diablo, The Wizard of Gore or Suspiria?

DC: (laughs) Suspiria.

LS: Saw it last night again. Masterpiece. I’m a horror movie nut.

DC: Are you? I’m doing a horror movie next.

LS: About? Can you tell me?

DC: Yeah. It has a female protagonist and a female monster. It’s about teenaged, sexual jealousy that manifests itself in a very literal way—in cannibalism.

LS: Speaking of sexual jealousy, I was just watching Eyes Wide Shut again.

DC: Yes! I love that movie!

LS: Yeah, after she confesses to him at the beginning of the film he goes on this dark odyssey. It’s like a guy trying to come to grips with his wife having this thing about another guy.

DC: I made a mistake actually, and went to see that film with my parents! I was like, 19, when it came out. It was this dark theater, and really graphic! I was in college on break.

EP: It came out that long ago?

LS: Yeah, Tom and Nicole were still…married. So you saw it with your parents? Wow.

DC: I saw it with my parents! I was so embarrassed! There were orgy scenes in it! The last line of the movie is pretty gross!

LS: It got some baggage attached to it for the wrong reasons probably.

EP: Yes, and his movie are always really well-respected like twenty years later because he was so far ahead of his time.

DC: Well I’m holding out hope for A.I. That is one of my favorite movies.

LS: I love A.I.! But it gets routinely dismissed. The scene where the mother drops him off in the forest is just painful: "Don’t leave me, mommy."

DC: Oh, that is so heartwrenching. One of my favorite movies of all time!

Special thanks to Diablo Cody and Ellen Page for this interview