Amy Poehler and ‘Wine Country’ stars on female friendships
“WE’VE had like 20 years of rehearsals,” Amy Poehler explained by phone.
She’s surrounded by her longtime friends, comedic powerhouses who form a crew so tight that they can finish one other’s sentences while provoking snorting laughs as they chat about their new movie, Netflix’s “Wine Country.”
It’s an easygoing comedy, but Poehler’s directorial debut also taps into the inner lives of grown women and long-lasting adult friendships - themes that Hollywood, in its obsession with younger audiences, has given little attention.
“Wine Country,” now streaming, follows a group of middle-aged friends traveling to Napa Valley to celebrate the 50th birthday of Rebecca (Rachel Dratch). But it found real-life inspiration in the actual vacations Poehler and her friends take.
“When we’re really together on our trips we laugh all the time, like, there’s just not that much conflict,” Poehler said. “We know the time is well spent laughing with each other, and we are constantly doing what you’re hearing right now, just bits and fun jokes -”
“Enjoying each other,” Paula Pell offered.
“And enjoying each other,” Poehler continued. “For the film, that might be nice to watch for 10 or 15 minutes, but we have to eventually create a story.”
Unfortunately for this reporter, listening in on speakerphone means not being able to catch all the rapidfire jokes made by Poehler, Dratch, Pell, Maya Rudolph, Ana Gasteyer and co-writer Liz Cackowski. But the women who spent years together in the trenches of “Saturday Night Live” are team players, so in the interview that follows, interjections heard in the background that couldn’t be attributed to a particular individual are still included. Amy Poehler: There’s not a singular experience. Everybody’s experience is very personal and different, and so that’s important, even just that, right? That there’s not the typical female 40-year-old or 50-year-old experience. But one thing that is just unmined territory is long friendships that go deep and the way that women of a certain age interact with each other, because I think sometimes we don’t show enough how we are each other’s kind of chosen family and also how we challenge each other, too.
Ana Gasteyer: As a performer, yes, the window does seem to close in terms of breadth and depth as you age, and one of the exciting opportunities behind this movie
is that it’s a conversation that’s a little bit less about the ways that our culture in general still thinks of women aging as a depressing - I don’t what’s the word, how to say this properly Background: Journey?
Gasteyer: Yeah, a journey that just kind of reaches - wait, were you joking? Background: No! (Laughter)
Gasteyer: - reaches not an expansive experience. What actually ends up happening when you turn 50, and I’m 51 now, there’s so much cultural mythology about you sort of being at the end of the road. To think about Gloria Swanson actually only being in her early (50s) in “Sunset Boulevard,” and our cultural perception being that she’s at death’s doorstep. I think it’s actually the opposite as you start to get older and less confined by babymaking pressure and societal norms, you actually get to dive a little bit deeper into what you actually like and concern yourself less and less with what you should be doing or what people think of what you’re doing. Paula Pell: I was just thinking of Betty White when you were saying that, how when she hosted (“SNL”) we actually had meetings where we were like, “Are we really pushing her too hard?” And then we get to the after-party and it’s like, “Oh, no, Betty’s not going to, she can’t, she’s not going to come,” and then she showed up an hour later, like in full regalia, and stayed for quite a long time, longer than me, I think. So I think comedy is, you can be a hand reaching out from the soil in the graveyard and still be doing your bits.
Maya Rudolph: I think about this age in our lives as being one of the elements of where we are in our lives right now, because it’s certainly not the thing I think about when I think about this group. And I think about our history. I think about the choice that we’ve made to be a family, in some way. I think about what we’ve learned together as a group. I think about the way in which everyone has naturally folded into these roles, where this idea that humans are meant to live in villages, and we live in a time and in a world where most of us don’t live in a small village.
And yet we can have the choice to create our own, and the choice that we made to create these women and these women in this story who have all of these facets going on in their lives. Everyone’s got their story to tell.
Liz Cackowski: That’s the hope, that the doors are opening to have many more voices heard now. What you want when you watch something, is not necessarily to see yourself reflected, but just to see somebody’s truth told and maybe a story you’ve never heard or seeing something either that you relate to or don’t relate to, but then learn from it.