• By
  • John Jurgensen
Allison Michael Orenstein for The Wall Street Journal
Lena Dunham at the HBO offices and on NYC midtown street March 21, 2012.

Seems like everyone’s going “Girls” crazy. Ahead of its premiere tonight, the HBO comedy created by 25-year-old Lena Dunham is ensconced in an echo chamber of praise and anticipation. (You know the place. It’s the zone adjacent to inevitable backlash.)

In the show, Dunham plays Hannah, a post-college New Yorker ricocheting between social drama, dismal job prospects and cringe-inducing sex. To Hannah, it’s all fodder for her book, an in-process collection of essays. (“I think I may be the voice of my generation. Or at least a voice. Of a generation,” she tells her parents who have recently cut off her funding.) Hanna’s experiences drive the humor—sometimes biting, sometimes tender—in a show about four friends treading water in the gap between immaturity and adult responsibility.

A few weeks ago, when “Girls” got a big-screen premiere at the South By Southwest film festival, we talked to Dunham and (separately) Judd Apatow, one of her fellow executive producers. Below are some excerpts from those interviews.

Lena Dunham

What was challenging about jumping into the TV format?

I spent all my time on my movies worried that people were eating and that the schedule was being kept, so to have experts in those areas giving me the brain space as a writer and director is huge. But that means there are so many people watching you. There are moments when you want to say, “Could everyone leave the room and not look at me think right now? It’s kind of private.” Also, the half hour format is new to me. Just thinking about how much story an episode and a season can hold, those are new narrative questions to me.

You’ve talked about growing up and feeling like something of an outsider. Did that play into your ambitions to make movies and create a TV show?

Not that I didn’t have great friends, but I’ve always felt that there’s somewhere else I needed to be and that place was in my room writing. But working in film and TV has been the first time there’s been social interactions that have kept me from wanting to be writing. Through the process of making the show I’ve made all these friends who I actually do want to sit around and drink with—well, I went to “Saturday Night Live”  and had literally one glass of wine and woke up the next morning and was like, “I’m not gonna do that again.” So pathetic.

How fleshed out was the “Girls” idea when you first pitched it to HBO?

I literally didn’t know what a pitch was. It’s just about girls like me doing stuff in New York and they’re always texting and worried about guys. They’re just like my friends and they’re really stressed out. I went home and wrote a document, a one-page composite of me and my best friends and even my best enemies.

What did that document say?

I have it in my computer right in front of me. It’s titled “Initial HBO thoughts.” The first part was, “Sex and the City depicted women who had mastered their careers and were now being driven crazy by the tick of their biological clocks. ‘Gossip Girl’ is about losing your virginity and gaining popularity in a world where no one is old enough to vote or has to worry about making a living. But between adolescence and adulthood is the uncomfortable middle ground where women are ejected from college into a world with neither glamour or structure.”

Is there optimism in the show?

I admire Hannah. If I was her I would have given up months ago, moved home, hid under the covers, had my parents bring me snacks and pretended my life wasn’t happening. I’m impressed that she gets up every day to take on the city. There’s got to be some kind of reward for that down the line.

Judd Apatow

After seeing Lena’s movie “Tiny Furniture,” you sent her an email with the subject line “From Judd Apatow.” How often do you reach out to people like that?

I never reach out to anybody! I’m too busy watching “The Bachelor.” It’s not like I’m watching thousands of movies looking for new people. I’m trying not to meet new people. Every once in awhile my manager will say, “You should meet this person.” And most of the time it conflicts with “Celebrity Apprentice,” and I’ll watch [the recommendation] three months after everybody else has realized how great they are and they’ve signed deals elsewhere.

What were some of your first steps when you joined “Girls”?

I try to force writers to overwrite. If Lena had seven or eight story ideas, I told her to go home and write out a few sentences on 50 stories, to open up what’s deep in her brain. Slowly she found the shape of the show and the people she wanted to write about. I try to get people to get creative before they lock onto a specific story. You may have an idea for an entire series, but what you’re really trying to do is create a first episode that will make people believe a series will work. A pilot episode has to be special. I think of them as little movies. There is no “it’ll get better.” The first one has to be a gem or you’re unemployed.

What’s your role? Are you in the writer’s room throwing around dialogue, or are your contributions more general?

We were asking questions like, “Is this all the girls? Is there a lead? How many guys are on this show and why are they around? Do the girls have boyfriends for the day or boyfriends for a few months?” Lena has so much she wants to say that a lot of what [fellow executive producer Jenni Konnor] and I are doing is helping her understand how much can you accomplish in one episode or one season. There are some mechanics in all that to kick around. It’s a fun collaboration because I get to be the one with a fresh head. I read the outlines and the draft and come into key meetings to discuss what the story arc should be for the season.

What sort of skills have you developed as a personnel manager?

It’s a lot like being a player-coach. Writers need timetables or they won’t do anything. How fast to write the pilot. I pushed for her to have a deal where she’d write a bunch of episodes. When you write more than one you learn so much about the characters from writing the next four. The characters get deeper. Pilots are usually a battle against exposition. That’s why you always see a lot of bad first episodes. “Oh, Bob, you’re always coming in late. It’s not my fault that you’re so busy as an insurance adjuster.”

Besides the body parts involved, what’s different about writing about women?

Men and women are immature in different ways. Some men are trying hard to be adults and be responsible, and a lot of men are fighting desperately against it. They need to go a little wild before they settle down. I think that’s a funny stage of life to write about. In Hannah’s world, there’s a battle in her group between the responsible and irresponsible ones.

You’ve often talked about being scarred from running TV shows [including the short-lived cult comedy “Freaks and Geeks]. Have you actively avoided the format until now?

I’ve actively avoided network television because I think the system is set up to make most people fail. People crack it once in awhile, but it’s a long shot because you’re in an adversarial relationship with the network. If you bring in a cast, a fair amount of the time they’ll say no to several people that you want to hire. In movies, we’ve earned the right for that not to happen. Television is best where there’s one person who knows what they want to do and is allowed to do it. That’s why we love “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “Mad Men.” You can tell no one’s watering it down.

Lena’s career is on a sharp ascent right now. Have you given her any advice on how to handle any stumbles down the road?

She’s getting a lot of attention, which is scary because it can throw you off your center. I think Lena will be fine because she showed me the meanest “Tiny Furniture” review, and it seemed to amuse her as much as it hurt her. I tell her that you can’t believe the good reviews because then you have to believe the bad ones. Have somebody you trust tell you which ones to look at. The Google alert can break your spirit. If you read everything, then some kid writing a bad review in a college newspaper in Delaware has just broken your heart. It can make you doubt your reasons for living. It may be a guy alone in his room and you don’t want to go directly into his mind.

How many projects do you have in development right now?

There’s a movie called “The Five-Year Engagement” that I produced. That’s in late April. And I directed a movie called “This Is 40,” which is coming later. I’ve scaled back. I have four or five things floating. I don’t have enough mental space to track a lot of projects. I tried that at one point and I don’t think I did very well.

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