Zoe Kazan’s Exploding Career

The fast-rising Zoe Kazan on her famous family, boring movies and why her "The Exploding Girl" isn't one of them.

So much of this film relies on quiet, elegiac moments without dialogue, which, in lesser movies, can come off affected or hollow. For your part, how did you try to evoke meaning?

A lot of the credit for that goes to Brad, who cut it together. We filmed for 17 days, ten or 12 hours every day, so we got a lot of dreck. Like I said, I went deep into the character and because of that, spontaneous stuff arose that wasn’t scripted. I don’t mean dialogue but reactions and happy surprises. When I was going through Al’s laundry, that was me really going through Mark’s shit. I found his little recorder, I’m nosy and I listened to it. It happened to be a beautiful song and not, like, him practicing his lines for a movie, which is what we were all worried it was when I pressed play. Little things like that.

I don’t have a lot of patience for boring arthouse movies. I would rather go see “Avatar” or a worse movie like “Step Up 2: The Streets” than something boring like “Closely Watched Trains.” I love Bresson, like “A Man Escaped,” and Godard. It doesn’t have to move fast for me to love it, like “Café Lumière,” and I love slow books like Murakami. It’s not like I need explosions, but being artsy for the sake of being artsy… I don’t like pretentious films or pretentious people. Part of my concern in making this was that it would seem active all the time. She’s going through something, even though not a lot happens in the movie.

Then were you ever worried the free-form process could’ve produced a boring movie?

No, I don’t think I was because I felt the emotional engine behind the movie. Brad and I were working very closely together. There were things that we shot that I thought, “I don’t know why we’re shooting this.” A lot of times, we didn’t use that stuff. It was a way of keeping us connected to Ivy: “Smoke this cigarette. Walk over there. Sit on that bench.” Some of it we ended up using and some of it we didn’t. I always trusted Brad’s vision. I loved his movies before I even met him, so I wasn’t that worried.

Besides riffing on the Cure song “The Exploding Boy,” what does the title mean to you?

I don’t know, but it’s beautiful. It just feels right for our movie. What is a great title? Shit that’s evocative, you know? You think about “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” What does that mean? You could be very literal and say she’s someone who is holding in her emotions the whole time, and then there’s this explosion. In another way, she’s like a flower that’s just starting to bloom. She’s at that adolescent part of her life where she’s becoming a grown-up and reaching out.

Speaking of exploding, your career is clearly taking off. Do you get tired of still being referred to by journalists and others as Elia Kazan’s granddaughter?

I look at my dad, ["Reversal of Fortune" screenwriter Nicholas Kazan], who has had to live with it his whole life. My dad’s a great writer in his own respect, and they still write it in his bios. I don’t think it’ll ever go away because it’s a way of contextualizing me for people who don’t know who I am. I don’t feel like I’m ever being compared to him. I’m very proud of him and his work. In an ideal world, everyone would be taken on their own merit with nothing else to explain them, but they still say [my boyfriend Paul Dano] is “from ‘Little Miss Sunshine’,” and he did that years ago now. It’s lazy journalism.

I don’t like being asked about it: “Do you remember your grandfather?” I was 20 when I died — do I remember him? There’s an assumption because he’s famous that he wasn’t a real person, and that bothers me, or people ask me to talk about my memories of him. You’re not going to ask me about my memories of my other granddad who is also dead. It just seems so beside the point. Why would you ask me that? It has nothing to do with my work. If someone asked me about working with Chris Walken right now, I can understand because he’s a fascinating guy. I’m still not going to say anything about him, but I understand it more than wanting to talk about my old man. [laughs]

I’ll tread lightly here, then. You come from two generations of artistic talents, and you’re a playwright yourself. Has anything about their work inspired your own?

Their work ethic, absolutely — from my grandpa and my parents. My granddad was an immigrant and carried that mentality: “You gotta work harder than everybody else.” He had a deep thirst for work. At the end of his life, when he wasn’t producing anything, he was still writing every day, and I don’t think my parents have ever taken a day off in their lives. I grew up with nannies because of that. They’re great parents and were always there to make dinner, but they’re also artists and consumed by that. I feel the same way. If I’m not working, I don’t feel complete. For me, writing came out of that. Sometimes you’re in a play for four months, you’re exhausted by it, and you have no more hunger for it. Writing provides another creative outlet for me.

So what have you been writing?

I wrote a play [called "Absalom"] that got produced last year at the Humana Festival down at the Actors Theatre of Louisville. I’ve written another play on commission for Manhattan Theatre Club, and I’m working on a third right now. I’ve also got three screenplays that I’m working on. It’s definitely a passion, but it’s more like a pastime for me than it is a career right now.

“The Exploding Girl” opens in New York on March 12th before expanding on March 26th.

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