Deborah Eisenberg

The News

By Ray Pride

December 12, 2020

Deborah Eisenberg on Let Them All Talk: “Well, so much of my life has been surreal anyhow — it was just one more surreal episode. I was very, very surprised, and we did meet up in Los Feliz — did I say that right? Steven outlined the few sentences that he and Greg had talked over, and, naturally, there was a lot of allure for me, as well as something like stark terror. But for one thing, if life offers you a chance to work with Steven and you say no, you might as well just curl up and die no matter how frightened you are. For another, I am actually well-situated to work on a project concerning women of around 70. And that was very, very important to me. In any event, I’m quite interested in what happens to people over a long period of time, how lives take shape, the stories people tell themselves about their lives, and the way they try to figure out their lives. I’ve seen a lifetime’s worth of movies about hugely pathetic old people. Particularly, women are portrayed as sort of clownish, adorable, theoretic creatures. And the idea of elderly beauty is just considered a joke, at least in most of the U.S. Either you’re looking at a horror movie or industrial-strength plastic surgery; it’s all tremendously sad and kind of amusing. But that was very, very interesting to me: to look at women my age in a way that didn’t wink or blush and would also assume that people didn’t stop having their lives at a certain point. Our lives actually just get more interesting and, in a way, more dramatic.”

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