THE MOST SUCCESSFUL FEMALE writer and director in Hollywood lives in a pretty stone house straight out of one of her own films. It’s surrounded by lavender and olive trees and filled with comfortable chairs, well-loved books, and vases of fresh flowers. Nancy Meyers’s success is striking not just because she is a rare woman director, but because she has produced a stream of hits about a subject Hollywood says no one is interested in: women in late middle age, discussing how they feel.
In Meyers’s new movie, The Intern, out September 25, the protagonist is younger (played by Anne Hathaway) and her foil is older (Robert De Niro), and it’s not a love story. But it is as radical in its insistent focus on the female experience as ever. We sat down with Meyers at her home and again at the Farmshop in the Brentwood Country Mart (which looks a lot like the place where Meryl Streep taught Steve Martin to make a chocolate croissant in It’s Complicated) for a conversation about what it’s like, and what it means, to occupy such a singular position in Hollywood at such a complicated moment.
In The Intern, De Niro plays a 70-year-old widower who goes to work as a lowly intern at a fashion website run by a 30-ish Anne Hathaway. Where did the idea come from?
I actually had the idea when we were shooting It’s Complicated 1. I was driving to work one day, and for the life of me I don’t know why, but I got this idea: What if an older person took a job as an intern? It just made me laugh. And then it became, well, who’s the guy? And then who would he work for? A woman just seemed like a logical good idea—never for a second did I ever want it to be romantic. And when I started thinking about interns, I started thinking about guys, about what’s happened to men.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der Sep 7–20, 2015-Ausgabe von New York magazine.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der Sep 7–20, 2015-Ausgabe von New York magazine.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
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THE BEST ART SHOWS OF THE YEAR
IN NOVEMBER, Sotheby's made history when it sold for a million bucks a painting made by artificial intelligence. Ai-Da, \"the first humanoid robot artist to have an artwork auctioned by a major auction house,\" created a portrait of Alan Turing that resembles nothing more than a bad Francis Bacon rip-off. Still, the auction house described the sale as \"a new frontier in the global art market.\"
THE BIGGEST PODCAST MOMENTS OF THE YEAR
A STRANGE THING happened with podcasts in 2024: The industry was repeatedly thrust into the spotlight owing to a preponderance of head-turning events and a presidential-election cycle that radically foregrounded the medium's consequential nature. To reflect this, we've carved out a list of ten big moments from the year as refracted through podcasting.
THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
THE YEAR IN CULTURE - BEST BOOKS
THE BEST THEATER OF THE YEAR
IT'S BEEN a year of successful straight plays, even measured by a metric at which they usually do poorly: ticket sales. Partially that's owed to Hollywood stars: Jeremy Strong, Jim Parsons, Rachel Zegler, Rachel McAdams (to my mind, the most compelling).
THE BEST ALBUMS OF THE YEAR
2024 WAS one big stress test that presented artists with a choice: Face uncomfortable realities or serve distractions to the audience. Pop music turned inward while hip-hop weathered court cases and incalculable losses. Country struggled to reconcile conservative interests with a much wider base of artists. But the year's best music offered a reprieve.
THE BEST TELEVISION OF THE YEAR
IT WAS SURPRISING how much 2024 felt like an uneventful wake for the Peak TV era. There was still great television, but there was much more mid or meh television and far fewer moments when a critical mass of viewers seemed equally excited about the same series.
THE BEST COMEDY SPECIALS OF THE YEAR
THE YEAR IN CULTURE - COMEDY SPECIALS
THE BEST MOVIES OF THE YEAR
PEOPLE LOVED Megalopolis, hated it, puzzled over it, clipped it into memes, and tried to astroturf it into a camp classic, but, most important, they cared about it even though it featured none of the qualities you'd expect of a breakthrough work in these noisy times.
A Truly Great Time
This was the year our city's new restaurants loosened up.
The Art of the Well-Stuffed Stocking
THE CHRISTMAS ENTHUSIASTS on the Strategist team gathered to discuss the oversize socks they drape on their couches and what they put inside them.
