Young Adult stars Charlize Theron as Mavis, an alcoholic, reality-TV-obsessed ghostwriter of teen novels who returns to her Minnesota hometown to steal back her high school boyfriend. Writer Diablo Cody (United States of Tara) and director Jason Reitman (Up in the Air) sat down with TIME to chat about Young Adult (which opens Dec. 9) at L.A.'s Tart restaurant--the spot where they originally met to discuss their first collaboration, Juno, which won Cody the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 2008.
Why did you want to make a movie about fame and narcissism?
Diablo Cody: I didn't sit down intending to write about a person warped by pop culture, warped by attention. Originally it was more about alcoholism and obsession. But then I thought about what she does with her day, and we talked about the Kardashians and Mavis' grooming rituals and fixation on being magazine-perfect to the point of torturing herself. In the first shot, you hear a sobbing woman and assume it's the protagonist, but it's actually Kendra [Wilkinson, from the reality shows The Girls Next Door and Kendra].
Jason Reitman: I locked into the fact that the character liked these reality shows. At one point we thought the only music in the movie would be the audio from these shows in the background, because that's the sound track of Mavis' life.
DC: I didn't know that. That would have been some really artsy Soderbergh [stuff].
JR: I like to go one-third Soderbergh. That's where I live.
DC: You never go full Soderbergh.
JR: When talking to Charlize early on, I sent her Keeping Up with the Kardashians and My Super Sweet 16 and The Hills. Diablo gave me a list. I said, "You're obsessed with these girls and their youth, and you're not becoming an adult."
Do you think reading Us Weekly and watching reality shows are bad for you?
DC: I think it's bad. I get a pronounced sense of guilt. The magazines are an invasion of privacy, and the shows have become creatively bankrupt. People are in full makeup when they're supposed to be waking up. But the show Kendra is a fascinating case study because it's about people who are past their prime, and they're only in their 20s.
JR: If we took Kendra, didn't change a thing about the visual cut but added dramatic music, would Kendra become a powerful, moving drama? Like Jonathan Franzen's Kendra?
DC: Then I'd like to see Ryan Seacrest's The Corrections, with wacky music and a bumbling patriarch.
Diablo, you've had every kind of fame. You've been a stripper.
DC: That's a weird kind of fame. It's certainly a bid for visibility. And I had a couple of years of local fame in Minneapolis.
For your blog? [Pre-Juno, Cody kept a blog for the alternative weekly City Pages that was largely about stripping.]
DC: Yeah, I'd get recognized at the mall and stuff. But I only experienced a true fame around 2008 [after Juno]. That kind of visibility is not for me. To enjoy being famous, you need to have a screw loose.
We have a whole generation under 25 who want to be famous.
DC: You can't blame people for feeling that way. How many friends you can amass on social media is how we measure people now.