Chewing the last bits of cheese off a cold piece of pizza, Lena Dunham puts aside a final college paper for the hour. She's been working on it a while.

“Is the pizza still as good four hours later as it was four hours ago?” I ask.

“Totally not! I was working and somehow couldn’t focus on the pizza, but I feel guilty being like, ‘Well, your life is just over.’”

The personification, oddly enough, isn't jarring. In the playful mind of Dunham, where absurdity, humor and meaningfulness all take turns downstage, the comment comes across with the same childlike truthfulness as her energetic iterations of "That's so interesting!" and "I'm so glad..." She says this herself later, that there's a quality kept almost adolescent in her personality.

In the first part of the conversation, Dunham spoke in depth about her feature debut Creative Nonfiction. In this second section she expands upon that dialogue while also addressing the work on her short films. The editor advises that readers visit the filmmaker's site to watch the shorts before continuing.

SM: I’d like to pick up where we left off by talking about your work with [cinematographers] Brett Jutkiewicz and Hannah Lesser. Hannah had shot 16mm for you on The Auteur, and you’ve worked with Brett on digital [Tight Shots]. Can you tell me about those working relationships?

LD: Hannah is someone I know from college. She’s a really interesting person. She’s a very strong-willed, creative cinematographer. She’s not trained at all, and she’s actually a Gender and Women’s Study major, so sometimes she’d have little director moments where from behind the lens, she’d be like, “Um, I don’t think this is necessarily in line with my feelings about feminist aesthetics,” which became a running joke with us. She’s really fun to work with because she’s learning a lot just like I am, so the whole process was just really new.

Whereas, with Brett, who’s amazing and who I met at Slamdance last year, I saw his cinematography work with Josh [Safdie] on The Back of Her Head, and I was so blown away with what he did. It was kind of my fantasy that he would work with me. Even though he’s only like two years older than me, he’s been to film school, and he’s done so much that it felt like he was way above my level. So it was really exciting when he was like, “Yeah, I’ll shoot a movie with you.”

For me, working with Brett, which I first did on Tight Shots and then on Creative Nonfiction—because I’m a liberal arts college student—it was sort of like my version of film school. I learned so much from him. He’d be like, “No, you know, you have to say, ‘Cut’ and ‘Action’ in this order.” He was literally teaching me how to be around—especially when we were shooting film—he was literally teaching me how to roll film.

I’m so attracted to what he does aesthetically, which is very clean but also really handheld and verite. I’m so impressed by how he keeps those two styles going.

SM: His work with you on Tight Shots is very different, I feel, than on Creative Nonfiction. We’ve talked about this before, the comment from one of your professors about that pornography, voyeuristic feel of Creative Nonfiction, that there’s something much more intimate and slightly invasive about the film, where there’s a more humorous, hands-off feel to Tight Shots. How did you find those two styles working with Brett? How did you move onto that more invasive, intimate side?

LD: I’d only ever seen film Brett had shot, so when I asked him to shot digital it was sort of an adventure. It was like, “I know you don’t usually do this, but you’re such a capable guy that I know you can.” He was really open, and he had very clear ideas about how (Tight Shots) should be shot. Because it involved so much improv and because it was such a collaborative process, he wanted to be able to move among people, he wanted to be able to make snap decisions. So the style of Tight Shots of him being there but not getting in anyone’s way, it was a very natural cinematography to emerge from the way that we were working on the show.

I remember getting comments from the people at Nerve.com because they were used to Joe Swanberg-style right up in there, right up in your face, right up in your boobs, right up in your crotch (laughs), and there were times that they thought we had too many wide shots. I guess it wasn’t “in your face reality” enough for them. For me, I thought it was a very intimate way of dealing with the camera, but that may just have been because I was on set and saw Brett being one of the group with us.

It was interesting; it was always that struggle. There’s a way that cinematography can be really sexy, and so there was always this struggle with Nerve.com about whether it was sexy enough—because that’s what they want. I was just so happy with the way that Brett shot the scenes that were at all sexy because he’s such a gentle person, and I think that shows.

SM: That perfectly describes the difference in styles that should have been evident to me, the idea that in Creative Nonfiction the cinematography serves the purpose of illuminating one particular point of view while in Tight Shots, because the whole premise of the show is that you can’t judge anyone although everyone is up for judgment, the camera necessarily has to be nonpartial.

LD: That’s true.

SM: So there’s the difference. That explains it.

LD: I’m so glad because particularly shooting the pilot of Tight Shots where we introduce everyone, and there’s a big group, (Nerve.com) was like, “Why are you always in wide shots?” I realized that we had no protagonist, and so there was no base to be shooting from.

With Creative Nonfiction, not to sound terrible, but it was always about me, and Brett really got that, that it was all either on my character or from the POV of my character basically. With that, I couldn’t even conceive how those shots would look. I just sort of said, “Brett, I’m overwhelmed. I need you to do this,” and he just made it happen. He’s a real film history buff, a very scholarly guy, and I know that he uses a lot of references when he shoots. So I just let him do this thing because I trust his relationship to other movies and his relationship to me.

SM: Before we move on to talk about your shorts, I wanted to know if there was anything else about Creative Nonfiction that you wanted to touch on?

LD: I was just thinking, actually this morning, about the main method of distribution of Creative Nonfiction thus far. I’m used to distributing over the Net, which I haven’t done with this. So my main method of distribution now has been DVD trades with other filmmakers, just sending it to assorted people who I know and even don’t know, and getting their thoughts about it.

People’s thoughts about the relationship between the 16mm footage and the digital footage are so varied. Some people wish there was more 16mm; some people wish there was no 16mm. Some people say they are distracted by the 16mm; some people say that they are distracted by the video. Somebody told me that they thought cutting between those was just an exercise in technique but it wasn’t a very interesting plot device; where somebody else thinks that’s what gives the movie its plot. So I’m still trying to work out the relationship between those two things in my mind, but I know that it was something I was really compelled to think about, the stories we tell ourselves versus what’s actually happening to us.

SM: What’s interesting also about the difference between the 16mm and the digital here is that even within your shorts there seems to be a dichotomy of theme, a battle between the absurdity of Zooquarium and Making Sense, for example—and Making Sense walks this line best—and then turning around to be really sad. That was something for me visually manifest in Creative Nonfiction with the 16mm and the digital. It was almost as if whatever sadness existed in the digital could only find its voice in the 16mm.

LD: That makes so much sense…In my head I’ll see scenes from my life from multiple angles, from multiple cinematographic angles, and I feel like the sadder things are, the harder things are, the more I distance myself in that way. I was trying to convey that for my character, and I’m really glad if it got through to you in any way.

SM: There is something about film that makes it instantly melancholic. I think that’s because we see it as a passé format, or at least, it’s coming to be seen as a passé format, and anything of the past gains this importance that’s built in loss.

LD: Working in film it’s like—you know how when you look at old pictures of your parents, you imagine that their whole world had this strange slightly yellow tint that the picture has? That’s always been the thing for me, like, “Wait, Mom, when you were a teenager, everything was black and white, right?” That phenomenon, I don’t totally know how, relates to my feelings about film.

It’s also really interesting to work with such a chancy medium. You’re making it, and you don’t really know what’s going to come out. That’s crazy to me. I’m of a generation where you take photos and see them instantaneously on your camera, and so there’s something inherently emotional and anxious for me about working with film.

…When I was shooting digital, I was often scared that my message and the strength of my desire to make the film, all the hard work that had gone into it, would be lost because of the fact that it was on this very casual looking medium. Somehow I felt as though when I was shooting on film that it really allowed me to show what I’d been feeling all along but hadn’t had the resources to convey. The formality that I always felt about it was suddenly apparent, and so I felt like, “This needs to be in here for people to understand how serious I am about this.”

SM: Do you worry about, at all, as an artist releasing Creative Nonfiction, the praise or censure that you’ll receive?

LD: Just within the screenings I’ve had with professors, the screenings I’ve had at school, (the feedback) was really great. Joe [Swanberg] was so supportive of the movie and forwarded it to South by Southwest and Sarasota. Neither of those festivals wanted to take it, but I got nice letters from both of the programmers who were like, “This is interesting, but it’s not going to fit into my program this year.” In some ways, that was really disheartening, and the criticisms I could level at my work are: maybe they think this is some quasi-mumblecore that doesn’t quite make it. There were lots of criticisms that I can love about my work, and I also feel like it’s a pretty weird movie. So when it resonates with someone, after it hasn’t resonated with other people, that’s even more exciting.

SM: Most of the artists that I talk to are young, and yet put so much pressure on themselves. There’s a fascination we have in this society with youth culture displaying preternatural genius, and I do feel it’s completely unfair.

LD: My dad teaches at Yale graduate painting department, and he says, “Every kid makes work that they think is the best work they’re ever going to make, and they think that right now they’re at their peak of artmaking, and they need to be getting shows, and they need to be selling their work, but they’ve come to grad school to learn. If you think you’re supposed to be making work that’s free of mistakes, that completely defeats the purpose of your 45,000 dollar a year graduate education.”

For me, I can see so many issues with this movie, so many things that even now, [eight] months later, I would do differently, but I also feel that it’s the movie I could make at the time. That’s not something I want to shy away from. I can see myself learning as I watch it, and I don’t feel scared to show that to people as long as they understand that I’m not going to just continue in the same vein eternally. I’m learning so much everyday just from watching and doing.

SM: A piece of art can only exist in that moment, and that’s not to say there isn’t something universal and timeless in that. I’m really attracted to the fact that a song ends. I’m really attracted to the fact that a film ends, that something has a definitive point at which it will no longer be perceived the same way again. Perhaps that’s the lesson that applies to this film for you as an artist and also for anybody who watches it, that you’ll only ever perceive this film, you’ll only ever make this film, the same way once.

LD: My boyfriend is always planning projects, and he’s always like, “I just don’t know if now’s the best time for me to do it. What if I just do it, and then in six months figure out that it should have been entirely different? Maybe I need to give myself more time.” When I give myself more time, it doesn’t happen.

Creative Nonfiction was really funny because I was initially going to make it—it was right after I’d been to Slamdance, and for some reason Slamdance attracts people who e-mail everyone with shorts films, and producers are asking for the ideas you have, who represents you, crazy when you’re just like, “I made this five minute movie on my Handycam. What are you talking about?” Somehow, because Slamdance is in Park City, it attracts that attention—so, I was initially talking to a producer about making it, not for very much money but for a lot more than I made it for in reality, which was in the very low thousands. Then I realized I wasn’t comfortable with the amount of control the person wanted to have and the changes that they wanted to orchestrate. So I knew it was either: do it, or the project loses momentum and dies.

…There are certain times where I’m like, “You know, my basic message got across, but I think I could have done that more elegantly if I’d taken even another three weeks to plan it.” But, also I’m always feeling like I need to seize whatever opportunity comes my way. It can be a little compulsive.

I know this: If I want to keep making movies, and if I want to do it for more money, it can’t be such a quick thing, like if I think of it Tuesday, I shoot it Friday. It’s not going to work that way forever, so I enjoy embracing that right now.

SM: And, then it does lend itself to rapid self-exploration. It’s very hard to tackle that longer piece unless you know you have a question that’s going to take you a long time to answer. I really do feel like, in a certain sense, when you’re making a film, you’re posing a question. Then, by the time you’re done with the film, you should have an answer.

…There seem to be threads in your work: this idea of absurdity, this idea of the bittersweet, this fun-loving, prankster playfulness. Within all of that, what do you think your primary concern is? If you look at all your pieces together, what is the question you’re trying to get at?

LD: I think about this with my parents. With my mom’s work, the movie that she made is called The Music of Regret, and the retrospective was called The Music of Regret, and she thinks so much about nostalgia, regret, what could have been but wasn’t. That’s just her thing, and she’ll never get away from it, I feel. So, I’ve thought before, “My mom’s got a thing; what’s my thing?”

I don’t know if I’ll never get away from it, but I think a lot about who we think we are versus who we actually are, our self-defined persona versus how we’re perceived. A lot of the characters I play especially have a very different idea about themselves than the people around them do. Particularly with my character in Tight Shots and some of the other characters I’ve played in shorts are girls who maybe on the inside know the impression that they’re making. It’s very hard for them to access, and so the basic thrust of it is that they have no idea what they look like. Sometimes they have no idea that in some way they are appealing, but most of the time, it’s just that they have no idea what assholes they’re being.

That’s something I’m concerned about with other people too. Rel’s character in Tight Shots has a very different idea about how women perceive him than what is actually happening. The fact that Rel was willing to poke fun at that part of himself was so incredibly appealing to me because it felt like it was so much in line with what I’m trying to achieve.

SM: Then the question, specifically with Rel, is: How much of that delusion or lack of self-awareness do you manifest into truth? Does your self-perception become the reality because that is the most potent vibe in the room?

LD: Totally. With Rel, it’s like, there’s one way in which girls are like, “Oh, my god, he’s just a sleazy, dorky Jewish boy. What does he think he’s doing?,” that part where Sara’s like, “He thinks he can just look at us all, and we’ll just all take all our clothes off. It’s horrible.” But, then he thinks that, and so it happens. He does look, and the clothes come off.

Have you heard about that terrible movie called The Secret?

SM: Is this based on the book?

LD: Yeah, it’s based on the book. It’s this self-help revolution, and basically the secret—I’m going to give away the secret—it’s the power of positive thinking, manifesting what you want through thought. I was like, “Dude, any of us could have said that and made eight million dollars on our terrible book.” But, I think of Rel’s character, and I think, to some degree, everyone has the secret down.

SM: It’s really cool that you know your concern is with identity and the way that differences are perceived by the individual and by society…Now that you mention that, I can see that in every single one of your shorts. The only short, for me, that falls out of that landscape a bit is Zooquarium…I was hoping you could talk to me a bit about where that short came from.

LD: Firstly, I just saw that place. It’s at our college pool. My mom did a lot of underwater photography, and so I’ve always been really attracted to it. So, in this space where you can just watch the swimmers in the pool, I was like, “This is one of the most unbelievable things I’ve ever seen.” My friend Marisa, who’s the girl in the short, was pointing people out as they dove in, and I just thought, “Oh, my god, this is like watching a little girl at the zoo, but she’s a little people watcher.” Then my fantasy life took off, and the only thought I had was, “This is my own ridiculous, oblique way of addressing my totally neurotic and not at all scientifically based fears about climate change.”

SM laughs.

LD: I know that sounds ridiculous. I don’t know very much about global warming, but I just finished a class that left me more neurotic than ever. I’m convinced that my house is going to be flooded at any minute.

That was my ridiculous way of being like, “Everything is going to be so different and sci-fi soon.” So sometimes when I talk about that short I get embarrassed, just because I feel like there was a certain heavy-handedness in my way of thinking about it.

SM: I don’t think the heavy-handedness comes across.

LD: I’m so glad to hear that because I was like, “If anybody ever finds out I was thinking about global warming, I’ll kill myself.” Now I’ve let the secret out.

SM: So funny.

LD: That was a total departure. I found (the actors) performances to be so innocent and timeless, and the fact that we decided to do the wearing all white, they became these archetypal people on a date.

SM: The other strange message that I read into the short was the idea that when people are in a relationship, it’s very easy to look out at other relationships and people’s lives, and in that observation, to really make them others, to judge what’s happening to other people from this place of safety. It was funny for me, that it mirrored the same way we’re able to look at other cultures and make judgment calls about what they are like.

Then, on top of that, we’re watching this couple, watching others. Because of that, there is that question of, “Are we judging them as they judge someone else?”

LD: Totally. Also, when you’re in a relationship, you’re in this weird, little club where you’re like, “Oh, my god, everyone is so weird,” which has totally befallen me at various times, where I’m like, “Why is everyone besides my boyfriend so weird?”

SM: (laughing) Then you wake up one day and realize, “Oh, my, I’m the weird one! How’d that happen?”

LD: Totally, and you spend the rest of your adult life reckoning with that fact.

SM: Then in brief illuminant moments you feel as if, “Ha! I am normal,” although you realize shortly after that you’re just lying to yourself all over again.

LD: Exactly, it’s so back and forth.

I’m so glad you got something out of that. I’ve been self-conscious about Zooquarium before. I’m so glad it’s something you were able to read things into, besides our upcoming global climate crisis.

SM: I also really love Making Sense. I thought it was terrific, audacious and strange, and along with The Fountain and Open the Door played with the idea of the prank. But, the really funny part of the prank aspect here is that it turns inward; it becomes a prank on the self. So, I was hoping you could talk a bit about that piece.

LD: (Josh Safdie and I) had been at Slamdance, and I made this joke about how I was going to sell him a dollar for fifty cents. It was a totally ridiculous joke I made. I was like, “Want this dollar?” He was like, “Uh…” “You just have to pay me fifty cents.” It was something I thought about writing a play about in seventh grade, so it was my little joke I’d been saving up. And, Josh was like, “Oh, my god, we have to do that for real!” I was kind of like, “Are you crazy?”

He totally orchestrated it. I went to his studio one day, and we built those change boxes. He was so serious about it that I was like, “I can’t help but just follow you on this mission.” He was so gutsy. I consider myself a pretty out there person, but I was so scared so approach these people, and Josh—I just could not believe what he was doing. He was walking up to homeless men. People loved him and responded to him so well, but I was just so shocked.

Then, when we looked at the footage, I was just like, “This is kind of unbelievable, that we actually went out and did this.” That was an amazing experience, and also, I think that seeing Josh act that way gave me the guts to do a lot of things on camera that I didn’t imagine I would do.

SM: What examples can you give me?

LD: The Fountain was totally Josh-inspired. Josh is such a character who’ll do pratfalls, fall on the ground at a film festival Q&A for fun; he just does what amuses him. That’s something I don’t know if I’ll ever become completely because I’ve too much of an adolescent girl in me, but I find it so inspiring.

SM: So there will be no pratfalls out of you.

LD: No pratfalls from me. It’s funny, the second day I met Josh I was at a festival Q&A, and he pretended to fall on his way up to the podium. I was like, “What happened?!?” Brett was like, “Don’t worry. He does this all the time.”

SM: (laughs) There’s definitely balliness in The Fountain. I love that your boyfriend comes up at the end and is like, “You just like being half naked in front of people. I don’t know if I can negotiate that in my head.”

LD: (laughs) I know!

We were actually planning to have him play the person who told me to get out of the fountain, and then the real security guard came. We were like, “Oh, my god, nothing better could have happened,” since the real security guard came over and was just like , “Please get out of the fountain.”

I run into that security guard all the time, and I always feel a little bit sheepish.

So then Ethan had this very honest reaction, which was, “I can’t believe my girlfriend made me come to the fountain,”—he works at the college; he’s graduated already—so, he’s like, “I can’t believe I’m at my place of work, my girlfriend is naked in this fountain, I had to assist her out of the fountain and make sure that she didn’t get arrested by campus security.” I think he was just boggled that he’d ended up there.

SM:…A question I’m always asking [when I see pieces like this is]: Have people, because of the digital age, become more performative in everyday life? We’ve always had some form of that performance—vaudeville, opera. Humans are extremists. We are all extremists. I think the digital age has just become a new way for us to explore and embrace the extremity.

LD: I think so too. Watching the final episode of Four-Eyed Monsters, I was so emotional, and then I realized, “You are essentially filming your break-up.”…The idea of people having these emotions that I find so affecting, but then I realize that there’s this shield between them and what they’re feeling in the form of the camera, in the form of playing for the camera, it’s troubling in some ways and definitely complicated.

SM: I was talking to one of my uncles this morning about objectivity, and he was trying to convince me that there is an objective reality in so much as there are definitives in time and matter. He’s a very religious man, and so I shot back to him that I found it interesting a religious man would consider matter objective. What this gets into is the fact that I do not believe there’s an objective reality at all.

LD: I feel the same way.

SM: So when an interviewer comes to you looking at Tight Shots, looking at Creative Nonfiction and says, “Oh, your aesthetic is one of reality,” I think there’s something strange about that, like—

LD: How are you defining reality? Maybe my aesthetic is my reality, but I don’t even know if I’m depicting that accurately because I’m going through this process which really distances me from it in a lot of ways.

SM: Exactly.

LD: It’s really complicated. For me it can be troubling because I’ll think, “I’m trying to do this thing which is honest and cathartic for me, but after the whole process am I farther from it or closer to it?”

SM: In the end, is what you’ve made only an approximation of what you originally saw, or is it what you saw?

LD: And, what was the purest experience, having the experience, writing about the experience? It’s layer upon layer.

SM:…There are so many issues when it comes to art and to life, and I think embracing everything as subjective is really important.

LD: I think so to.

SM: Maybe you can’t embrace everything as equal. Maybe that’s not possible with art, but maybe you can embrace it as legitimate.

LD: These are the questions where I’m like, “That is so big for me.” My boyfriend is so into philosophy and thinks about it so much, and sometimes I’ll be like, “Philosophy is not my thing.” Then I realize philosophy is kind of the only thing.