Interview with Marya E. Gates for Roger Ebert
Adapted by Susan Sandler from her play, the film centers on independent bookstore manager Izzy (Amy Irving) who is happy in her carefree life, filled with many vibrant friendships, a situationship with a married man named Nick (John Bedford Lloyd), and a newfound crush on a self-centered novelist Anton Maes (Jeroen Krabbé). That is until, on one fateful trip downtown to visit her Bubbie Ida (Reizl Bozyk), she discovers her Bubbie has hired a matchmaker (Sylvia Miles), who subsequently sets her up with a successful pickle man named Sam (Peter Riegert). Initially hesitant to give into such an old-fashioned tradition, Izzy soon begins to question her own needs and desires as her attraction to Sam grows despite herself.
Susan, what was the most rewarding aspect of transforming your stage play into a screenplay?
Susan Sandler: I teach an adaptation course at NYU, and it’s about the difference between dramatic writing, where you’re dealing with all of the constraints of the theater and everything is about compression, and in film, which is so much about stepping outside and letting your characters walk out into the world. So I thought about every possible place I could bring each of these five central characters from the original play, grow their friend circles, grow their experiences in New York, and grow the sense of how the genre can support it most authentically. The key for me was thinking about everything authentic and true and not forcing rom-com genre tropes into the work, but looking around at the worlds—the literary world and the Lower East Side world—and then Izzy’s journey from Uptown to Downtown.
