There have been plenty of films made about recent college graduates trying to figure out their place in the world, but not many by filmmakers as close to the situation as Lena Dunham, a 24-year-old film school graduate who stars in and directs her second feature, Tiny Furniture, which is out in limited release this weekend. The overlaps between the story and Dunham's own life are hard to ignore-- she plays a 22-year-old film school graduate, cast her mother and her sister to play the character's family, and shot most of the film in her parents' own Tribeca loft-- but unlike her character Aura, Dunham is well-aware that self-absorbed college graduates are also kind of hilarious too.

Thanks to Dunham's keen awareness of both her own flaws and that of her generation, she makes Tiny Furniture far more than just a navel-gazing exercise in feeling sorry for yourself, but a comic, satiric look at someone who graduates with the world at her feet, but can't see past the fact that she's not as pretty as her younger sister and the guy she has a crush on doesn't feel the same way. Dunham's film won the Best Narrative Feature award at SXSW in the spring and got her the attention of Judd Apatow, who is shepherding Dunham's new HBO series about three girls navigating post-college life in Manhattan. Yes, you could definitely say Dunham sticks to what she knows, but when she does it so well, why should she?

I've transcribed the first half of our interview, in which we talk about building Aura as a selfish and often wrong character and Dunham's own lack of vanity in playing her (she's frequently half-naked or wearing unappealing clothing). The second half you can watch on video, in which we talk about her work with Apatow, the challenge in putting realistic female characters onscreen, and the meaning of the word "mumblecore," an indie film movement of which Dunham is at least peripherally a part.

The character is fairly self-absorbed throughout the movie, which is a tough thing to pull off even when you're not the director and the star at the same time. Why did you want to take the character in that direction?
For me, that character, she's in pain and she's not able to see outside of it. As her creator, that's my sympathetic read of what she's going through. She's trying to connect with other people and finding it challenging. I've had moments of deep self-involvement that didn't come from a place of loving myself but quite the opposite. That's what this character's experience is. To me it can outwardly appear navel-gazing, but ultimately she's trying and failing to get outside herself. There's a lot of stuff in there that isn't me, that's parts of me but enhanced. It's a complex mix.

Why was that self-involvement an element that you wanted to bring out?
When I write I'm never really thinking about themes or the universal. It's writing from the heart and hoping it will be resonant. For me it just felt like an honest depiction of an emotional state that I could recognize, and one I could recognize in other people.



There's the sense of entitlement and also privilege in this character, and they're things that can destroy a movie that isn't as aware of that.
My feeling is that problems are relative, and I understand that it's not a piece of political commentary, it's not calling awareness to a giant social issue, but it's treating the pain of somebody. That's a theme as old as time, having everything an having nothing. The character is in such a convoluted place she's not able to recognize the things she does have, which is parents that love her and a place to live and a college degree. Hopefully six months down the line she'll understand the significance of all of that, but at that moment she's too wrapped up in her own anxiety to be able to see that.

Do you feel like you don't have the ability to write about something else yet?
It's sort of that, but I feel like it's a unique privilege to be able to write about what you've just been through just after you'd been through it. There are a lot of stories I want to tell that are farther away from myself. It's not like I don't want to write other kinds of stories, but I"m just writing what feels urgent to me.

Were you ever going to write this for another actress?
I'm sure there were other actresses who could have done it, and who could have brought totally different, better stuff than me, but it was part of the process for me to do it myself.

You show a real lack of vanity in this, which a lot of actors have, but when you also have to edit it yourself.
There are lot of things that give me anxiety, a lot of things that torture me, but looking unglamorous or the looks aspect of the whole thing really isn't one of those. For me it's like a real release from the image self-consciousness of everyday life to be on camera and let that go.