LA People 2009: Fucking With Drew Barrymore

“I loved all aspects of filmmaking. I studied it so much that I just kind of clicked and I was, like, producing, producing, producing, hmm. So, I decided to start a company and on a guttural instinct I asked this woman to start it with me,” she explains. “She’s very organized and I’m very disorganized, but we had the same creative tastes and intentions and approach to life. I had all this background and experience, but we both said let’s create like a college for how you [get to] be a producer. And we’re definitely not going to read any books written on it because that’s all going to come from, like, Hollywood people, and we definitely don’t want to party with Tinseltown and wine and dine — we want to go to school for how we would make movies. And that’s what we did.”

So they logged years — really years — watching documentaries, studying film, reading scripts, meeting with agents, making lists of writers and directors they wanted to work with. After starring in and unofficially helping hits such as Scream and Ever After get made, Barrymore’s Flower Films debuted as a full-blown production company with the modest back-to-high-school hit, Never Been Kissed. A year later, Barrymore also starred in the company’s monster Charlie’s Angels.

Kevin Scanlon

Drew Barrymore

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• Drew Barrymore
• Hollywood
• Donnie Darko
• Lou Reed
• Rollerderby

On the other hand, though, I’m talking about an underlying message discernible in most Barrymore films, going back to the Cinderella redux, Ever After, which says, basically, girls don’t have to take shit.

“What excited me most about that movie was that [it showed] the way I feel about life,” says Barrymore. “Don’t wait to be rescued, rescue yourself. I was so excited to do that movie. I was, like, yeah, man.’”

I confess that I still get verklempt at all the girl-power shit in the Charlie’s Angels films.

“I’m so glad you feel that way,” she says, delighted. “That’s all I wanted to come across. I love people who love each other and have a lack of competitiveness, but when they band together, there’s no stopping them. Oh, and P.S., if you can’t laugh at yourself, yeck, vomit.”

If her entirely human, preternaturally approachable persona is a put-on, it’ll take a keener eye than mine to discern how. For example, when I succumb to exhaustion and go prone on her leather couch seconds after introductions are made, the first laughing words out of her mouth are, “Please, make yourself comfortable.” When I bolt upright, she insists that I stay down. Then her ancient golden retriever, Flossie, who once rescued her from a house fire, ambles over and starts licking my hands.

I take that as a sign and from my back ask her about this movie Whip It, which she directed and is working mightily to finish up for a fall release.

“In a nutshell (and I can make a good story sound bad whereas my partner, Nan, can make a bad story sound good), it’s about a girl, played by Ellen Page, who lives in a small town and is battling her world — her family has a sort of a set of ideas of what your life is supposed to be — and she finds this Austin roller derby team. The movie is really about finding your tribe out in the world. It’s not about winning or losing. It’s about being yourself and being okay.”

When I tell her my grandmother, like the characters in Whip It, was a roller derby girl, she says, “Get the fuck out, that’s awesome!”

Barrymore plays derby demon Smashley Simpson, and the story fits with a credo she’s pursued in both her films and her life.

“It’s a little bit of be your own superhero. I was a girl who never believed that girls couldn’t do what boys can do. And I don’t believe in being repressed, or ‘no’, or that your dreams have limitations. And whatever people told me or society or anything that got in the way, or was tearing away at that idea, I just never let it. I think that’s very, very true to derby. It’s, like, this is who I am. I don’t care if it has to come out in another form and an alter ego, but I want to go out there and kick ass and have fun and be theatrical and capable while I’m fucking doing it and have a good time and party. It’s this whole culture, and the metaphor of it is so beautiful and interesting and I dig it and agree with it.

“That’s just the derby part of the film,” she says. “It’s also got a lot of comedy and a lot of drama because if you’re not laughing through life, you’re fucked, and if you don’t explore the heartaches of falling in love and getting your heart broken or the struggles you go through with your family in order to try and make it work . there’s drama in life and there’s bad-ass action and I just love all those things and I wanted to incorporate them all into one film.”