Jill Soloway
Jill Soloway
Jill Soloway is an American comedian, playwright, feminist, Emmy-winning television writer, and award-winning director who won the Best Director award at the Sundance Film Festival for directing and writing the film Afternoon Delight. She is also known for her work on Six Feet Under and for creating, writing, executive producing, and directing the Amazon original series Transparent...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScreenwriter
Date of Birth26 September 1965
CityChicago, IL
CountryUnited States of America
By recognizing your own vulnerability you can recognize and identify with the vulnerability in others.
I think, because of the Internet, we're not looking at the very, very narrow channels for distribution that there used to be.
Whether you're writing television or movies, at some point you're going to encounter a male executive or investor who's going to say, 'I don't like that woman. She's unlikable.' And often, it's literally for being a regular human woman as opposed to an attracting human woman.
When you're making an independent film, it's like this actor plus this actor equals this funding, this financing. Pull this actor out, this actor is still here but this money's gone. It's this frightening puzzle mosaic that is the world of independent film.
I think I've always had that struggle my whole life, of feeling a little bit more gender-neutral, feeling more comfortable as a creative person when I'm dressed like a boy, when I'm dressed more masculine.
You just have to say over and over again: 'I am a director.' Nobody gives it to you. Nobody anoints you.
My sister and I created a show called 'The Real Life Brady Bunch,' which was sort of a theatrical sensation that got us attention in L.A. and New York.
My sister and I are incredibly close, and we created together from childhood through the time we spent in Chicago at the Annoyance Theatre.
My purpose as an artist is to heal the divided feminine in our culture. Well, okay wait, that sounds incredibly cheesy and like something a massage therapist might do at Esalen.
I was the kind of Jew who'd be in a bar, somebody would say it's Yom Kippur, and I'd go, 'Really?'
I think of myself as a producer. As a producer and as a showrunner, I already understand what it meant to gather people into a room and step back, to create the boundaries of 'everything's okay' to allow TV writers to go to their craziest places.
When I went to Sundance for 'Afternoon Delight,' I came back feeling like I wanted to take my experience that I learned from directing and bring that into a series.
We grew up watching Woody Allen and Albert Brooks movies, and we see this neurotic, annoying, unlikeable male at the center of a story, and people root for him anyway. I think that's really what we have been craving as women is the hero who doesn't look perfect and doesn't act perfectly.
Years of my life were lived knowing that I'd get a book out of them one day.