Yahoo News Lena Dunham Says She’s Not Making Polly Pocket Movie: “I Don’t Think I Have That in Me”
Lena Dunham is no longer attached to the previously announced Polly Pocket film.
In a wide-ranging interview with The New Yorker published Tuesday, the Girls creator revealed that despite working on a script for three years, she decided it wasn’t the right project for her.
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“I’m not going to make the Polly Pocket movie. I wrote a script, and I was working on it for three years. But I remember someone once said to me about Nancy Meyers: the thing that’s the most amazing about her is that the movie she makes or the movie she would be making with or without a studio, with or without notes—that somehow her taste manages to intersect perfectly with what the world wants. What a fucking gift that is. And Nora Ephron, too, who was such a mentor to me, but always said, ‘Go be weird. Don’t kowtow to anyone,'” she said.
She also praised Greta Gerwig for her “incredible feat” with Barbie, which she said “was to make this thing that was literally candy to so many different kinds of people and was perfectly and divinely Greta.”
“And I just — I felt like, unless I can do it that way, I’m not going to do it. I don’t think I have that in me. I feel like the next movie I make needs to feel like a movie that I absolutely have to make. No one but me could make it. And I did think other people could make Polly Pocket,” she added.
Mattel says it still hopes to make a movie based on the property.
“Polly Pocket is in active development, and we look forward to sharing updates on the project soon,” a Mattel spokesperson tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Lena is a remarkable writer and creator and we wish her all the best!”
It was announced in 2021 that Duham was to write and direct the film which would follow a young girl and a pocket-sized woman forming a friendship. Lily Collins is attached to star as the titular toy.
Though no longer working on the film, one of the projects Dunham is currently busy with is a semi-autobiographical comedy series, Too Much, which will debut on Netflix next year. Co-created by Dunham and her husband Luis Felber, the show will star Megan Stalter in the lead role as a “an American woman in London who has had a bad breakup in New York and is confused, meeting a recovering punk musician (Will Sharpe) and trying to figure out if they can make a life together.”
Despite the series paralleling Dunham’s life, the writer explained why she was reluctant to cast herself in the leading role. “I knew from the very beginning I would not be the star of it,” she told The New Yorker before praising Stalter. “First, because I had seen Meg Stalter’s work, and I was very inspired by her. She’s unbelievable; I think people are going to be so blown away. We know how funny she is. But, then, when she enters a dramatic scene, you’re, like, ‘Oh, we got a little Meryl Streep on our hands!’ I was thinking a lot about, like, what is it that allows women to be complicated on TV and still be embraced and seen and understood? There’s an openness to Meg’s presence that I think goes a long way. She has whatever the opposite of resting bitch face is. She has resting angel face.”
She then shared that another reason she didn’t want to star is to avoid her body being “dissected again” by the public.
“I also think that I was not willing to have another experience like what I’d experienced around Girls at this point in my life. Physically, I was just not up for having my body dissected again. It was a hard choice, not to cast Meg — because I knew I wanted Meg — but to admit that to myself. I used to think that winning meant you just keep doing it, and you don’t care what anybody thinks. I forgot that winning is actually just protecting yourself and doing what you need to do to keep making work.”
Dunham went on to explain that she she is uninterested in attention and what makes her “feel powerful” is making work. “It’s the only thing I want to do. It is my only love in life aside from the people who are closest to me and my pets and books,” she added.
“I remember looking at Meg and being, like, ‘You are my muse. You inspire me every single day to go home and tap out pages upon pages.’ I definitely don’t want to be my own muse.”
Given Too Much will stream on Netflix, it marks a departure for Dunham whose previous creative-television home for Girls was HBO.
Of the change, Dunham explained, “I think the whole business is changing. I loved my experience with HBO. I hope there’s more. I’m still close to my executives there. Netflix, I happen to have a real creative connection with them on these two projects. If there’s a project that’s close to you and you find somebody who’s excited by it and understands it, that’s not to be taken lightly. It’s almost like when you’re young, and you keep saying there’s a lot of fish in the sea, and then you realize, ‘Not as many fish as I thought.’ I can feel the business contracting. So I enjoy having a creatively poly life style. Just as it doesn’t make sense that one person can meet all your needs, it doesn’t make sense that one producing home is going to understand everything that you make.”
Dunham recently starred alongside Stephen Fry in Treasure, playing the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. Under her company Good Thing Going, Dunham is working on two shows, Female Friendship and a Netflix C.I.A. series that she teases, “What happens when a group of college kids, who have all the issues, pains and fears of college kids, are tasked with an agenda of national protection?” She is also writing a memoir.
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