Katie: I’ve always been an entrepreneur, I used to steal fruit and sell it back on the corner, like a little Mexican kid, but in my neighborhood, I was like a little fat redhead kid. People would literally buy grapefruit from me, then go home and say, "Wait, there’s none on our tree either!" That's some kind of a weird Robin Hood thing I did. My best friend in high school and I ran a General Hospital fan club, in which we would turn these photos we had taken of the soap stores into mouse pads and tote bags and we had a membership fee, and then in college I had a phone sex line.
Jamie: And she’s still broke! [Laughs]
Katie: [Laughs] I know, I’m trying to think of a new company! But I really like that idea of a really strong woman who kind of takes her own life by the reins, but she that can still be a really insecure, real person underneath who still has a lot to learn, and that’s something that inspires the movie Katie’s character.
Me: And do you think the girls making it on their own reminds you of making this movie?
Ari: Definitely.
Lauren: Making this movie for all of us is such a springboard, I mean Ari’s been acting and obviously done amazing projects up till now, but this is her first lead, and this is the first script that’s gotten made for us, and Jamie’s first feature and it’s so much about us, finding our voices in a way.
Jamie: There’s a lot of meta going on.
Katie: That can be the headline: It’s very meta.
Me: You wrote it for me!
Katie: Well you know, I’m a writer.
Me: I know a lot of it’s autobiographical, well not a lot but...
Katie: Well, yeah, inspired by a true story
Lauren: Katie and I were a random roommate match in college. I asked where the recycling was and had long hair and my boyfriend played the guitar. She called me “Earth Girl.” We had that interesting dynamic. Between us, I’m more of the straight and arrow, and she’s the lively one. But that’s how female friendships are, girls are different and you never know who is going to be your best friend.
Katie: This is pretty universal we’ve found, but I tend to judge women right away, a snap judgement. "She dated Brian, you don’t like her, I don’t like her." Or, "I hate her sweater," or "I want that sweater." You can take one small thing and you decide not to like someone from what you’ve seen, but there’s a lot underneath there that you don’t know about. So how great that Lauren and I did get to become best friends and we ended living together through the rest of college. So there’s that, and also the phone sex hotline that I had in college, that experience was always really funny to talk about. It’s racy and weird, and it’s this nice little hook around this sweet story about female friend love.
Me: Do you want to give a 30-second plug for why readers should see the film?
Katie: It’s a discovery film or surprise film, we like to say. You walk in thinking it’s going to be one thing and you walk out and it’s something totally unexpected. It has a real heart to it and it’s fun and I don’t think you are going to want those two hours back. Also, it’s only an hour and a half. [Laughs]
Ari: It’s like having a dessert for an hour and a half. There’s so few times you get to leave, just having had a fun, feel-good experience and that’s what this is.
Lauren: That’s such a cute way to describe it.
Jamie: It’s like a malt with two straws and a cherry on top, and you can go with your girlfriend, and you can wear cute dresses.
Lauren: For a good time, you should go see…
Katie: You should go with all your girlfriends, it’s like a fun thing and afterwards you can talk about dirty stuff and eat carbohydrates and then complain about it, that kind of thing.
Jamie: I think it also totally functions as a date movie, because men, as we’ve seen especially in Washington, D.C. where the response was so amazing and people were so enthusiastic, I think men would rather see a movie about phone sex than Bride Wars.