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
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.
I'm a fan of Louis C.K., I'm a fan of Lena Dunham. I love shows about people that other people would consider unlikable, or, like, the work of Woody Allen and Albert Brooks.
Watching 'Girls,' it was really angering for me at first, because I really had spent decades hiding unlikable, unattractive Jewish girls in likable, attractive, non-Jewish actors and characters.
Years of my life were lived knowing that I'd get a book out of them one day.
We're a whole culture of people who have a really hard time seeing beyond themselves.
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.
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.
Some of you guys are going to boo, but I'm going to say it anyway. I don't like dogs.
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 think, because of the Internet, we're not looking at the very, very narrow channels for distribution that there used to be.
You just have to say over and over again: 'I am a director.' Nobody gives it to you. Nobody anoints you.