Lena Dunham, the creator of HBO’s “Girls,” doesn’t read reviews of her show — she reads tweets.
“It’s crazy. It’s so addictive. It’s so weird. I wish that I wasn’t so addicted to reading the Tweets about the show,” Dunham tells The Hollywood Reporter in a new interview. “I don’t really read reviews … that’s not where my attention goes. But I love seeing the real-time reactions of people who aren’t critics, who are just experiencing the show at home.”
She says her fans’ tweets can even influence the show’s direction.
“I’m consistently surprised by my audience, and also amazed by their sort of wit in the things that they pick out as sort of themes in the show that I didn’t even see,” Dunham says. “I sit at home thinking, like, ‘How did they feel about Adam this week? Are they liking him more?’ ‘Are they connecting to Marnie?’”
“Girls” follows Dunham as Hannah Horvath, a mixed up Michigan native trying to navigate post-collegiate life in Brooklyn, with her best friends Marnie (Allison Williams), Jessa (Jemima Kirke) and Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet), as well as her bizarre boyfriend Adam (Adam Driver).
Dunham, who Judd Apatow took under his wing after seeing her 2010 indie feature “Tiny Furniture,” says she grew up as a comedy fan but never thought of herself as a comedy writer.
“I never sort of thought of myself as a comedy writer, by nature,” she tells the Hollywood trade. “I never thought of myself as like, a funny person. In some ways, I guess, I must’ve been, because I actually did stand-up comedy and stuff in high school — like, I went to a stand-up comedy class, which is embarrassing to admit. So there clearly must’ve been a part of me that felt that that was an itch I needed to scratch.”
But she adds that even when she tried to write serious material, people always seemed to laugh.
“I would write this, like, super earnest poetry and really intense short stories, and I’d say things that felt really emotional to me, and people would still laugh at them,” she says. So I was like, ‘Oh. Whether I’m trying to be funny or whether I’m trying to be serious, it still seems to be eliciting the same reaction from people.’”
Her show just finished its first season.