The director Nicole Holofcener knows some of her friends don’t like her films. “They’re never very effusive about my work,” she says over breakfast at a sunny Venice Beach café one morning in April. “For some reason, that’s okay with me.”

But there are other people whose disapproval would be intolerable. Certainly, a boyfriend would have to appreciate what she’s doing. “I’m an insecure person. Anybody who creates things from their heart, I think, is very vulnerable,” she explains. 

Her latest, You Hurt My Feelings, emerges from that anxiety. It’s a movie that articulates a nightmare anyone who’s ever produced art has had: What if the person you’re closest to is actually lying to you about liking your stuff? 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus, reuniting with Holofcener after starring in her 2013 rom-com, Enough Said, plays Beth, an author working on a new novel. Her husband, floundering therapist Don (Tobias Menzies), is encouraging to her face. Then she overhears him telling his friend (Arian Moayed) that he doesn’t like the new book, which sends her into an emotional spiral. 

Like all of Holofcener’s films, You Hurt My Feelings is rooted in her own life. “Because my movies are so personal, I sometimes wonder if the people in my life who love me—do they love my movies, and do they have to? And if they don’t, do they actually get me?” she says. “I feel like I am my movies, but I’m not, right?” She seems to be genuinely asking the question. 

You Hurt My Feelings is a return to form for Holofcener. She’s been one of the preeminent voices in American indie cinema since her 1996 feature debut, Walking and Talking, but still struggles to get her productions off the ground. In our conversation over coffee and toasts—during which Holofcener also peppers me with questions—she is frank about the unglamorous aspects of how she makes a living. “I feel like if I stick to doing what I love or really like, my career’s always in jeopardy,” she says. After she leaves me, for instance, she’s going to have to go home and get a producer’s notes on a Netflix script she’s rewriting. (For what it’s worth: Holofcener also did a pass on Marvel’s Black Widow.)

Her last writing credit prior to You Hurt My Feelings was on Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel, which she cowrote with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. It was a “blast,” she says. When I tell her I loved that film, she deadpans: “You and three other people that saw it.” She hadn’t written and directed a feature since 2018’s The Land of Steady Habits, based on a novel by Ted Thompson, mostly because she just hadn’t had an idea that “stuck” in a while. Originally, she thought she’d make Louis-Dreyfus’s character an actor. Instead, she returned to a more familiar line of work. “I made her a writer, maybe, because that’s what I do, I suppose,” she says. 

Holofcener’s movies are often about herself in one way or another, and she’s always feared rejection. In the past, she has shared a story about how her stepfather, the producer Charles Joffe, told her she should maybe consider a different profession after he watched a short film she made at NYU. I ask if that’s in You Hurt My Feelings. “It’s in everything,” she says. 

The short, Holofcener admits, was “terrible.” Called Every Other Weekend, it was a dramatic story about being the child of divorce, based on her own experience visiting her father in New Jersey. “I thought the movie was great,” she says. “And I did hear someone, while it was screening, behind me like, ‘When is this going to end?’” 

Holofcener’s films mostly take place in New York or Los Angeles—while she’s lived in both, her decisions are largely based on which will give her tax breaks—and capture the neuroses of the white middle-to-upper-class intellectual breed. Her heroines are never as successful as they want to be, often coveting a lifestyle that’s just out of reach. 

In Walking and Talking, her protagonist (played by her sometimes-muse Catherine Keener) spirals as her best friend (Anne Heche) prepares to get married and starts to doubt that commitment. In Enough Said, Louis-Dreyfus’s divorcée realizes she’s accidentally become friends with the ex of the guy she’s dating and starts absorbing her criticisms. Please Give is an almost prescient take on the embarrassments of allyship and the absurdity of white guilt, derived from Holofcener’s own experience volunteering. Holofcener wasn’t trying to make any grand statement about culture at large, though. “It was just about this character based on me, and how useless I felt volunteering, and the blind, bleeding heart of offering a Black man a meal when he’s just waiting for a table,” she says. “That happened to a friend of mine, actually. Not me, thank God.” Beth and her sister, Sarah (Michaela Watkins), also do volunteer work in You Hurt My Feelings. 

Still, Holofcener doesn’t think about her work in terms of overarching themes. “It’s only later I realize that I’m kind of repeating myself, like, Oh, shit. I’m doing that again,” she says. “And then I think, Oh, fuck it, whatever.” Similarly, only after the fact does she recognize that characters in her films are often overhearing things they aren’t supposed to. (In Walking and Talking, for instance, Heche calls Keener’s date “the ugly guy” on an answering machine without realizing he’s listening.)

It may be random to her, but for viewers it creates a universe of familiar stress that is uniquely Holofcener’s. The inciting incident in You Hurt My Feelings is devastatingly funny—and takes place at the gigantic Paragon store, of all places, in Union Square—but it also feels like it could happen to you. 

Despite her decades of creating critically adored work, it hasn’t gotten easier for Holofcener to finance her movies. Until A24 came along, this one in particular was “really hard,” she says. Even then, she only got 22 days to shoot—the shortest amount of time she’s ever had. She’s not sure when the next idea will come along, or if it even will. “I always feel like, and I’m sure most writers feel this way, that might have been my last one and I might have to live with that,” she says. “But I hope that’s not the case.”

As we’re talking, Holofcener mentions that the only character in You Hurt My Feelings who is not a “wreck” is Watkins’s Sarah. She’s an interior designer who is frustrated when her wealthy clients don’t like a particular light fixture, but she’s not losing sleep. I ask Holofcener if that implies we should all just pursue careers that mean nothing to us so we won’t become insecure messes. “That’s a really interesting question,” she says. She muses for a bit, then concurs.  

“Maybe we should all just have jobs we don’t care about, and then we can lead stable, secure lives. Yeah—really bad, boring, sad lives. But we’d be sure of ourselves.”