Joan saw you at a movie screening scarfing down popcorn, and that’s when she decided that she wanted to cast you as Izzy. Do you have any memory of that? What do you think struck her about you?
I always loved that she said “scarfing,” as someone with deep food shame. Great. I love it. And she continued to say that all through our promotion. This image of me feeding my fat face. Anyway, yeah, she had been looking for a long time for her Izzy. She knew her pickle man, Sam, but she didn’t know who her Izzy was going to be. I was with girlfriends in the Upper West Side, where I lived. I didn’t have makeup on. I was probably high. [Laughs.] So I was just very relaxed. And yes, I was scarfing down popcorn, and she got in touch. When she met me in Spain, she told me that that’s what clinched it for her. I think she previously thought that I was maybe precious or because I was, at the time, a little bit of a princess of Hollywood — being married to the prince — she just didn’t know that I was just a regular down-to-earth gal.

You think your image was such that you were kind of untouchable?
I think there was a good thing about being married to Steven and a bad thing about being married to Steven. The good thing about being married to Steven was that I was married to Steven. We had a family. We had love. The bad thing was people got very awkward with me, whether we were divorced or married. It’s like, “Do I want Steven Spielberg’s camp in my backyard when I’m shooting this movie?” I think it became harder for me to get work, both married to him and not married to him. I was just grateful when Joan just pushed through all the bullshit and just wanted who she wanted.

She saw you outside of that paradigm.
Yeah. I mean, I think Los Angeles, the movie industry, feeds on a lot of fear. I remember once I wanted a job, it was a little PBS movie. Noel Black, who did Pretty Poison, a really interesting director, was going to do this Sherwood Anderson short story, “I’m a Fool.” It was going to be me and Ron Howard acting in this very sweet period piece. We’re in a rowboat with parasols, all that. I went to meet Noel Black having just finished shooting the last scene of Carrie, in which I’m in my mother’s arms screaming my head off. My real mother, by the way. And so I’m screaming, take after take after take. When I arrived that evening for this meeting, I have no voice. I can’t speak anymore. But I was so confident. I didn’t feel like a fraud. I felt like I was the real thing. I went into this office and I had so much confidence, and I literally just talked Noel Black into giving me a part. In a whisper, rather than having to read for the role.

I think that was very indicative of the way hiring and all works in Hollywood. If you come in and you’re scared, they’re going to think, Oh, you don’t know what you’re doing. You need to exude confidence to get past other people’s fears. But I had a hard time later, and Joan was a real savior for me. She kind of gave me hope that I could still work in the business.

It’s really interesting, though, because some of the sort of lore of the movie is Joan talking about how she was having trouble getting financing, and Steven was able to get financing from Warner Bros., right?
Joan remembers it a little differently. What happened was, obviously Steven read the script with me. And Steve Ross, who was the head of Warner Bros., was like Steven’s surrogate father — his other father. We vacationed with Steve. So, I mean, it was a no-brainer to give him the script because we knew he’d love it. And he loved it, so that’s how the financing came out.

But it was funny, because Warner Bros. had never made a low-budget film like this. This movie cost $5 million to make, and the press alone cost more than that to promote it. They were kind of awkward with it at first. I don’t know if they really gave it the full push they could have. They were all very nervous about putting a Jewish movie out there. Joan did feel very confident after Moonstruck came out. It was a very Italian movie.

I read somewhere that the studio was initially like, “Well, why don’t we make them Italian?” That they were very uncomfortable with the Jewishness of it. There were obviously rom-coms about Jewish people — Nora Ephron movies, movies infused with a Jewish sensibility — but this is one of the only super, super Jewish romantic comedies where it’s two people and it’s specifically about being Jewish.
And there’s a bris.

Yeah, exactly. What do you remember about the pushback on that — on the Jewishness?
That was not while I was involved. I think once I became involved, everyone kind of shut up a little bit. I think I had enough cachet at that moment to help get it going. Or I guess knowing Steve Ross helped a lot. But because I wasn’t brought up in the Jewish faith, it wasn’t something that meant so much to me one way or another.

Your father was Jewish, right? But you were brought up —
Christian Science. I went to Christian Science Sunday school. I learned all about Mary Baker Eddy and Science and Health. And because of the power of positive thinking, I’m like the opposite of a hypochondriac. That’s what I got from it.

So when you were put into this Jewish Lower East Side film, did it feel foreign to you?
It was a world I learned a lot about while doing that movie — the whole world in the Lower East Side. Well, the Lower East Side was a hangout of mine for a while, but it was more about the Fillmore East. I don’t think I got on the other side of Delancey Street. It’s interesting — Izzy was not religious, and she was trying to get out of that culture, but she was also drawn to the culture because she had her great love for her bubby. Susan Sandler talks about how the love of her bubby was her main love. I think about going down there and meeting Reizl Bozyk, who kind of became my bubby too. The most delicious, delicious grandma you could have.

The whole matchmaker thing — I didn’t really know that that existed. It was kind of bizarre, but it was bizarre to Izzy, too. So it was like, I could use all that. And her resistance to Sam was not just being a pickle man, and it wasn’t about being Jewish. It was more that she felt herself in this literary world, because she ran this bookstore, and she was involved in bringing artists in and exposing people. I think she just felt like that’s where she belonged. When she became attracted to the asshole writer Anton, it was more like she thought that was her lane. So she resists the whole matchmaking and the pickle man and everything. But then she gets off her high horse and feels something in her heart and learns a different value — being able to actually look at the person and say, “Oh, this is a good person and this is someone I could lose my heart to.”

And here is an excerpt related to The Fury:

How did playing this role or making this film change you at all? Did it change the way you related to men, to relationships, to Judaism, to New York?
Making movies is a lot of sitting around and waiting and working yourself up to do this one scene again. That kind of screeching up from zero is sometimes very hard. So I loved working in a lower-budget film like this, where you had to keep moving. I loved being the lead because I was in every scene, just about, so I didn’t have to sit around. I’m a theater actor, so I’m used to getting on the stage and doing the whole thing to the end of the thing. It’s a way I feel comfortable working. And that was the closest to that feeling that I’d ever had. I was not offered a lot of big pictures, but still, it was the independent, smaller-budgeted films I felt more comfortable in.

How did you feel like it changed your life or changed the trajectory of your career?
Well, you’d think it would’ve changed it in a pretty nice way. It was a really awkward time for people dealing with me. Because right after the film came out, Steven and I were divorced. And if you think they were awkward with me when we were married, they would literally walk across the street to avoid talking to me.

Why?
“What if Steven thinks I’m in Amy’s camp?” They didn’t realize Steven and I had parted as friends. But they just assume or whatever. I actually had to leave Los Angeles. That’s when I moved to New York.

You left because it was so awkward in L.A.?
I left because it was awkward and I thought, Well, if I can’t work in film, I’ll get back to my true love, which is theater. Which is what I did. I went back to New York to do theater. I assumed that film wasn’t going to be my medium.

Do you feel like that was the right choice, leaving L.A.?
Well, I really was never in love with living in Los Angeles. It’s a one-note town, and I was a San Francisco girl first. I moved to New York when I was 11, and then New York was home. I did my time in L.A. That’s how I feel about it. But I love living in New York. I just think it’s real life. I don’t have plastic surgery all over; when you’re out there in L.A., they all do that. They all just suddenly get worried about wrinkles, and I’m kind of embracing mine. I’m old enough to be able to not have to look young anymore, which is freeing. They’re not going to start a film on my ass in a bikini. Like in The Fury, when Brian De Palma told me that was our first shot. I was like, Oh, my God. That’s horrifying. I went on one of those fad diets. I think in those days it was — they used to shoot pregnant women’s urine into your thigh to break down the fat.

What?!
Swear to God, there were so many ridiculous fad diets.

They would shoot pregnant women’s urine into your thigh? What is the science there?
I think it broke down the fat, and then they put you on this specific diet that would rinse the fat through.

Did it work?
Well, did you see my ass in The Fury?