I Feel Pretty Filmmakers Address The Film's Early Backlash: 'It Was Super Frustrating'

Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein have been a formidable Hollywood duo for over 20 years. Having met in film school in the '90s, the pair has written some of the most seminal films in the romantic comedy genre, from Never Been Kissed to He's Just Not That Into You. While the nature of their relationship has changed over the years — Kohn and Silverstein dated for seven years, broke up, and have since gone on to marry other people — the creative energy that fuels their long-lasting partnership hasn't. The way they tell it, they just balance each other out.


With the release of their latest film, I Feel Pretty, out right now, Kohn and Silverstein also make their directorial debut. The film follows Renee (Amy Schumer), a young, meek professional who struggles with feelings of insecurity on a day-to-day basis. However a freak spin-class accident makes her visualize herself as "undeniably pretty." Renee's newfound confidence lands her the job of her dreams, a wonderful guy, and nearly derails her friendships.


MTV News chatted with Kohn and Silverstein about their creative partnership, subverting Hollywood tropes, and dealing with the "frustrating" backlash surrounding I Feel Pretty.


MTV News: You've been working with each other for over 20 years, and in that time the nature of your relationship has really changed. So I'm curious: What's the bedrock of your creative partnership?


Abby Kohn: We really have done the complete journey with each other, from meeting in film school and Marc being the star of my first Super 8mm, black-and-white non-sync movie to selling our first script and asking ourselves, "Are we even going have the ability to create this our career?" We've done it all with each other — every meeting we've ever had, every great-news phone call we've ever had — in a way that nobody else could.


Kohn and Silverstein on the set of I Feel Pretty


Marc Silverstein: For whichever reason our joint sensibility works. It creates something else that is viable. I can't quite describe why it works, yet it does. It's the push-and-pull of what she likes and what I like and the weird checks and balances that we go through to produce something else entirely.


MTV News: What are those usual sensibilities?


Kohn: We meet in the middle on our preference movies and filmmakers. Although then Marc will visualize a movie and mention, "I loved it. I think you will hate it." Because he's more tolerant of... Weirdness.


Silverstein: Yes.


Kohn: And I'm more tolerant of a little more cheese.


Silverstein: With each other, we mitigate the too-weird or too-cheesy of each other into something that works. It's really funny. Our agent will send us something and we'll be like, "I'm not interested in doing that at all." And he's like, "Yes, however in case you could figure out how to be interested in doing it, it will be really good." That's how we work. We're routinely in a constant method of convincing the other person that what we wish to do is a good idea. One of us is resistant and the other is routinely cheering it on.


Kohn: Or coming up with a new way to pitch it that actually makes it more interesting to that person and, in return, to yourself as well.


Silverstein: And the world. I think Abby's accountable for how our movies are so acceptable, and I'm accountable for the fact that they're not exactly like all of the other movies in that genre.


MTV News: So who'd the idea for I Feel Pretty? Because you had been working on it for years.


Silverstein: It was Abby's idea first, for sure.


Kohn: Then I pitched it to Marc.


Silverstein: I wasn't resistant at first, however I was like, "Can we maintain that for a whole movie?"


Kohn: From the very starting, I was like, "We must never visualize what she sees." That was in the opening three sentences of the idea.


Silverstein: I like that we never visualize it because then that's different. And then I got super excited about doing a version of that scene you often visualize in movies like this, where they go tell their companions that they've changed and so they have to convince them that they're still them, although in this movie her companions just look at her like she's crazy because it's naturally her. That's funny to me.


Those weird, specific scenes are my main go to scenes, like her meeting [her love interest] Ethan's character in the laundromat and the funny miscommunication of how that happens. Or towards the end of the movie any time if he thinks they're role playing and she thinks he can't recognize her. For me, I'm serious about playing out the tropes of a movie like Big...


Kohn: Yet putting a whole different spin on that because nothing has changed.


MTV News: And Big is in the film.


Silverstein: It's in there because we wanted people to know that we knew what we were doing.


MTV News: This also marks your directorial debut, which means you were accountable for every aspect of this film. I know there was some pushback from producers on the idea that you never visualize Schumer's Renee as she sees herself. How did you navigate some of these tough conversations?


Silverstein: It was hard!


Kohn: I think we did a lot of excellent group effort, however if you're going to helm this ship, and you also wrote it and directed it, there's going to be moments where you feel like you really need to stand firm.


Silverstein: We were also super lucky in having Amy's full creative support. From the jump she was like, "You can never visualize that."


MTV News: How did you react to the initial backlash to the premise once the opening trailer dropped? Because I think the concept here's really hard to advertise. Some people online thought Schumer's character was the butt of the joke.


Silverstein: It was super frustrating because once you've seen the movie, you know that it can not be further from the truth.


Kohn: It's exactly the opposite of that. So that was really frustrating. I had some long conversations with those people in my shower. [Laughs.] However I think it's really a referendum on past Hollywood movies that have been sort of tone deaf, and right now they are assuming a certain thing.


MTV News: The death of the romantic comedy has been written about for years. As writers of some of the most seminal films in the genre, what's your take on that? How has the rom-com evolved?


Silverstein: Any time people talk about it, they're talking about 27 Dresses or How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days — those kinds of movies where it's strictly like girl wants guy and there's an obstacle. The hope of the movie is to get this couple with each other, and that has sort of gone away. For several reasons, although I think the plotting is tough to do right now in the way social media works and the way folks are meeting each other.


Kohn: Maybe people used to appreciate the predictability and right now they reject the predictability.


Silverstein: So the way it operates is that you're pushing the romance into different kinds of movies. We visualize our movies more as character comedies. Never Been Kissed is about a girl who goes back to high school for a job thinking she's going to kill it and ends up being the same loser she was the initial time. There's a romantic element to it, nevertheless the movie isn't about that. It's the same with I Feel Pretty; it's about Renee's journey with a little bit of romance... I do think there will be a down-the-middle romantic comedy that succeeds again. If someone can crack that, it's a super satisfying kind of movie. Maybe we'll try it.


MTV News: I love how you subvert some of those tropes in I Feel Pretty. Ethan is a very uncommon male lead in that his insecurity is this idea of hyper-masculinity. It makes him uncomfortable.


Silverstein: It's me! I am Ethan.


Kohn: Marc doesn't do Zumba, nevertheless the idea that Ethan does was in the very first draft of this movie. Kudos to our producers for letting us have that character.


Silverstein: And Rory [Scovel] just paid for into it. He's so funny at it, and it's endearing. It felt like a very real thing that I struggle with as an insecurity, and we were very specific in the writing of the movie in giving everybody their own insecurity that wasn't about looks. Each person has their own Achilles' heel that they feel like is holding them back. For a male, that's what it felt like for me, the trends and norms of masculinity are so in flux that it is hard to get ahold of how you're supposed to act.


MTV News: And having a male who's turned on by a confident woman with a larger-than-life personality is also underrepresented on screen.


Silverstein: That's also me!