How to Make Rom-Coms Poetic with Kiwi Smith
Rom-com-versations is an interview series with people from the entertainment industry discussing all things rom-coms
Hi Meet Cuties,
This week I sat down with Kirsten Smith, better known as Kiwi, the amazing screenwriter, poet, and novelist who has worked on many of the classic rom-coms, like 10 Things I Hate About You, Legally Blonde and She’s the Man. Kiwi is also a published author, having written The Geography of Girlhood and Trinkets, which was later adapted into a Netflix series. But all of this started with her love of poetry, which also got her published in over 40 literary magazines, such as The Gettysburg Review and The Massachusetts Review. With her talent for writing coming of age stories for all audiences, Kiwi is one of the most notable storytellers of our generation. I hope you enjoy this interview with her!
💓 Naomi: What is your favorite rom-com?
💚 Kiwi: My favorite rom-com is My Best Friend's Wedding. I rewatched it recently at Cinespia’s drive-in theater and it really holds up! Julia Roberts' character is a flawed protagonist. She's doing something technically really unlikable, but she's overcoming so many obstacles all across the journey of the movie, which makes it really fascinating. Namely, the fact that the fiancé is played by Cameron Diaz and she's expecting to hate her, but she actually falls in love with her. It's a really fun way to see a protagonist– her goal is so terribly wonky and she's getting punished for it throughout the movie. I also love how her best gay friend becomes a really hilarious supporting character. It's an important thing to keep in mind about continuing to add complications by way of really funny supporting characters, too. It's very psychologically rich and it's beautifully directed.
💓 Naomi: One thing we were really curious about is how you got the name "Kiwi" from “Kirsten”.
💚 Kiwi: It's a childhood nickname that my mom gave me because she would put kiwi fruit in my lunch and I didn't know what they were. She started calling me "Little Kiwi". I brought the nickname back into my adult life because “Kirsten” always gets pronounced in a million different ways, and “Smith” is quite a basic last name. When I started working in Hollywood with my writing partner Karen, people would get “Karen” and “ Kirsten" mixed up all the time and I wanted to have a name that's memorable so I can feel like I'm standing out— you know, just like Madonna, or Prince, or Cher.
💓 Naomi: Kiwi is definitely a stand on its own name! Let's go back in time a little bit: you're obviously a very accomplished screenwriter, but you came into your career in screenwriting as a means to support your poetry. What made you fall in love with poetry in the first place?
💚 Kiwi: The poems I wrote were character snapshots of a person at a moment in time. Usually I wrote from a first-person point of view in my poems, but often I would meet somebody whose career really intrigued me-- like a tattoo artist or a person on the street-- and I would just imagine a very intense moment in their lives. It was a way for me to explore and jump into different people's personalities or characters, which was the intoxicating thing about writing a poem: getting to pretend I was inside their heads. I think there's crossover there with screenwriting in terms of jumping into another person's point of view. Also, there's such an economy of language required for writing poetry. Every word has to matter. That's not 100% true of a script, but when you're writing a great script, you want it to be great and you want every word to matter. I take that pretty seriously. I want it to be as concise as possible and as perfect as possible, like a poem.
💓 Naomi: I really liked that because there are constraints when it comes to poetry. You don't have as much space as a novel or a screenplay. Something we talk about at Meet Cute a lot is that moment that people connect with something or someone-- that meet cute moment-- and it is always an origin story of some sort, whether it's meeting your best friend, falling in love with a sport, or falling in love with another person. There's always one, very intense moment because it's a moment of serendipity a lot of times.
💚 Kiwi: Speaking of serendipity, Marc Klein-- who wrote Serendipity-- he and I had a meet cute during the 2008 writers strike. We were picketing and we met cute on the picket line. We had a super intense friendship to the point where everybody thought we were dating, but we weren't. We were just obsessed with hanging out together constantly. Then we ended up writing a screenplay about our obsessive friendship, called TMI, which one day we'll get made, one day…
💓 Naomi: That is an incredible meet cute story that someone needs to tell! In addition to poetry, you're also a published author with your first novel being The Geography of Girlhood, which is a coming of age story about a girl in the Pacific Northwest. I'm curious, what if any of this story is rooted in real life experiences of you growing up?
💚 Kiwi: There's probably a lot of overlap, more than is comfortable to admit honestly, because when the book first came out, people from my high school were saying, "I think this is about us, isn't it?" It's a novel in verse, so the foundation of it was me pulling together a group of 30 poems and using those to create a story spine that I could then turn into a novel and fill out with new poems I wrote. When it began, it was snapshots from different types of characters that I tried to create a throughline between them. The details of the protagonist are not quite from my life. It's about a girl whose parents are divorced, and mine were together for 50 something years. She has a younger stepbrother and a sexy, older sister that she always inspires to be, which I did not have. But I pulled a lot of emotional truth. On the surface, she's a very different girl than I am, but emotionally we share something. There's a lot of specifics in terms of vibe and tone and place. Like I said, a lot of people probably recognize a little bit of truth in a way that's uncomfortable for me. I actually wrote the poem in 10 Things I Hate About You, probably the most famous poem I'll ever write. I got introduced to a literary agent as a result who then read my poems online and he said, "You're really good. Would you ever consider doing a young adult novel in verse?" It was becoming its own genre and it just worked out really beautifully. It led to me writing another young adult novel, called Trinkets.
💓 Naomi: That's so interesting, and it's incredible that that started from poetry and then turned into a fully developed novel. You went from one medium or type of writing to another one. Who are some of your favorite poets?
💚 Kiwi: Sharon Olds is probably the most inspirational poet to me. She writes from first person, started writing in about the late seventies and is still writing today. Her stuff is very raw, sexual, honest, romantic, and from a strong female point of view. She's also spoken about how her work might not be totally autobiographical, which is equally as fascinating. I also love Anne Sexton who was kind of a contemporary of Sylvia Plath's in the fifties and sixties. These were women who are "insane," and I mean they had mental health issues, but they were writing the most glorious poems. I love Wallace Stevens, who is like a dude, but has really juicy language that I love.
💓 Naomi: You mentioned your novel, Trinkets, was turned into a TV show that's now a Netflix series. For those who aren't familiar, Trinkets is about three girls who develop an unexpected friendship after meeting at Shoplifters Anonymous. I love this trope of unexpected friendships and individuals who society sees as misfits coming in and finding support for each other. Where did the inspiration for this story come from?
💚 Kiwi: I feel like a lot of friends and women I knew had sticky fingers. There was a light kleptomania that was going on that was kind of punk rock and mischievous and kind of a diss to power and to patriarchy. It's the ultimate rebellion, it's naughty, it’s outsider-y, but it's not hardcore crime. I wondered if there was an actual Shoplifters Anonymous group, because I thought it would be a fascinating group of people. I just thought about how I want to go to that group, meet the friends of my dreams there, and have a secret friendship. We had superheroes who had dual lives. Why not shoplifters who were also normal people?
💓 Naomi: What was it like to translate one of your novels and to bring it to life on screen?
💚 Kiwi: It was very rewarding because I was working with a team of female writers, Amy Andelson and Emily Meyer. I felt I was too close to the book, so I wanted to have partners to bring it to life. What was really magical was we became the trio of the girls in the book in a way. I was probably the bad girl and they were more of good girls, but we maintained such a strong relationship throughout making two seasons of the show. We all three were learning about being creators and Executive Producers at the same time. It was really emotional because we were going through such a challenging learning curve, but made something that we all really feel really proud of. It honestly makes me tear up thinking about it.
💓 Naomi: It's so nice to hear that you had an amazing trio and that you all supported each other through that. Okay, we have to know: which one of your projects are you most proud of and why?
💚 Kiwi: It's so tricky, it's like trying to choose your favorite child. It’s probably 10 Things I Hate About You because for everybody involved in the film, it was our first major film. There was such a level of excitement about the whole thing, then to have it turn out so well, and to go on and resonate with the audience in the way that it has is pretty extraordinary. It's all very moving and heartbreaking too, just because we lost Heath, who was such the center of the story and production in terms of his leadership, charisma, and energy. We all take our friendship in making that movie really seriously because he galvanized us so much.
💓 Naomi: We're getting a lot of emotional reactions to you talking about this from our community. It's incredible to get your perspective on what it was like to work on it. Speaking of friendships, you and Karen McCullah have a deep working relationship and friendship together. Will you share about how you've developed this multifaceted relationship working with her?
💚 Kiwi: Karen and I had a great meet cute. When we met, she sent me a query letter because I was working in development, so I wrote to her asking to send me her script. She was living in Denver, I was in LA. She came out to LA and we got together. We had some drinks, then we started brainstorming and writing a script the night that we met on cocktail napkins. Then we went to a second destination and a third destination. We had a crazy first night. It's like we got pregnant on our first date because then all of a sudden she went back to Denver and we were writing a script long distance, which didn't sell, but then we ended up writing 10 Things I Hate About You together, long distance. We're really a sisterhood. I think we've given each other permission to explore other avenues of our writing. If one of us wants to write something that's personal to us, the other is deeply supportive. It's huge to have our own identity as well as our double identity as a team. She teaches me stuff, I teach her stuff, and we just continue to build. It's also really great to go back into this safe place where we can make each other laugh, even though we're wildly different people. We talked about opposite types of people becoming friends, and Karen and I are pretty opposite, but it's something that's worked.
💓 Naomi: I feel very lucky that we've gotten a chance to sit down with both of you. We're going to end on a fun one from the audience: do you have a favorite line that you've ever written?
💚 Kiwi: The poem in 10 Things I Hate About You I really love. I also really liked the "I object" line in Legally Blonde. It's a simple line but it’s a great moment in the movie. I also love the line from House Bunny, "The eyes are the nipples of the face," which is so ridiculous. We wrote it together in some crazy champagne fueled moment. It's just a ridiculous comment.
I hope you enjoyed this rom-com-versation! If you want to get more of Kiwi and her amazing rom-com writing partner, Karen, check out this video on their creative chemistry!
Stay tuned for my next Rom-com-versation.
xx,
Naomi