Did you worry from the start that presenting the fear and desperation of these women as humorous might ring a jarring or discordant chord?
Well, I think they go hand in hand because it's funny when people get desperate. I like comedy and my background is in television comedy, but I like drama and tragedy--weepies--and it seems entirely logical to me that you should have a movie with comedy, even knockabout comedy, that has a tragic or sad side as well. I like jokes but I like to cry also.

Mel Brooks once said that tragedy was a hangnail and comedy was a man walking into a manhole and dying.
(laughing) Yes. I knew that there was always going to be a fine line to walk in this film. These three women [of Crush] are very successful but are lacking this one ingredient that, turning forty, they still haven't found that perfect partner. It's the desperate hours so there was always going to be an edge of sadness, loneliness, and desperation. But we discovered that these women, in the act of talking about it in their "Sad Fuckers' Club" (The film's working title. -Ed.), they find a lot of humour in their situation.

Why the change of your working title to Crush?
Although "The Sad Fuckers' Club" was sure to catch the eye of cynical metropolitan film exec types--encourage them to never push it to the bottom of the pile. By the time we made the movie and saw what we had, we saw it was a much softer, more romantic movie "women's picture" than that title would imply. So though all along I expected the hand of Big Brother to impose itself, in actual fact in the end we changed it ourselves because we realized the audience who would really love this film would have difficulty asking for ticket to something called "Sad Fuckers' Club."

Tell me about Henry Braham's cinematography; his interiors especially are lovely.
I was very lucky to work with Henry--he's very good, very painterly. I wanted to make a "brown" movie, brown/gold sort of movie, so we banned blue from the movie and decided to use widescreen even though it's an emotional picture, not Star Wars. I was interested in landscape, in evoking the beauty and the claustrophobia of the setting. Widescreen is also very good for emotion: when you shoot someone in the format you're more aware of their thoughts in the context of a wider visual. Images immediately become more decorative and abstract.

Tell me about writing women.
I spent a long time writing men as a playwright in my twenties in Scotland. I decided at one point that there was a whole section of the audience I wasn't writing for and I much prefer now writing women than writing men. I find that my women say and do things my men never would. I think as a writer you're always trying to fool yourself into being more revealing or more truthful and often that's choosing the right subject, but sometimes it's finding the right mouthpiece.

Why Andie MacDowell?
In terms of "Kate," I wanted someone who could convince that she'd been very good all her life. You had to understand that although she was very beautiful, she'd always neglected that family and romance element of herself. Andie occurred to us very quickly because she can portray that innocence and yet it would be very interesting to see her be naughty.