For Mature Audiences

Young Adult stars Charlize Theron as Mavis, an alcoholic, reality-TV-obsessed ghostwriter of teen novels who returns to her Minnesota hometown to steal back her high school boyfriend. Writer Diablo Cody (United States of Tara) and director Jason Reitman (Up in the Air) sat down with TIME to chat about Young Adult (which opens Dec. 9) at L.A.’s Tart restaurant–the spot where they originally met to discuss their first collaboration, Juno, which won Cody the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 2008.

Why did you want to make a movie about fame and narcissism?

Diablo Cody: I didn’t sit down intending to write about a person warped by pop culture, warped by attention. Originally it was more about alcoholism and obsession. But then I thought about what she does with her day, and we talked about the Kardashians and Mavis’ grooming rituals and fixation on being magazine-perfect to the point of torturing herself. In the first shot, you hear a sobbing woman and assume it’s the protagonist, but it’s actually Kendra [Wilkinson, from the reality shows The Girls Next Door and Kendra].

Jason Reitman: I locked into the fact that the character liked these reality shows. At one point we thought the only music in the movie would be the audio from these shows in the background, because that’s the sound track of Mavis’ life.

DC: I didn’t know that. That would have been some really artsy Soderbergh [stuff].

JR: I like to go one-third Soderbergh. That’s where I live.

DC: You never go full Soderbergh.

JR: When talking to Charlize early on, I sent her Keeping Up with the Kardashians and My Super Sweet 16 and The Hills. Diablo gave me a list. I said, “You’re obsessed with these girls and their youth, and you’re not becoming an adult.”

Do you think reading Us Weekly and watching reality shows are bad for you?

DC: I think it’s bad. I get a pronounced sense of guilt. The magazines are an invasion of privacy, and the shows have become creatively bankrupt. People are in full makeup when they’re supposed to be waking up. But the show Kendra is a fascinating case study because it’s about people who are past their prime, and they’re only in their 20s.

JR: If we took Kendra, didn’t change a thing about the visual cut but added dramatic music, would Kendra become a powerful, moving drama? Like Jonathan Franzen’s Kendra?

DC: Then I’d like to see Ryan Seacrest’s The Corrections, with wacky music and a bumbling patriarch.

Diablo, you’ve had every kind of fame. You’ve been a stripper.

DC: That’s a weird kind of fame. It’s certainly a bid for visibility. And I had a couple of years of local fame in Minneapolis.

For your blog? [Pre-Juno, Cody kept a blog for the alternative weekly City Pages that was largely about stripping.]

DC: Yeah, I’d get recognized at the mall and stuff. But I only experienced a true fame around 2008 [after Juno]. That kind of visibility is not for me. To enjoy being famous, you need to have a screw loose.

We have a whole generation under 25 who want to be famous.

DC: You can’t blame people for feeling that way. How many friends you can amass on social media is how we measure people now.

There’s that scene in Young Adult [warning: spoilers ahead] where the character Sandra, who still lives in Mavis’ hometown, says she’s jealous of Mavis’ life, even though she’s a sad drunk.

DC: Sandra represents a person who believes the only fulfillment in life is in being famous or wearing a certain dress. Her attitude is what feeds Mavis’ flaws.

Mavis reaches her lowest point, and she can still say, “Thank you, Sandra. You wanting to be me fuels my miserable life.”

DC: Mavis says, “How can these people be happy with so little?” Because to her, having a job and kids and friends is so little. That used to be considered a very full life. Now we’re bombarded with the message that each of us is a special snowflake and deserves to be found by E!’s cameras.

JR: Everyone watching the movie can look at that moment and say, “Here’s your chance: Change. Become a better person.” We’re blind to those moments in our own lives. All too often we look for a Sandra who lets us say, “No, it’s O.K. to keep being exactly who I am.”

It’s a gutsy choice. In most storytelling, there is change and some satisfaction.

DC: It’s a difficult choice to finance too. Before Jason was involved, I didn’t think this story had a chance of being made. It doesn’t have a traditional redemption arc.

JR: Films fall into two categories: movies that they presume everyone is going to see and movies they presume nobody is going to see. With a story like this, they go, “O.K., this is one of those movies no one is going to see, but maybe it’s worth making anyway for a tiny bit of money. We’ll put a star in it and confuse some foreigners.” We got to make this movie because Juno cost $7 million and grossed $230 million. It’s a tricky moment for these kinds of films. People don’t even want to watch television about adult themes. Mad Men is barely watched. I don’t know how Carnal Knowledge would do if it came out today.

My theory is that’s because adults no longer act like adults.

JR: That’s what we made a movie about.