A Sisterhood of Writers

Sisters Nora and Delia Ephron are sitting in Nora’s kitchen discussing their latest collaboration, “You’ve Got Mail.” On the table is cold ham and strawberries, which they produced with practiced teamwork. Outside is the familiar sound of jackhammering.

The atmosphere is maternal and professional, and the movie they made, which opens Dec. 18, reflects who they are: Nora is smart, acerbic, unabashedly romantic; Delia has the same qualities, but in different proportions.

Nora, 57, first gained notice as a journalist, then as author of “Heartburn” (a thinly disguised account of her marriage to Watergate hero Carl Bernstein), and finally as a screenwriter, first for others’ movies (Mike Nichols’ “Silkwood” and “Heartburn,” Rob Reiner’s “When Harry Met Sally . . .” ), then for her own (“This Is My Life,” “Sleepless in Seattle,” “Mixed Nuts,” “Michael”).

Delia, 54, has co-written most of Nora’s films and is an essayist and novelist (“How to Eat Like a Child,” “Hanging Up”).

Together they are part of a writing Ephron dynasty that includes their parents, Henry and Phoebe, who were screenwriters in the ‘40s and ‘50s (“Desk Set”), and their novelist siblings, Amy Ephron and Hallie Touger.

Nora and Delia’s “You’ve Got Mail” carries on this glittery, sophisticated tradition. The film is a remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1940 classic “The Shop Around the Corner,” which featured Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan as warring clerks who are conducting an anonymous courtship through the mail.

In this update, Tom Hanks is part of a huge, family-owned bookstore chain that threatens to swallow Meg Ryan’s small children’s bookstore. Though they can’t stand each other, they are, unbeknownst to them, soul mates online, a bond they keep from their respective partners (Parker Posey, Greg Kinnear).

Between bites, Nora and Delia discuss bookstores, e-mail, Joni Mitchell and “The Godfather.” Nora may be big sister, but Delia holds her own.

The Times: Did you write the script with Tom and Meg in mind?

Nora: We always do. I don’t know anybody who writes a romantic comedy that isn’t writing for the two of them.

Q: Really?

Nora: How do I know? I’m not anybody else, but . . .

Q: I understand this was producer Lauren Shuler Donner’s idea.

Nora: We came into this through Amy Pascal, who was at Turner, which owned the rights to “The Shop Around the Corner.” [Pascal is now president of Columbia Pictures.] There’s a woman named Julie Durk, who works for Lauren Shuler Donner. It was her idea to do it, and it was Lauren’s idea to use e-mail. But we first heard about it when Amy called and said, “ ‘Shop Around the Corner’ using e-mail.”

It was just one of those things that you heard and you went, “That’s a great idea, and I wonder how you do it, and I wonder how you solve the problem of the movie.” It’s always had a problem, which is that it was always a play. It never escaped from the shop itself.

Q: So how did you get to where you had to go?

Nora: Here’s what I remember. I said to Delia, “I have no idea how to do this,” and Delia said, “Oh, it’s very simple. The Upper West Side, bookstores, and they each live with other people.”

Q: Just like that.

Delia: Yeah. It seemed logical that it would be in a bookstore. But you know the other problem with a romantic comedy, which is that it’s very hard to have stakes that keep people apart now. It used to be that class kept people apart or that you weren’t allowed to say what you felt in all those English movies, so that could keep you apart forever. . . . It’s like, why aren’t these people together? Why doesn’t one just say to the other, “I want to be with you”? So the question is, what could keep two people apart?

Nora: Besides not knowing one another. And not liking one another.

Delia: Right. Because even not liking is not enough anymore.

Nora: Then you automatically know that you’re going to be with the person. There’s so many movies where people who don’t like each other end up together.

Delia: So then bookstores give you this thing. She has this big stake in that children’s store. Also Nora loves bookstores. It’s always good if you’re working out some passion.

Nora: One of the things that I think is so interesting is this thing that the Barnes & Noble bookstores are a part of, these kind of gigantic “third places,” as they’re called by the sociologists, these sort of multi-functional things, like the gym where you can exercise, fall in love, have dinner and get your dry cleaning done. At Barnes & Noble you have coffee, fall in love, buy books and do your homework. It’s a) very hard to compete with those places and b) to be 100% right if you think they’re bad, because they aren’t. They’re just not what those of us who are readers imagine a real bookstore is.

Delia: There are three key scenes from the [original] movie that we are deeply attached to and you knew were pivotal scenes in the remake. And that is the scene in the cafe and the ice cream scene--it’s when he goes and she has a cold--and there is the “if only” scene at the end. So you’ve got a grid that you then have something to hang off.

Nora: The great thing that “The Shop Around the Corner” gives you is this sort of amazing machine of a plot where they don’t know that they’re in love with the person they hate and then one of them finds out and the other one doesn’t. That is so amazing, and it works, so it’s one of those structures that you worship when you’re hanging garments on it.

Delia: Nora knew the minute we finished it that it was going to be made.

Nora: I knew it 10 pages from the end. Ten pages from the end, I looked at Delia and said, “We are going to get Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.” And I picked up the phone and called Richard Lovett, Tom’s agent, and said, “What is Tom doing after ‘Saving Private Ryan’?” And Richard said, “He’s doing a romantic comedy with you, Nora.” Whoever calls, he would have said, “He’s doing an action movie with you, Mel,” if my name had been Mel and I directed action movies. But the point was we knew he was free and we knew that Meg was free. It was a small miracle of the movie business.

Q: Do you bounce ideas off each other or does this go on paper?

Delia: We talk, and then we write. It’s really relaxed.

Nora: It’s very fluid--our parents, for example, who wrote together, we knew what each of them did. My father walked around, and my mother sat at the typewriter. But we don’t have that division of labor at all. Sometimes Delia’s at the typewriter, sometimes I’m at the typewriter, sometimes she’ll start a scene and say, “I give up, I’m going to the kitchen,” and vice versa. And the other one will finish it while the other one is making tuna.

Q: You could have had them make all these extraordinary observations about New York life on e-mail, but you didn’t make it that clever. Is that something you have to resist, being too smart?

Nora: No, we were actually trying to be as clever as we could.

Delia: E-mail is a very relaxed, casual form of communication. It’s not a polished thing. It’s very from the gut, shorthand.

Nora: Two of the most interesting things I think about e-mail is it’s not a letter and it’s not a phone call. It does not have the formality of a letter or the performance of a letter even. It’s just some things that are passing through your head.

Q: Do you have conflicts while writing?

Nora: Absolutely sometimes. Sure.

Q: What do each of you bring to the scripts? Different things?

Delia: I used to think that was true, that one of us has strengths in areas. I think you learn so much from the other person that your strengths rub off.

Q: Anything in what you do picked up from your parents?

Delia: It must be a love of work. We all have a love of work. We must have gotten that from them.

Nora: Well, I don’t know. Everyone I know works.

Q: Did your parents just lock themselves in a room?

Nora: They went to the studio. They were contract writers at Fox for years and years and years. And every morning they would get in separate cars--that probably should have been a sign of something.

Delia: They did?

Nora: Yes. And they would drive two minutes to the studio. It was a big joke in our house when they sold my mother’s 1947 Studebaker in 1957 it had 8,000 miles on it.

Q: Was there some stuff left on the cutting room floor?

Nora: Movies like this are very delicate things, and they can’t support two hours and 20 minutes of running time, or even two hours and 53 minutes of running time, which I am appalled to tell you was the assemblage length of this movie. So there’s a lot of stuff that’s not there anymore.

Q: Is that more than normal for you?

Nora: I’ve never had an assemblage this long. I was mortified. I was ashamed of myself. But now it’s under two hours.

Q: Who was responsible for Tom’s joke in the film about “Both Sides Now”?

Delia: Nora doesn’t like Joni Mitchell. So many people have a Joni Mitchell thing. It’s a girl-versus-guy thing. It’s not a guy song.

Nora: One of our favorite things is to write scenes about boys and girls.

Delia: We really hate boats more than we hate Joni Mitchell.

Nora: There’s a scene that ended up on the cutting room floor that was a small tragedy. A scene where Meg announced to Heather Burns that she could never fall in love with a man who had a boat. It went on at some length saying all the things that Delia and I feel about boats.

Q: That must be kind of fun to vent that way--in character, of course.

Nora: Well, yeah, that’s one of the things that’s fun about writing screenplays is that occasionally you can put little essays into people’s mouths and they don’t have to be 850 words long. You can be really short, and you can say exactly what you think.

Q: What was that line about business? When her bookstore is about to be closed down because of competition from the corporate giant, Meg says, “People always say, ‘It’s just business, but it’s . . .’ ”

Nora: “It wasn’t personal,” he says. And she says, “What does that mean? All you’re saying is that it wasn’t personal to you. It was personal to me. It was personal to a lot of people. What’s wrong with personal?”

One of the things we discovered when we were looking for “Godfather” stuff [which Hanks, in the movie, is fond of quoting] is that one of Delia’s friends goes with a guy who is on Wall Street, and on Wall Street virtually everything that happens to you is a line from “The Godfather.”

Q: I had no idea it was that seminal.

Nora: Well, of course, in our house more so. It’s what we do on Christmas Eve. We watch “The Godfather.”

Q: You’re kidding.

Nora: No, it’s our Christmas ritual. Some people have Santa Claus or something. We have “The Godfather.”

Q: The whole thing?

Nora: Well, we can do both. Usually Part 1, Christmas Eve, Part 2, Christmas Day.

Q: How festive is that?

Nora: “The Godfather” feels like--it’s so great, it’s so great.

Q: I have this facile theory that in order to make romantic comedies in this day and age you have to be unsentimental.

Nora: I don’t know the answer to that. There’s a thing I wrote in “Heartburn” that I can’t remember exactly, but it says that no one is more romantic than a cynic, or something like that. I do think that you don’t become “cynical” or “unsentimental” unless there’s a core of romanticism or sentiment that’s had a few chips nicked into it. Is every cynic a romantic at the core, or are some cynics cynics at the core? I don’t know. Probably there are.

Delia: We’re not like that.

Nora: Oh, heavens, no.