Amy Poehler on Netflix’s 'Wine Country,' Stacey Abrams, and Good Ol’ Leslie Knope

Amy Poehler has made drinking wine a professional requirement. Kind of. Her latest project, Wine Country, sees the comedian joining her close friends and former SNL colleagues Rachel Dratch, Maya Rudolph, Ana Gasteyer, and Tina Fey, among others, in Napa, California, to celebrate a friend’s fiftieth birthday. She both stars in and directs the film, out May 10 on Netflix. It’s the first time she’s helmed a full-length feature, thus she barely had a sip herself: “I was teetotaling because I wanted to be a proper captain of the ship.” On the day the Oscar nominations were announced, she spoke to ELLE in New York, where she’d recently opened a wine shop with friends in Brooklyn.

ELLE: Let’s start with the Oscars. There were no female nominees for best director.

Amy Poehler: I was just reading about the USC Annenberg study that came out. The statistics are a real bummer. There were so many great films made by women this year, and once again they’re not nominated. Not only is there such a small number of women directing, it’s especially small for women of color and Latina women.

The most jarring statistic I found was that less than 4 percent of studio film directors in the past year were women. What has to happen to change that?


The best way to decide that you’re ready for something is almost the opposite of what women are taught to do: to overprepare, to be the most qualified in the room, to have all the answers. Studies have shown that men do not take the same approach. There are young male directors who are fine with taking on a $60 million movie, even if they’ve never done anything before. So it’s not only about creating opportunities for women when you have the power but about taking the power, even if you don’t feel like you’re ready.

Power dynamics are obviously a huge issue. In your book Yes Please, you write, “My friend Louis CK likes to say that ‘guilt is an intersection.’ Getting out of it means making a choice and moving forward.” Where do you think he is in that intersection?

That’s such a big question to answer in this small interview.

We can talk about Chardonnay next, promise.


Yeah, but I’m not trying to dodge it. I can’t speak for any man and his past or present behavior, and I frankly don’t want to. But at a time when the world is so divided and everything is so ugly, it’s really rough to watch people decide they’re just gonna lean in to the ugliness of everything. It’s incredibly depressing.


How do you combat that?


The women in my life, and in the movie, have been the people who turn the crying into laughing, changing things on a dime. Female friendships have been key for me in the last couple of years, in terms of how to find true, deep, deep, deep laughter.

There’s a lot of that with this film.


I like to brag that we had zero rehearsal time. I wasn’t just working with my friends, but with premier comedy legends. I don’t think I’ll ever have this directing experience again, where I had to give people very little direction.


Do you feel like your career has always been headed toward directing?


Yeah, I’ve directed a lot of episodic television. There are a couple of things I like about directing. One is you get to wear your own clothes. But really, I tend to see things big picture, so it gets harder and harder sometimes to just show up on set and be an actor. I like the control that directing gives. On this film, I ended up sleeping with the director, and that really worked out for me.


Good move. In all seriousness, you’ve never shied away from feminism. Your Smart Girls initiative empowers young women to stay true to themselves. When did you first understand what it means to be a feminist?


My mother was involved in the women’s movement. In third or fourth grade, I remember one of the boys saying, “You’re such a feminist.” And I remember thinking, Oh, I guess I am.