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 yllian Gunther is a wryly funny, whip-smart and totally hot native New Yorker, a successful TV and film producer. In 2003, she decided to find out why, in spite of all she has to offer, so many men had broken up with her. She made a documentary called Pull Out about her romantic history, interviewing in the process her latest ex-boyfriend (and several significant former boyfriends) to figure out what had gone wrong in each relationship, to pave the way, she said, for "future ex-boyfriends."What could have been a self-indulgent nostalgiathon is instead a witty, original look at how Gunther's issues (her mother's death, father's lack of boundaries and her own quirks) drew her to certain kinds of guys at certain times, and why those relationships didn't work out. Her need to savor the past borders on the Proustian. The men are all familiar as types, but they're all clearly individuals, too. Gunther doesn't make snide comments about the guys, even when she finds out that one, for example, cheated on her with between ten and a hundred women while they were together. Hooksexup took her out for lunch. — Ada Calhoun What did you want to accomplish emotionally by making this movie? When I started the movie, I thought I would be interviewing all these guys who broke up with me and cheated on me, and it would be about how things went wrong. But then I did the movie and it became about what different senses we have of relationships. It turned out I broke up with one guy and I had another guy who wasn't in the movie say I had broken his heart — I had no idea! Do you know the word poshlust?
Maybe it's Russian. Nabokov used it. It's sort of the word for petty nostalgia. Like, if I come back to this restaurant in a month and go, Oh, that's where I sat with Ada! It doesn't really have any significance to anyone else. But when I talk to people about the film, they seem to really connect it to their past. I did. It's so relatable. Are people always telling you about their love lives? I've gotten funny letters. A lot of people have been asking me for advice. I actually started setting up a booth at art openings where I would put up a sign that said "Free Advice: Twenty-five Cents." What kind of advice do you give? I don't really like to think about relationships as failing so much as they end. Everything has a shelf life, and if it ends because somebody dies or because it plays out its course. I didn't feel like these things were failures, so I did a lot of re-framing for people. My main advice is you can do anything, just don't get pregnant. The film has been compared to High Fidelity. The two films I thought of while structuring the movie were High Fidelity and Annie Hall. Annie Hall opens up with that "The food sucks, and such small portions!" joke, and he's wearing this plaid shirt and a blazer. I did an opening scene (that didn't make it into the film) in which I'm in a plaid shirt telling a joke. It was this: There's these three guys sitting on an I-beam. The first guy opens his lunch box and is like, "Veal parmigian! If I get this one more time, I'm going to throw myself off the I-beam!" And then the other guy opens up his lunch box and says, "Rice and beans! If I get this again I'm going to throw myself off the I-beam!" And the third guy opens it up and he's like, "Kielbasa! If I get this one more time I'm throwing myself off the I-beam!" So then the next day, they're all sitting there, and the first guy opens his lunch box and goes, "Ah, phew--spaghetti and meatballs." And the second guy goes, "Ah, phew--quesadillas!" And the third guy says, "Kielbasa!" and he throw himself off the I-beam. And the other two look at each other and say, "I don't know what's wrong with him. He makes his own lunch." So the idea was, I know I make my own lunch in terms of relationships, but somehow I always end up with kielbasa. In the movie, you talk about your green-card marriage. Would you get married again, for real? I don't believe in marriage. It seems archaic as a concept. The way I got married was like an adventure. I'll try anything once. But as an idea, I don't really see how it makes any sense anymore. What do you think is passé about it? It seemed ridiculous. I sold my wedding dress to a thrift store the week after the wedding. I mean, I wouldn't have sex in front of my family, and my relationships are also very personal. I guess if you never get to perform a wedding is a nice way of standing up in front of people. It seems like a performance, putting on this weird dress. Why would I want to feel embarrassed and nervous in front of all these people, and why would I spend all this money? And why would I want this? It's an institution that doesn't support gays. The idea of dreaming to be in a dress is retarded. I like being married. I was anti-marriage growing up. It seemed so suburban. But now I like the idea of being part of a family tree. As for the wedding itself, there's something to be said for formality. I understand that as you age you feel more like being rooted into the world and into a community even if you're not religious. I'm not against it as an institution for anybody else. But I feel like my generation especially has got so many doors that they became inert. So many people my age are single because they didn't want to make the wrong decision. Your father is a major part of the movie. He also seems to have trouble acting traditionally grown-up. Growing up in the '70s, I got a lot of information that other generations did not share with their kids. And suddenly you become very intimate and in other ways there's a lack of boundaries. My father and I had this boundary-lessness that played out in my relationships. Having a camera between us was a way of separating us and creating a boundary. Do you still shoplift, as you report doing in the film? I think about shoplifting all the time. Why is that? Because it's guilt-free shopping. You get to go in and buy something and you don't have to feel guilty because you didn't spend any money. I guess I don't feel any guilt about stealing from corporations. I don't steal from my friends. I won't steal your purse, but would I steal from Pottery Barn or Duane Reade? There are more Duane Reades in the city than Starbucks! I don't do it anymore because I don't want to be a thirty-nine-year-old shoplifter, but I feel like my methods are pretty foolproof. I could write a book. How did your exes react to the movie? The only guy who saw it was the guy I called the Bad Boyfriend. Some people hated his guts. Other people just said, "Oh, it was a young relationship." He's really intense. He's a private eye. I felt like he was going to hunt me down and break my legs when he saw the movie. He was really nice about being in it, but even that weirded me out. I sent it to him and didn't hear anything until five months later I got an e-mail from his dad, who said, "I just wanted to let you know my son let me see the movie and I really liked it and wanted to know if I could get a copy." So presumably he saw and liked scenes like the one where the Bad Boyfriend is saying, "Here's a picture of you with my dick in your mouth." As an aside, watching that scene with my father at a screening was a little intense. My dad's bought me tampons and I've talked to him about my sex life but hearing another guy talk about his dick being in my mouth was a little much. One thing about the Bad Boyfriend that I really liked was the idea that you were together for so long and didn't like each other. I think that's so common — having friends you don't like, jobs you don't like. Why do you think we stayed together? I think you were really attracted to each other. It's funny, because you think of "liking someone" as the number one criteria for being with somebody, and it just isn't at all. Yeah. But as you get older you start to become much more specific in the things that make you like somebody — you start to go, oh shit, I'm going to have to compromise. It's so textbook cliché, but your time becomes much more valuable. No offense, but you're twenty-nine. Scientifically your brain hasn't really hardened entirely until you're, like, twenty-nine. Speaking of age, all the advice books for women in their thirties are about getting pregnant before it's too late. Did you see that op-ed column by David Brooks in the Times? The one that said women shouldn't start working until they're thirty-five? They should have kids when they're twenty-one, and then go into the workforce! And it's like, tell me who's hiring a thirty-five year old with no experience? What's your next project? Well, I'll never make another personal documentary again. Right now I'm working on a documentary that compares the story of The Grapes of Wrath to Hurricane Katrina, so I'm in the process of researching a family whose son is going to come home in January from the National Guard, and he hasn't been home since Katrina. There's a beautiful passage in The Grapes of Wrath that says, "Who are we without our pasts?" And the sentence ends, "Leave it, burn it." I mean, leave it maybe, not burn it, but it's a beautiful thought. It's the mom, right before they're packing up what they're going to bring with them, and what they still need, and she's looking at sentimental things as opposed to, do we bring the guns or do we bring the ticket stub? Watch the trailer here, and buy the DVD at Indieflix. n°  
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