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Born
December 8, 1949 · Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Birth name
Nancy Jane Meyers

Spouse
Charles Shyer (1980 – 1999) (divorced, 2 children)

QUOTES:

Movies don’t look hard, but figuring it out, getting the shape of it, getting everybody’s character right and having it be funny, make sense and be romantic, it’s creating a puzzle. Yes, having been a writer for so long, I have an awareness of when things are going awry, but it doesn’t mean I know how to fix them.

I don’t diet, I don’t do fads, I’ve just decided to not eat carbs. So no more bread and pasta for the month. I can’t live without chocolate, though. I’ve always got a bar in my handbag. It has to be 72%. Any less and it’s too sweet, any more and it’s inedible. Like I said, I’m very particular.

I don’t shoot movies quickly because I get a lot of coverage and a lot of angles, so we have all the pieces in the editing. I do a lot of takes, but it’s because I’m looking for something.

Being part of a team helped me so much. I know the fact that there was a man in the room with me all those years made the medicine go down. I had made the companies money. I didn’t have to start, like a lot of women, from ground zero. My path was not the same as a woman starting out by herself.

I wasn’t the kind of kid like Spielberg or Lucas who knew to go to film school. I didn’t know at 12 what I was going to do; it took me until I was about 23. I studied journalism in college, but after school, I got a job in public television and I never worked as a journalist for one moment.

We don’t want to be our own niche. We’re filmmakers like everybody. How many years in a row are we going to talk about the fact that we make films and we are women? Enough already.

Like most struggling writers trying to get their scripts commissioned, I had to do something odd to pay the rent. So, aged 21, I started up my own small cheesecake company in Philadelphia.