Anna Kendrick on Scott Pilgrim, Meeting Edgar Wright, and Surviving the Oscar Gauntlet

You're in the upcoming cancer comedy Live With It, with Seth Rogen and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Tell me a little bit how you got involved, because I know there was a director shakeup early on. Were you attached before Nicole Holofcener left the movie?

No, I'd met with [producer] Nathan Kahane before Up in the Air came out, and I thought that was a pretty good meeting, but I wasn't officially attached at all until Jonathan Levine came on board. He'd seen Rocket Science and Up in the Air, and I really wanted to be a part of this film. My meeting with Nathan had been months and months before, and I was sort of disappointed that I hadn't heard anything over time, but over Christmas, they offered it to me and I was so excited.

Now, I wouldn't usually think of Nicole and Jonathan having much in common as directors. What has he brought to the table?

I don't know Nicole personally, so I can't really speak to that, but I think Jonathan is one of those amazing souls who's smart and sensitivity and funny, and the film has to be all of those things. It's great to have a director who strikes that balance between having really strong, amazing ideas, but also has an openness toward contribution. Having Seth and Joe and [producer] Evan Goldberg and our incredible screenwriter Will Reiser on set...it's a really good creative collaboration.

And who do you play in that?

I play a sort of well-meaning but inexperienced -- and maybe not very talented -- social worker to Joe's character, who has cancer. She's definitely supposed to be helping him, but she ends up being more of an obstacle than a helping hand at certain points. She's very enthusiastic, but she's maybe not the help that he's looking for.

Now, I had thought that you're done with the Twilight films, but IMDb lists you as being part of Breaking Dawn. Is that an error?

IMDb never lies, so... [Laughs] I honestly don't know. The honest-to-God truth is that I have not talked to [screenwriter] Melissa Rosenberg about it.

How does it feel to be done with that franchise?

I feel like I got to go in and do my little silliness and try to be funny in the time that I was given. It was cool to be a part of something from the beginning when we had no idea what it was going to become, but it's not really my movie, it's not my experience. I'm just happy to have been along for the ride.

For that matter, how does it feel to be done with the ride that was the Oscar gauntlet? I interviewed you before Up in the Air came out, and you said you were worried that you'd have to do so much press that you'd have to fight your answers from becoming mechanical. How did you fight that? Was it draining?

Yeah, it was really draining. I did press for, like, six months, and it started to feel like my job was to talk about Up in the Air and not to be an actress. [Laughs]

Six months...that's probably double the amount of time it took to shoot the actual movie.

It absolutely was, yeah. It was definitely a weird time. I'm sort of glad that it all happened -- I mean, obviously I'm glad it happened -- but I sort of got thrown in the deep end, and now I feel confident about press and events. I feel like I should have a T-shirt that says, "I survived Up in the Air press." [Laughs]

[Main Photo Credit: Jordan Strauss/WireImage]

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