JONI: I had a little conversation with Joan yesterday. And Joan, who was editor-in-chief of French Vogue for many years and a fantastic author and writer for Vogue and Vanity Fair and wherever she writes, is suddenly acting in very, very big productions. So I said to Joan, "Would you talk a little bit about the movie you just made?"

MARY: And how much did they pay you? We want to know how much they paid you.

JOAN: Well I’ll tell you, because it was shot in the jungle, I spent more money on anti-mosquito clothes than I think I’m earning for the movie, because it’s an indie.…

JONI: Joan, you have two movies, not just one?

JOAN: Yes. One day, a year ago, I got an e-mail from Nora Ephron saying, "Can you act?" I was a child actress, which doesn’t mean I can act. But when I was ejected from French Vogue I started writing plays and then I started doing a kind of improv called Action Theater, because I thought I should remember what performing was like if I’m writing words for people to say. I was in complete denial. So for four years I studied action theater four or five times a week, and various workshops 18 hours a day, locked up with 11 other people. I kept saying, "I’m just doing it for my writing." And then I came back to New York and I started working with a great actors’ studio teacher, Elizabeth Kemp. "Just for my writing." And she dragged me to Paris and made me perform in a theater in Paris, and I had a huge fight with her. "No, I’m not an actress. I’m not an actress." So when Nora Ephron sends me the e-mail, asking, "Can you act?" I wrote back, proudly, "Yes. Trained." I’d felt a fool for all this training I was doing. And I’m so glad to be part of this movie, because Nora Ephron has found her bliss. She’s a great writer and a great director, a sublime wit …

MARGO: And a great cook.

JOAN: … and also a great cook. So a couple of years ago she came across this project: A girl called Julie Powell – who in 2002 was working at the World Trade Center Families of Victims hotline, fielding these calls every day and getting very depressed – decided the only way to cheer herself up was to cook for her husband and herself, every day, two recipes out of Julia Child’s Mastering The Art of French Cooking.

MARGO: Yes.

JOAN: She blogged about it. It became a book. The producer Amy Robinson bought the book to make it into a movie. It goes to Nora. Nora says, "Great, but let’s also do Julia Child, My Years in France. " So she wrote Julie & Julia, which stars Meryl Streep as Julia Child in the late ’40s and ’50s in France; and Amy Adams as Julie Powell in the early 2000s in New York, in Brooklyn. And it’s the contrast between the pioneer and her acolyte who never meet. It’s a beautiful film, about love and food and cooking and giving and sex and loyalty and hope.

JONI: And you are who, in this movie?

JOAN: The Bitch: the cold, mean proprietor of the Cordon Bleu Cooking School in 1949, Madame Elizabeth Brassart. I have four scenes. In each scene I abuse Meryl Streep. That was my return to acting.

MARY: What was that like?