Cindy Chupack is a writer, executive producer and director. She has worked on iconic television series such as Sex and the City and Modern Family, with her episodes of the former nominated for both Writer’s Guild and Emmy awards. Her first feature Otherhood, starring Angela Bassett, Felicity Huffman, and Patricia Arquette, was released on Netflix in August of 2019. Chupack is the author of NYTimes bestseller The Between Boyfriends Book: A Collection of Cautiously Hopeful Essays, and has written comic essays about dating and relationships for many magazines including Glamour and O, The Oprah Magazine.

CINDY CHUPACK

It was a long journey because I think I've been writing television now twenty-five years. I never really had the directing bug. I always loved writing and I like being behind the scenes and, in television, writers have so much control anyway to rise up the ranks and run the show and hire the directors, so I mostly had just great collaborations with directors. Especially on Sex and the City, we had really filmic talented directors and it was like one plus one equals three, I felt, collaborating with the directors, but there was a film that I was hired to rewrite. At the time it was called Whatever Makes You Happy that became Otherhood. And Mark Andrus (who won an Oscar for his script As Good As It Gets) had done the first adaptation, which I loved, so when I was hired to rewrite it, I thought why are they messing with this? I just want to protect what I love about it.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process.