Diablo Cody has a dream collaborator in Jennifer Aniston for their upcoming 9 to 5 reboot.
“Jennifer Aniston is just the coolest girl in the world, right?” says Cody, 46, of the movie’s producer. “She can make anything happen. She’s incredibly powerful. And she’s gorgeous and she’s cool.”
Aniston, 55, is attached to produce a new version of the 1980 comedy that starred Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin through her production company Echo Films, which she runs with Kristin Hahn.
“They were looking for a writer, and I heard about it, and I really move on things,” Cody tells PEOPLE enthusiastically. “I thought, ‘If I don’t do this, I’m going to regret it.’ And that’s always the sign. I think to myself, ‘Would I be viciously jealous of the person who took this job if I didn’t take it?’ If the answer is yes, I have to do it.”
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The Oscar-winning Juno screenwriter adds that it’s “definitely a pinch-me moment to be collaborating with” Aniston and Hahn, who hired her as the movie’s screenwriter because of Cody’s “love” for the original film. “It helps when people know that you’re passionate about it and that you’re not just a hired gun.”
As for why she’s invested in a story of women in the workplace, the filmmaker says she “many years ago was a corporate 9 to 5 girly. So I’ve been in that world. I worked in an ad agency. So I had to call upon that era in my life to write.”
However, a good reboot should break new ground as much as it must “pay homage to the material,” Cody says.
“I’m not really supposed to talk about this that much,” she teases. “But the original movie was kind of a battle-of-the-sexes type scenario. Whereas now I feel like most of the conflict in the workplace is generational: how Gen Z works versus people that have maybe been in the office for decades.”
The tale of Parton, Fonda and Tomlin’s characters outwitting their misogynistic boss (played by Dabney Coleman) “was the perfect statement about corporate culture for its time,” Cody continues. “And I think now the conflicts have changed a little bit.”
Diablo Cody attends the Variety The Business of Broadway presented by City National Bank in New York.
Diablo Cody in 2019.
Andrew Morales/Getty
Among Cody’s other upcoming projects following the release of the Kathryn Newton-starring Lisa Frankenstein in February is Death of a Pop Star, the big-screen adaptation of the hit supernatural webcomic of the same name.
“The horror-comedy genre is something that I’ve been doing for years,” she says. “But there’s also this element of music and ‘stan’ culture that I feel is very of the moment and relevant. Sometimes those people are the scariest thing imaginable.”
