GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE FUNDS 'FRIENDS WITH MONEY' STARS, WRITER-DIRECTOR REFLECT ON KEEPING UP WITH THEIR PALS.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

"Friends With Money" is about three female pals who live at various levels of economic and domestic comfort on the Westside of Los Angeles, and their fourth friend, who does not.

Nicole Holofcener's rueful, observant comedy, opening Friday, reflects its own topic in a number of ironic ways.

It's a low-budget independent film set where people who've made fortunes in the commercial movie industry live. The well-off women are played by Oscar winner Frances McDormand and multiple nominees Catherine Keener and Joan Cusack. Jennifer Aniston is the poor girl, which is funny when you consider that, as the actress who used to be one of TV's highly paid "Friends," she's probably got more money than her three distinguished co-stars combined.

Keener, who just last year clocked her first studio blockbuster ("The 40-Year-Old Virgin") after years of acclaimed work in indies such as "Being John Malkovich," "Capote" and Holofcener's two previous films, "Walking and Talking" and "Lovely and Amazing," explains how movie people's money can be a very relative matter.

"I've always been able to pay for health care and clothes and stuff like that; or my parents will for me when I need them," says the actress, who acknowledges that her paydays may seem like a fortune to you or me. "But working in independent movies a lot, you just make a very respectable living, comparatively. You don't make, like, a movie star's living or even an executive's living."

It's a mistake for people to think that pay is tiered here," adds British actor Jason Isaacs. "There are only two tiers. A producer friend of mine hired me for a film once and just paid me peanuts. I asked him, 'What's going on here? It's kind of a nice part.' He said, 'Jase, you've gotta understand. There are two kinds of actors. There are those you have to pay because you need them in your film or people won't buy tickets, and then there's everybody else, and you're everybody else.'"

In "Friends With Money," Keener and Isaacs are screenwriting partners who are building an ocean-view second floor onto their house while their marriage is falling apart. McDormand is a successful but unaccountably angry fashion designer whose loving husband (Simon McBurney) sure seems gay but probably isn't. Cusack's character comes from money, and appears to have the happiest union of the three with a guy ("Ally McBeal's" Greg Germann) who by all indications married her for it.

Aniston's single Olivia, on the other hand, has given up a low-paying but respectable teaching job for a more downscale career cleaning houses. The men in her life aren't any better, even when they actually are in it, which isn't much. Her three friends brainstorm ways to help Olivia out or get her life back on track - when they're not consumed by their own comparatively petty problems, that is.

"I sometimes feel Olivia feelings without it being as extreme," admits writer-director Holofcener, who's supplemented whatever she made from her previous small movies with directing gigs for cable TV's "Sex and the City" and "Six Feet Under." "Like a friend will say, 'Let's meet for dinner,' and I'll say, 'Where should we go?' I don't particularly have a lot of money at that moment because I'm not working, and they'll suggest this Malibu restaurant that is astronomical. I'll say, 'Isn't that expensive?' 'Oh no, it's not that much,' and you end up there. That still happens."

"Or, like shoes," the director's good buddy Keener adds. "Somebody'll say, 'Oh, you've gotta get these shoes," and I'm like, 'How much are they?' and they're $300."

"'Oh, they're hardly anything, just like $450,'" Holofcener interjects.

"I'm like, 'What planet are you from?'" Keener says.

"And I'm friends with you?" Holofcener rhetorically cracks. "That has to change."

Similarly witty banter is a hallmark of Holofcener's scripts. But there is more to them than snappy lines; and, in the latest one's case, there's more than an obsession with money.

"It's just that our lifestyles can be so cliche, but underneath, they're not," Keener says of privileged L.A. types and how the movie presents them. "Her characters reveal themselves to be really well-meaning, true people ... who are shallow, and can be a little self-obsessed and all that. But they're still good and still deserve love and want friends and still have loyalty and have moments of enlightenment and values, little or how unsustained they are."

Raised between here and New York and now living in Topanga Canyon, Holofcener also captures very L.A. - maybe make that very Westside - attitudes and ways of life that couldn't be more recognizable.

Unreliable personal trainers, coveted charity-event gift bags, neighbor-alienating construction projects, rampant consumerism clothed in good taste ... some stereotypical funny stuff, yes, but all played in a realistic, unexaggerated key.

"I think that L.A. just came through inevitably," Holofcener says. "I really didn't focus on the city, or it being a character. It's just, that's really where these people lived and that's where I wrote the script, and I wanted to have real locations that were here. It is a very L.A. story, but it could also be told somewhere else. It's ultimately just about relationships and these people's lives.

"But it's fun to make fun of L.A. in it," the director confesses, "because I have to live here, and live with that shame."

All that noted, the film remains ruthlessly true to its title.

"What I like about this film is the question of how relationships are economically based," McBurney, another Brit, expounds. "What happens when everything about the give-and-take in a relationship is about money, or when the give-and-take is like an economic transaction."

Which makes us wonder what it's like to make a $6 million, modestly paying ensemble film when everyone knows one member of that ensemble could buy and sell everyone else several times over.

"She has sold me," Keener jokes regarding Aniston.

"It seemed ironic; I mean, I was aware of that," Holofcener admits.

"I thought it was cute," Keener continues, still laughing.

"Cute's good," Holofcener agrees. "I just didn't want people to go, 'Oh yeah, right.' Which people will do."

Bob Stephenson, who plays one of the feckless men Olivia encounters, says that Aniston was as pleasant and unassumingly professional as anyone he's encountered. And under extraordinary conditions, too.

"She's incredibly giving, and she doesn't walk around with an entourage at all," Stephenson says. "She just shows up with, basically, her security people that she has to have now, since there were 40 paparazzi camped out across from where we were shooting every day. We started shooting this movie right after the announcement of (Aniston and ex-husband Brad Pitt's) splitting up came out, so it was really nuts. But you would never know from being with her every day. She'd show up and was just focused."

Of course, it can just as easily work the other way.

"This is a business that brings you into close contact with people who have lots of money," Isaacs notes. "What's been nice about that is that it's made clear to me that that absolutely does not make them happier. In fact, it often makes them isolated, and they find it very difficult to trust anybody else."

The filmmaker may have a solution to that, though. "I'm not friends with anyone who is under a certain income," Holofcener deadpans.

"But you're patronizing toward them," her friend Keener chirps.

"That's right," says the director. "No, friendships don't come or go because of things like that. I mean, if they do, it's because I or we or they are petty and unconscious and we don't communicate well, or we don't like each other or we're just too different."

"Or if it means too much," Keener adds in all seriousness. "If it's just a hump that you can't get over, which can happen, it can just poison a relationship."

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

5 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) Jennifer Aniston, left, Catherine Keener and Joan Cusack.

(2 -- 3) Jennifer Aniston as low-paid house cleaner Olivia, above. The film's more solvent characters are played by, top from left, Joan Cusack, Catherine Keener and Frances McDormand.

(4) ``This is a business that brings you into close contact with people who have lots of money. ...It's is made clear to me that that absolutely does not make them happier,'' says actor Jason Isaacs, whose on-screen marriage to Keener, left, is crumbling in ``Friends With Money.''

(5) ``It is a very L.A. story ... about relationships and these people's lives,'' says the film's writer-director, Nicole Holofcener, left, on the set with McDormand.