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[BOLD {ELLEN PAGE}] (pictured with Michael Cera) ''She's so cool, she scares the s--- out of me,'' says Cody of the actress. ''She [ITALIC "is"] Juno.''
Doane Gregory

Cody recently moved with Jonny and their dog, Barnabas, into a 500-square-foot guesthouse in Los Angeles. She suggested we meet at Fred 62, a hip café that the actress Eliza Dushku had taken her to for a meeting. ''I always remember where the actor suggests and then I recycle those places,'' she says. ''Honestly, if I picked the place, it'd be like, 'Oh, this Arby's on De Longpre is really awesome.''' She orders a salad for lunch, despite the fact that she once wrote that salads were for losers and Best Supporting Actresses. ''I got a trainer now, man,'' she says. ''I've sold out. It's a shame, I know. But I ate cake for breakfast.''

Looking around at all the other diners, most of whom are male and floppy-haired and tapping away on their laptops, she acknowledges that life has gotten deeply weird. ''When you live among other screenwriters in the center of the entertainment industry, it's difficult to maintain perspective. It's not the same as sitting in Target in suburban Minnesota, which is where I wrote Juno. People there just thought I was schizophrenic. I would say I was writing a movie or my book, and they would just nod and say, 'Sure you are. I'm sure you're going to be a big star. Big star!'''

When Jason Reitman, who'd made a name for himself with 2006's Thank You for Smoking, read the script for Juno, he scrapped plans to direct his own project to work with Cody instead. ''When I think of the response to Diablo and her screenplay,'' he says, ''the only person I can equate it to in recent history is Tarantino, that kind of overwhelming excitement about a fresh new voice.'' But the movie would have imploded fast without the right actress in the title role. Enter the impressive Hard Candy actress Ellen Page, who, Cody believes, beautifully embodies her wry, tough-talking, secretly tender main character. ''It would have been really heartbreaking to meet Ellen if she was like, 'Oh, hey, wassup?' while talking on a rhinestone-encrusted cell phone,'' says Cody. ''But she's so cool, she scares the s--- out of me. She is Juno.''

With Page in the lead, Michael Cera as her surprisingly fertile friend, and Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman as the adoptive parents, Juno started filming in Vancouver late last year. ''I don't even remember the first day,'' says Cody, ''because when we pulled up and I saw them shooting my movie, there were just tears streaming down my face.''

NEXT PAGE: ''If you want to know who I was at 18, you look at my left butt cheek.''


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