TIFF PHOTO GALLERY: Yeardley Smith’s hilariously frank explanation of what producers do at the What’s Wrong With Virginia press conference

She said:

The only way I could get into the film was to buy my way in. You think I’m kidding. I was so high on the food chain that people wouldn’t come to me with their day-to-day problems so I did a lot of knitting. I’m just standing around going, “Does anybody want to ask me anything?” And they’re like, “No, Yeardley, no.” So it was interesting to see how the sausage is made at this level and I found the job not actually entirely creative, the executive producing part, which was perhaps my own fault but in that way was a revelation. Nobody would come to me with any minutia and I was a really good minutia solver.

Awkward. But then Black continued:

The producers came to me and said, “We have this role of a social worker named Ms. Whitaker and we need to cast it. What do you think of this Yeardley Smith?” I didn’t know she was involved with the film at this point and thankfully I said yes because they then told me, “Good, because she’s also one of your financiers.” The movie may have never happened.

Yeardley brought it home for us: “I get a lot of knitting done, too. It’s awesome.”