Female Filmmakers in Focus: Marielle Heller on “Nightbitch” | Interviews

A movie where six-time Academy Award nominee Amy Adams is so swallowed up by the weight of parenting that she disassociates by transforming into a dog might sound like a bit much. And it is, purposefully so. The body horror comedy “Nightbitch,” an adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s 2021 magical realist novel of the same name, is writer-director Marielle Heller’s latest foray into the darker aspects of what it is to be human. Set in a nondescript suburb (Yoder’s book was inspired by Iowa City), Adams stars as an artist-turned-stay-at-home Mother who has put her creative life on hold to raise her son. While her Husband (Scoot McNairy) travels for work all week, the frustrated and deeply isolated Mother begins to lose her grip on reality. 

Since making her feature film debut with the 2015 Sundance hit “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” Heller has established herself as an idiosyncratic chronicler of singular human experiences. Her first film, an adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s diaristic graphic novel, explored the sexual coming-of-age of San Franciscan teenager Minnie Goetze (Bel Powley) with a refreshing frankness and flights of animated whimsy. Her follow-up film, the mordant biopic “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” gave Melissa McCarthy the role of her career as cantankerous literary forger Lee Israel. McCarthy and co-star Richard E. Grant earned Oscar nominations for their empathetic portraits of two lost souls connecting in the cold isolation of New York City. The next year, with “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” Heller explored the thorny relationship between irascible journalist and new father Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), his estranged father Jerry (Chris Cooper), and the inimitable children’s show host Mister Rogers (Tom Hanks, in another Oscar-nominated performance). Each film traces the internal struggle of outsiders finding their way in the world through transformative experiences and radical self-acceptance. 

Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Heller took a circuitous route to filmmaking. Heller, who received widespread acclaim for her performance in the Netflix miniseries “The Queen’s Gambit,” has said acting was her first love. After performing with the Alameda Children’s Musical Theater, community theater, and the drama program at her high school, she studied theatre at UCLA and later at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. She then performed at the Magic Theatre, the American Conservatory Theater, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and the La Jolla Playhouse. Initially, Heller developed  “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” as a stage play before realizing the material was better suited as a film. The rest, as they say, is history. 

For this month’s Female Filmmakers in Focus column, RogerEbert.com sat down with Heller over breakfast the day after the film’s world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival to speak about the physicality of parenthood, growing to appreciate the sacrifices of your own parents, the wisdom of older women, whether she’s made a comedy or a horror film, and finding the right dog to play Amy Adams. 

This interview was conducted at the Toronto International Film Festival and has been condensed for clarity.

You film parenthood almost like it’s an action movie. 

[Laughs] Yes.

There’s a lot of choreography with Amy, like when she falls on the paint. I guess I’d love to hear how you thought through that in pre-production. Did you choreograph those scenes like action scenes? 

Oh, yes, we did. Definitely. We had stunt coordinators, then we had a stunt double for that scene. It was totally choreographed like an action movie. You know, the truth of the matter is, I maybe didn’t realize when I became a parent how physical the entire thing would be and how taxing it would be on my body, and how much my body would feel ravaged by parenthood. Truly. Between birth, breastfeeding, and then just the constant lugging of children and things and whatever. It’s one of the most difficult physical things that you can go through as any kind of parent, whether you’re given birth or not, just the actual act of raising a child.

You’re holding a 60-pound child all the time.

And lugging things all the time. You start to realize your back is off because you always hold them on one side, and then everyone tells you you need to switch sides. And you’re like, “This hurts and that hurts.” Not to mention the fact that kids don’t give you any personal space and just claw at your body at all times. Climb on you. Want you to be a climbing structure as well as, you know, a pack mule. So it was important to me that I showed all of the physical exhaustion that goes along with parenting. The shot where Amy’s flat on the floor, so tired after not sleeping all night, and–

You pull back and he’s on her like a horse.

Yeah, he’s on her back. It was just something I thought of really early on, because I was like, “This is my life.” I was so exhausted at all times, and I felt like you never see that. You never see how hard it is physically. The paint sequence was a joy. I mean, the sequences with the kid, where we had to kind of push him to be really naughty, like when he breaks the spaghetti plate and also when he paints all over the walls, were so fun. I had to apologize to his parents and say, “I’m really sorry I’m going to have this kid do something that he should not do at all.”

But also, the joyful chaos of childhood is just kids being really naughty. I also hate in movies that I always see these perfect, well behaved kids who just sit and listen. I’m always going, “Where is the kid right now? Why don’t I see the kid while you’re trying to do this other thing? This is so unrealistic.” So it was very important to me that we portrayed a real kid, you know?

Last night, you talked about how Rachel’s soul is in her book, and then in the film there are whole bits of yourself, and Amy, and even Scoot, as parents. I wondered in particular about all the women sharing their experiences and the revelation that comes from something like that.  I love the scene in the book and the movie where the moms share the terrible things they’ve done, like, “I killed the goldfish,” “I let the bird out,” “I stepped on the hamster.” What was that like for you as an artist to meet with all these other artists who had gone through similar experiences as mothers?

It was cathartic. I mean, the truth is that almost everybody who was working on the movie was a mom, and we all felt seen by Rachel’s book. Her book, really, truly, felt like this revelation to be able to be seen in that way. And, also, for somebody to care. Because I think as women and as mothers, we’re really used to people just not really caring what it feels like to be a mom or what it feels like to be an aging woman. It’s just not something anyone thinks is worthy of a movie. So to have a story that’s like, “Oh, hey, here’s what you’re going through right now. Let’s reflect back what this might feel like to be going through hormonal rage.”

That felt cathartic; it felt great. I mean, writing the script was actually, genuinely a joy. And writing is usually a slog. More than a slog, writing is torture. Writing this movie was joyful. I was working through my own shit with it. I feel like it’s how I survived. Then Rachel read the script and loved it so deeply, and being like, “This is the perfect script for my book. This is exactly what it needed to be.” Sue Naegle brought me the book and said, “Oh my god, this is it.” It felt like we were seeing each other. And it didn’t matter who else related to this. If we felt seen by this, then it’s true. And we all felt it to be so true.

Another aspect that I love that is in both the book and the film is the way she comes to understand her own feelings about her mother. I haven’t had children, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve definitely seen why my mom is often so miserable. She doesn’t think that raising children was a career. She has a lot of regrets about that, and I’m like, but you raised me, my brother, foster kids, my friend when she came to live with us during our senior year of high school. That’s a lot of kids to raise.

There’s this natural thing that happens, right, where as we age, our perception of our parents changes. For a lot of us it happens when we have our own kids, where we suddenly look at our parents and are like, “Oh my god, look what they did for me,” or, “Oh, my god, look how terrible they were,” or think, “What do I want to do differently?” It’s a natural part of our evolution of becoming adults. We think we become adults when we’re eighteen or twenty-one. But it’s not true.

There’s this next phase that I think happens, usually in your late 20s or early 30s, where suddenly you’re seeing your parents from a totally different perspective that sometimes brings a total appreciation for everything they did and what they did for you. That’s a really important shift, into the next phase of our lives. To recognize our own parents, what they might have sacrificed for us, and what they might have given up.

And what society tells them isn’t worth it. 

And it’s painful. I made shifts within that storyline because her mother’s still alive in the book, and I have some very dear friends who lost their mother before having kids. There was a particular pain in becoming a mother without having someone to guide you in that change that felt so poignant to this story. So I made that shift where she can’t have that conversation with her mom. She can’t finally look at her mom and go, “Oh my god, now I get it.” Even though I do have a mom who is alive and wonderful, she’s 3000 miles away. That’s where we’ve gotten in society, that even if we have that generation above us, they’re almost never next door. They’re not raising your kids. They’re not a village. And we’re losing something like that, you know? We’re losing this natural next phase of growth where we get to see them and see their sacrifices and appreciate them. 

I love the other change you made, where you took the Wanda character and kind of made her the librarian. Also just Jessica Harper showing up was amazing. 

She’s the best.

How did you land on that shift?

I don’t think Rachel would mind me saying this, but I found the Wanda White character in the book slightly unsatisfying in the end, because we never meet her. She was a person we never get to see and I was craving seeing a woman from an older generation be a present character in the movie. Because she doesn’t have her own mother, I wanted to show how much you want guidance from those who come before. There’s obviously these other young moms, and you’re getting to see what they’re going through. But I really wanted to see almost like the old crone, who knows things you don’t know, but who maybe you’ve dismissed. I also think there’s a very natural thing that we all do, which is that when women hit a certain age we stop thinking they have wisdom, and we start not taking them seriously. I thought it was a fun thing to misdirect, to kind of have just this woman in the background who you realize holds the wisdom of the world, and you just never looked at her, 

When I read Rachel’s book, the book the Mother reads, Wanda White’s A Field Guide to Magical Women, reminded me of Women Who Run with the Wolves.”

[Simultaneously] Women Who Run with the Wolves! 

I read that Rachel had not read that book when she wrote her book.

She hadn’t read it! I went to her and was like, “So you based this on Women Who Run with the Wolves, right?” It was one of the first things I said to Rachel. She was like,”I never read it.” It was a huge book for me as a teenager. 

My mom gave it to me. 

Me too!

She was like, “You need to read this.”

Me too. Me too. Huge book for me.

In your adaptation of “Nightbitch,” I felt like the audience was learning from Women Who Run with the Wolves, too. Like how the crone is thought of as evil, but actually it’s a misinterpretation of wisdom, right? I feel like that’s the journey.

Just to have a little fun Easter egg, I put my mom as the author on the back of the book that Amy reads in the film.

I love the double edits, where you see what she wishes she said and then what she really said. At what point did you realize that was sort of the best way to do that internal monologue?

That came pretty early in my writing. So much of my adaptation was taking something that had felt so cathartic in reading it and realizing It was not at all filmic and that I needed to find a way to actually make it cinematic, but in a way that gave me the same emotional punch that the book did, and felt as cathartic. So I just think it’s a relatable conceit for any of us to walk away from something and realize all the things you didn’t say, or in the moment to have the flash of everything if you were to tell the truth, and how much you would freak out everyone around you if you said the real thing that you’re thinking. So I came up with that conceit. 

There were a lot of conceits to the script that were weird and that people were not sure about, but that I very quickly felt very confident about. Like her speaking out loud and people just not really hearing her was a clear concept for me. This is a woman who feels invisible. She speaks and nobody fucking hears her. That came from not just the book, but talking to women and my husband’s grandmother, who would tell me stories about trying to talk to her family and tell them that she wants to go back to college when she’s fifty, and literally them all looking at the TV and not looking up and her feeling like she’s speaking and no one’s hearing her. The number of times that I talk to my kids and I’m like, “Does anyone hear me? Does anyone hear me?” It’s just this sense of being invisible, and I wondered, “How do I make that cinematic?” 

For example, the kale salad scene. When she orders the kale salad, the waiter doesn’t hear her. As we were about to start the scene, the actor playing the waiter said to me, “I have a question. Why can’t I hear her?” And I was like, “Oh, your ears are not tuned to the tone of a woman over forty. You can’t hear women over forty.” And he was like, “Oh, okay.” And it made everyone laugh, but I just said it really matter of fact. Yeah, your ears just aren’t tuned to that tone. Because that’s how it feels. As we age, more and more, it just feels like no one’s listening. So much of it felt like, how do I, in a way that tickles me and feels funny to me, show that without also like, wanting to be, like, whiny about it? Because it’s not something I feel that way about. Just in a funny way show what it feels like to feel like nobody fucking listens to you.

I’ve seen this film called a drama, but at the screening last night, it was very much a comedy. Lots of laughter. So I think it’s a comedy.

I do too. I stick by my phrase that it’s a comedy for women, and it’s a horror movie for men. The reason I came up with that is I wrote a script that I thought was fucking hilarious. The first people I shared it with were girlfriends of mine who all thought it was fucking hilarious. Then I shared it with my husband and some male friends of mine who were like, “This scares the shit out of me.” And I was like, “What do you mean it scares the shit out of you?” And they’re like, “I don’t feel like we should talk about this and I don’t really want my wife to read this.” Or “I feel like this is bringing up things I don’t want to talk about. This is terrifying.”

Interesting.

My husband felt scared about it. Brandon Trost, our cinematographer, was like, “This scares the shit out of me, and that’s why I know it’s good.” And I was just like, whoa. We’re having really different reactions to this script. And that just kept going.

My friend is seeing it today, and he’s a married man. I’ll be fascinated to see if he thinks it’s a comedy. 

My husband finds parts of it so funny. He finds Scoot a little too funny, because Scoot is basically playing him. And he dies at certain lines that Scoot says. It’s a little thing, but when he goes, “Just for the record, I don’t like the term night-night.” That’s a direct thing I took from Jorma [Taccone] having words, like saying “veggies,” or talking to kids in certain ways, and then being like, “I don’t want to say that anymore.”

You had twelve dogs in this film and you talked about trying to find the exact dog for Amy. What were you looking for in dog casting?

I wanted a dog that was gorgeous, wild, not tame, that felt like it was feral and yet strong. There were a million dog options that could have been sort of silly. I’m sure I was influenced by things like “Women Who Run With The Wolves,” where I wanted it to be a little bit wolf-like. I wanted it to be red. It just turned out there were no red Huskies that were trained for movie work. So we found Juno at a shelter in California and trained her for five months for this movie, and then the trainers adopted her. So we saved her. It was also a beautiful rescue story. She’s the most amazing, gorgeous dog who ever existed. 

Just like Amy.

Yes! I have this hilarious little video of the moment Amy and Juno met each other, and they’re like, lying on the ground together, scratching each other’s tummies. It was like they were two halves of a whole.