TORONTO (AP) — The day after the premiere of their film “Nightbitch,” Amy Adams and Marielle Heller are sitting in a Toronto restaurant reflecting on all that went into, as Heller puts it, “birthing” a movie that captures some of the truest, rawest but seldom Instagrammed things about early motherhood.
Their film, which writer-director Heller has described as a comedy for women and a horror film for men, stars Adams as a woman credited only as “Mother.” With her husband (Scoot McNairy) often away on work (and when he’s there, he refers to solo parenting as “babysitting”), Adams’ character experiences a wide range of emotions raising a newborn.
She is exhausted and resentful. Fresh postpartum horrors await a glance in the mirror. Animalistic urges bubble up. New powers emerge. The movie turns increasingly surreal. There are dogs.
“I just met her where I was at,” says Adams, whose own daughter is now a teenager. “That was me at that time in my life. It wasn’t a transformation that I made for the movie. I just was like: This is who she is. This is who I am, let’s marry the two and let’s be proud.”
The adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s bestseller that Searchlight Pictures will release Dec. 6, is about as close to the bone as it gets for Adams and Heller. In “Nightbitch,” the rage and bitterness of an over-burdened, self-sacrificing mother — Adams’ character has given up her successful career as an artist — find well-deserved expression. Aside from pulling from Yoder’s book, the movie comes directly from Heller and Adams’ experiences. Extreme as it can be, “Nightbitch” is essentially reportage from a little-documented chapter of parenthood.
Heller, the filmmaker of “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,”“Can You Ever Forgive Me?” and “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” wrote the script while raising her second child with her husband Jorma Taccone. They had moved out of New York during the pandemic, but Taccone was away for several months working on a TV show.
“I wasn’t sleeping. My daughter was getting up at 5 every day. I was out of my mind,” says Heller. “When you’re sleep deprived, you sort of feel more connected to the mythological world because you’re not in a literal headspace.”
The only way Heller could write was to put her infant daughter down for a nap and let her older son watch TV.
“And I’d get two hours. And in those two hours I wrote the script,” Heller says. “It was my one little moment that I could carve out, and I could just get out all of my frustrations from the day.”
When Adams, a producer on the movie, read Yoder’s book, she recognized a more honest perspective on motherhood than she had read before.
“It really reminded me of ‘Metamorphosis,’ my favorite book in high school,” she says. “This idea of transformation. Outside of just being a mother, the loss of identity, the isolation, those were things that spoke to me so deeply.”
“I struggled after my daughter was born,” says Adams. “I definitely was not one of those women that bounced right back. I think that’s a really common experience.”
Adams, the six-time Oscar nominee, gives a performance without a hint of vanity. She growls. She eats meatloaf like she’s in a pie-eating contest. She runs around on all fours.
“You didn’t blink,” Heller says, admiringly.
Adams shrugs. That’s how her family sees her around the house, she says, though not the running on all fours bit. “I mean,” Adams adds, “watching it is a different story.” (Adams, who generally avoids watching movies she stars in, slipped out of the premiere's screening Saturday night.)
Many of Heller’s favorite, most cathartic scenes to write came from the kind of passive-aggressive exchanges that can happen in a relationship, especially one tested by the pressures of child-rearing and the inequities that can arise between parents.
“The thing is, you can be in a very equitable relationship, then the moment you have kids, even in an equitable relationship, suddenly gender roles peek their way out,” Heller says. “My husband and I were together for, like, 14 years before we had kids. So it was shocking to suddenly find ourselves falling into gender roles we had never been in before.”
There are delightfully cutting observations laced through “Nightbitch” that might serve as a wake-up call to plenty of fathers. As much as many women will cheer Heller’s film, men — horrified or not — may be its best audience. The dad in the film often appears useless, even when it comes to making coffee.
“Jorma would read scenes from the movie and be like, ‘F--- you, that’s really rude. I know how to make coffee,’” Heller says, laughing.
“It’s funny, I didn’t remember the bit about the coffee until I watched it again. Darren (Le Gallo, Adams' husband) and I literally had a conversation this summer. He was like, ‘How did you get the coffee machine to work?’” Adams adds. “I was like, ‘If I can figure it out, you can figure it out.’”
Early on, Heller and Adams began to get the sense that they had tapped into something. Heller called it “an invisible experience” at the Toronto International Film Festival premiere.
“It started on set with crew members coming up to us,” Adams says. “People kept saying, ‘This is a little too on the nose. I really see myself in this.’”
“I first shared the script with a lot of other mothers and women who I trusted, and they all thought it was hilarious,” says Heller. “Then I started sharing it with my husband and Brandon (Trost), our cinematographer, or other male friends who were like, ‘This scared the s--- out of me.’”
“Nightbitch” — Heller says she still loves saying the title — will open in theaters just weeks after a U.S. presidential election where women's rights are at the forefront.
“Women’s bodies are being attacked. Freedom of choice is being attacked. It’s a very volatile moment for women,” says Heller. “Inevitably making a movie that I don’t think we even thought of as radically feminist in any way — it’s just about where we are in our lives, in our bodies, and we don’t think our own bodies are taboo.”
Adams, who starred in the movie adaptation of J.D. Vance's “Hillbilly Elegy” years before Vance was the Republican nominee for vice president, says she's more hopeful. She made “Nightbitch,” she says, for her daughter.
“It's not a surprise but I really always try to find a celebration in a moment that can be challenging. My daughter is going to be voting in four years. To have these conversations with her — women’s issues, bodily autonomy, misogyny — that’s kind of where I’m at with this,” Adams says. “Let’s keep our eye on the future. I’m really excited that her generation will be voting in four years. And they’re listening.”