Director and screenwriter Marielle Heller is known for her nuanced portrayal of complex characters reaching their breaking point. In her latest film, Nightbitch, which premiered at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, she pushes that exploration further, blending dark comedy and body horror to create one of the standout films of the year.
The Can You Ever Forgive Me? director adapts Rachel Yoder’s bestselling novel of the same name. The novel tells the story of a stay-at-home mom, referred to only as “Mother,” whose routine of raising a toddler slowly unravels as she begins to suspect she’s turning into a dog. As Mother becomes increasingly isolated from her former self, she enters a new phase of life, discovering an unexpected power within her transformation.
Heller, who won a Film Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature with The Diary of a Teenage Girl, taps into the loneliness and insecurity that can accompany motherhood, especially when all your energy is spent nurturing someone else. For Heller, making Nightbitch was both cathartic and rewarding—an opportunity to reflect on her own journey as a new mother and the process of reclaiming her autonomy.
“One of the things Amy and I talked about really early on was the idea of isolation and feeling invisible,” shares Heller. “I think it’s a very relatable experience for a lot of women to feel invisible and I thought about how to externally show that experience of feeling like no one listens to what you’re saying.”
Heller spoke to Awards Focus about the catharsis of making Nightbitch, the vulnerability involved in opening Pandora’s box of emotions, working with Amy Adams through the chaos of trainers and dogs, and the line of dialogue that still terrifies her.
Awards Focus: Let’s start with first reactions to your script. I understand that opinions differed vastly along gender lines and were you at all prepared for that?
Marielle Heller: I wasn’t prepared for it. As I wrote this script, I just thought it was so funny and poignant. I didn’t even think that anyone would think anything differently than that. I had a few girlfriends of mine who had read the book and were reading my drafts, we were having the exact same experiences, like, “Oh, my God, this is so funny” and “Oh, this feels so good that you’re saying this!”
It was only when my husband and our DP Brandon [Trost] read it, and had this experience of feeling like, “Oh, this is freaking me out. This feels a little scary.” I was saying things we shouldn’t be talking about because it opens up this Pandora’s box and once we say them out loud, we can’t really put them back in the box.
I realized that it felt much more uncomfortable for men who are in heterosexual relationships to read then for the women who I knew were reading it and were feeling just really seen by it.
AF: Could you talk about the decision to have the Mother character talk to herself out loud and what was it like creating those scenes with Amy Adams?
Heller: One of the things Amy and I talked about really early on was the idea of isolation and feeling invisible. How in this odd way the process of becoming a mother for a lot of us leads to feeling less and less like an autonomous being with your own sense of self. Anyone who’s been a parent knows that feeling of talking and no one’s listening. My kids tune me out all the time and sometimes I feel like my husband tunes me out and sometimes I feel like I’m just speaking in my house and nobody’s even hearing me.
My husband’s grandmother once told me this story about speaking to her family and telling them how unhappy she was and none of them even hearing her. I think it’s a very relatable experience for a lot of women to feel invisible and I thought about how to externally show that experience of feeling like no one listens to what you’re saying.
In my own first months of parenthood, I was largely alone and talking to myself all the time because there was only a baby there and I was not having any interactions with any human grown-ups. I just loved this idea of externally showing how she’s speaking and feeling so unseen that people don’t even hear what she’s saying.
AF: And from an acting standpoint does that scene come naturally? Actors rarely get to do that on camera.
Heller: It’s a very vulnerable thing to do and Amy really trusted me, she was like, “Okay.” But she understood deep down that feeling of invisibility.
The kale salad scene where she’s speaking in the restaurant, and nobody hears her. She really understood that very deeply. It feels awful to be in a group of people where you feel like they’re all successful and they’re all doing what they want to do in the world, and you’re the only one who has nothing intelligent to add to the conversation. You’re just stuck in your own head feeling alone. Thinking you’re uninteresting, unsuccessful, unsatisfied in your life.
That feeling of leaving your body and looking at yourself sitting in a restaurant. I think that it was less of an intellectual exercise in terms of getting into the character and the moments where she does that, and it was much more of an emotional experience of what it felt like.
AF: Is this project the most cathartic one you’ve done?
Heller: Yes, this movie is definitely one of the most cathartic things I’ve ever done. It was clearly me processing parts of my own life that I think I hadn’t totally processed. I don’t think I was prepared for how much I would feel like a different person on the other side of becoming a parent than I did when I started out.
This movie was about processing that change in myself and my own aging, and, you know, being a menopausal woman at this point, looking in the mirror and no longer recognizing my face and body when I see it compared to what it used to look like. All of the things that go into being a woman who’s aging, who’s changing, who’s transformed, who’s no longer what they once were.
It was a cathartic experience of trying to work through all of those feelings as they were happening. It was a joyful experience, too, because it felt very validating and very real. Part of me worried that people aren’t interested in stories about women’s bodies or mothering or the process of becoming a mother and I’ve seen that reaction with some people who watched the movie where this isn’t interesting to them. It’s not interesting to learn about what it might feel like to become a woman who’s shifting and changing. I think it makes people a little uncomfortable, but that’s also what made me so compelled to tell this story – for all of my friends and people who would feel seen by it.
AF: We have to talk about the dogs. I am specifically interested in the practicalities of getting that wonderful shot of Amy Adams running and the dogs following her one by one. I believe you had like 12 dogs on set, plus trainers. How do you navigate that?
Heller: She reconnects to herself as she starts running, she gets more in touch with her physical body. The more integrated she becomes; these dogs join her on the run, and we did that totally practically.
We picked a street where we could hide the dogs in certain places and have trainers with each dog and then as she ran, we released the dogs. We practiced with them, ran through the whole thing, and gave the dogs treats as we went along.
I couldn’t believe the dogs can differentiate their trainer’s voice from other trainers’ voices because all the trainers talk at the same time. Like the scenes where the dogs are all sitting on the lawn and then they have to get up and fight; there were like 12 trainers. If you heard the actual audio from those scenes, it’s just people being like, “No” and “Sit, sit.” It was pure chaos and then Amy’s trying to act through all these trainers talking to the dogs.
AF: I do want to ask about the montage sequences, especially at the beginning. It truly feels like this is what montage was invented for; it conveys the repetitiveness of motherhood so well.
Heller: Obviously in the book there’s no montages, she just describes different days. I really tried to put myself in my feeling of what those experiences were and how could I convey it in a cinematic way.
The hashbrown montage came out of that. I would fry up these frozen dinosaur hashbrowns for my son when he was little, and I have this visceral reaction to remembering that food that I would prepare when he was little and how disgusting it was. I was just feeling like I was living the same day over and over again and had no sense of when it began or ended.
So, filming that was a challenge and fun in so many ways but was also everyone kind of going like, “Really? How many times do we have to do this?” and me going, “We’re gonna do this so many times because it’s gonna work as an overall idea.”
But it wasn’t until people saw it that I think they really understood, “Oh, yes, this does feel exactly how those early days feel like where you don’t know what day it is or what meal you’re even cooking or how many times you’ve sang Wheels on the Bus that day.” It’s just the same every day.
AF: I need the line “I could crush a walnut with my vagina” to join the best movie quotes of all time.
Heller: Right? Put it on a T-shirt.
AF: Put it on a T-shirt. I’m curious if you have a favorite moment or a line from the film that maybe you’re surprised you even got in there?
Heller: A line that I wrote and then got almost terrified of having written, was the line, “What happened to my wife, what happened to the girl that I married?” When she says, “She died in childbirth.” – that was a line that didn’t come from the book but as I wrote it, I thought, ‘Oh, god, this is what it’s all about.’
This feeling of mourning the death of who you once were but I also didn’t know if that’s too raw, too much, it felt like a lot.
But “I could crush a walnut with my vagina” is also one of my favorite lines that’s ever been, and I was thrilled with the way Amy delivered that line, it just makes me happy every time.
Searchlight Pictures releases ‘Nightbitch’ in theatres on December 6, 2024.