Author Rachel Yoder and director Marielle Heller sit down to talk about Nightbitch, Heller’s new film based on Yoder’s novel of the same name. The film opens the third Refocus Film Festival on October 17 in Iowa City. The festival is an appreciation of the art of adaptation, particularly interested in the relationship of page to screen. Here in this UNESCO City of Literature, which is also Yoder’s home, it’s unsurprising that Opening Night is a sold-out gala affair. In a layered conversation wholly appropriate to the ethos of this festival and community, Yoder and Heller discuss their shared responsibility to the story, making art, letting go, and, of course, motherhood. Nightbitch stars Amy Adams and will be released theatrically in the United States by Searchlight Pictures on December 6, 2024.

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Marielle Heller: I guess I’ll just ask you generally, how are you feeling with this adaptation of your book being out in the world now?

Rachel Yoder: I feel great about it. I mean, there’s something really beautiful about having a project sort of adjacent to your own for which you don’t really feel responsible, yet it is still sort of fascinating to see the process of it being made and what the response is.

MH: You don’t feel the burden of responsibility?

RY: I don’t feel the burden of responsibility, like I did with the book. But then, I don’t know if I even felt that with the book because it feels like once the book is done and you put it out there, you have no control over what happens to it. It becomes something that isn’t quite fully yours anymore. I like that, because in making the thing you become so obsessed with it and so you want it to be perfect. So there’s some relief, then, in it being out there. I guess I just feel sort of relief and curiosity having it out in the world and it feels good to be in a supporting role to supporting your work, and supporting Amy. How do you feel having it out in the world?

It’s the plight of the artist, isn’t it? To have the pleasure really be in the making of the thing. And then what comes after that is not as pleasurable.

MH: I think I find the process of letting go of work harder than you do, it sounds like. Maybe I’m going to try to learn from the way that you’re thinking about it a little bit. I don’t know, I’ve said this before to Jorma, my husband, that I sort of wish I could make movies and then never show them to anybody. I find it sort of gut-wrenching to put work out. I find it fun and fulfilling to talk about the work and to have interesting conversations with people, that part I find fun, but the actual act of just letting it go is a little bit painful to me.

RY: Is it because you feel like people misunderstand it or don’t read it in the way you wish they would read it?

MH: Yes. I’m sure it’s about loss of control of the whole thing, right? Like you said, you obsess about every detail of it for so long and then to put it out is this sort of letting go of all control. Whatever will be will be and everybody will make what they will of it. It’s like a Zen process of releasing. It’s like your kid going out in the world and the pain and joy of seeing them like out interacting with other people and having to fend for themselves a little bit.

RY: It’s the plight of the artist, isn’t it? To have the pleasure really be in the making of the thing. And then what comes after that is not as pleasurable.

MH: Yeah. It just isn’t.

RY: So after you read the book, what were you most excited to put on screen? What aspects of it excited you in terms of propelling you into a film?

MH: This is just a small detail, but I think I got very excited about portraying a long-term intimate relationship in all of its sort of gross, intimate goriness. I had been thinking for a while about how to portray long-term relationships, because I’ve been with my husband for 25 years. And once you go through having babies and they’ve seen your body ripped open or cut open or whatever, you cross over this threshold where any kind of dignity and vanity has gone away.

Also, I know I’m going to be with my husband forever, but that doesn’t mean that our marriage is perfect or great all the time. And everyone I know who’s in a long-term marriage or long-term relationship and feels like, “Oh yeah, we’re going to stay together.” But like, there’s a lot to mine in what it is to be growing and changing together. I got very excited by digging into all of those details of the things that I just find funny about day-to-day life in a long-term relationship. Jorma and I were together 15 years before we had kids and you have a long time where you have a certain relationship and then everything shifts because you become co-managers of a little operation. I just got excited about…even just the scene where they’re both in the bathroom and one of them is peeing and the other one’s brushing their teeth at the same time… I thought ‘Oh, this is so funny!’ There’s no decorum left.

RY: Seeing each other’s messy parts and scary parts and ugly parts yet you still are willing to stay.

MH: Yeah. There’s such a deep intimacy to that and that so much of having kids. You’re just really getting into the shit, like physical shit, and all of that stuff is just so much, there’s something beautiful about the humanness and the intimacy. Any part of us that’s kept it together and controlled before having a baby—you can’t do that anymore.

RY: I love that answer. I think right now we’re sort of in an era of, for better or for worse, angry women or angry mom books and films. And I think the easy route to take in those narratives is “one person’s wrong, one person’s right.” Or, you know, here are some answers, this is the way to resolve it.

I was also interested while writing the book—okay, what if it’s two people who want to be together and it is really hard to be together? I mean, that’s not what I emphasized in the book, but I didn’t want it to be like a divorce novel. I was interested in what it looks like when you show each other your mess.

MH: And that we are different people over the course of our lifetime. So if we’re in a long-term relationship, we really evolve and you either accept the new version of your partner or you move on.

There’s no right answer to that, but if you’re choosing to stay with that person…what does that look like to accept looking at your partner and they’ve become a different person and you’ve become a different person? When I got married, one of my mom’s friends said—and this is very generalized and binary—but “Every man marries a woman hoping that they’ll never change and they always do. And every woman marries a man hoping that they’ll change and they never do.” It was just a little funny phrase but it kind of stuck with me. I was with Jorma since the time I was like 20, and I had a version of who we were and that’s very much changed over 25 years, you know? Do you choose to stay with that new person? Do you choose to wish that they were always the person that you first married? I don’t know. That whole idea I think was one of the most compelling questions for me.

RY: I think it’s interesting that there’s such an overt transformation at the center of the book, but then it’s really about these subtle transformations within a relationship.

MH: In my own motherhood journey I had been thinking a lot about my own relationship with my parents changed in the course of having kids and watching friends of mine who had lost parents, who had lost their mom before they had a baby, and then what that meant to them becoming a mother and just how this lineage of becoming a mother gets influenced by what came before. When you don’t have that connection to a past lineage of women, what does that do to trying to become this new version of yourself currently?

RY: I loved that change that you made in the film that her mom wasn’t around.

MH: It took a while to come to that, but it came out as I wrote it. I wonder if you also went through this when you were writing the book, I kept thinking “why doesn’t she just pick up the phone and call her mom and ask her mom all these questions?”

There were versions of it where I had her mom still alive, but not very comfortable with speaking about these things. But it was really a necessary shift where it felt like the story told me, oh no, the stakes would be higher if she just has no one to call.

RY: Absolutely. It was a great change.

MH: I go through the experience where I write the script and I get to make every choice—this mug that she’s going to drink her coffee from, and then the glasses she’s going to wear, and the this and that. And even though I’m part of every little choice and decision, I still have a moment when I look at it and I think “does this look like how I saw it in my head or does it look different?”

How was it for you? Because you were not necessarily part of every teeny tiny little decision, but you were there while we were filming and you were seeing the big choices. Was there anything where you thought that’s not mother’s car or that’s not what her house was supposed to look like? Because you created the world first and then I interpreted it.

RY: I was actually really struck by how similar things looked to in my mind. You know, the little boys were wearing the same target shirt that my son had. It was a really pretty intense experience to be on set, to have something that I’ve written that obviously came out of my life and is then taken by you and dramatized. When I was in that little scene—which you so graciously put me in—and Amy was acting out this scene that I had written in my head, that was set in a real place in Iowa City, and then I was responding to her in the scene. It was just too much for my head to handle. It was really overwhelming and way more emotional than I thought it would be. After we went home, there were just a lot of things that were stirred up. It was a really intense experience. But I was astonished by the house, the interior of the house you chose, the kids.

I guess the one thing that surprised me or looked different was, um, what mother wore because I didn’t see her in that style of clothing. For some reason that was surprising to me, and interesting.

MH: We went through a big evolution around what she would wear based on also trying to tell the story of who she was before. How do we bring in a little bit of artistic style? So its a simple issue of translation. I wrote her for a while in the same t-shirt and sports bra, which was something that was in the script. And it was like, she’s wearing the same thing she’s worn for days. But then I was also doing this visual gag where I wanted her to be putting a hash brown in the pan, panning back up and she’s in a different outfit than she was in the day before. And that’s the only indicator that time has passed. She reaches down and then she’s stirring mac and cheese, and when you come back up, she’s wearing something different. I actually needed her to change clothes in order to do this visual gag otherwise it could have just felt like only one day instead of this feeling that I wanted to portray.

That was a very visceral feeling in your novel, that the days are all blending into each other. Time is weird. There’s no sleep. There’s today, tomorrow. What day of the week is it? It’s just all blending together. And so in order to visually show that—even though what you described in the book is never changing your shirt and not having time to care for yourself—we had to change clothes enough to make it clear.

RY: That’s something that never would never cross my mind. And it makes complete sense.

MH: And then also thinking about ways that she was being influenced by having a little boy and they were sitting on the sidewalk and that their life was kind of dirty. Which probably comes from my own experience of having my son. Sometimes our activity was just watching a construction site for hours and being on the sidewalk. That was like a free show we would do.

RY: Oh, I know. Yeah.

MH: And the sort of utilitarian aspect of clothing. You’re going to be on the ground a lot.

RY: You’re going to be moving, you’re going to be running.

MH: Yeah, there’s no skirts when you’re sitting on curbs.

RY: That’s true. That’s a really good point.

RY: Were you thinking of any other films or pieces of art? As you conceptualized this film? And what were inspirations that went into the film?

MH: Not really, I’m always kind of terrible at that. I think I wouldn’t make a movie if I felt like it was too closely referring to something else. Because the whole reason I want to make a movie is because I feel it needs to be told because it hasn’t been told. I will say, I feel a guiding principle for the sort of aesthetic was this honest intimacy, which was so present in your book, this feeling of what is it to really allow the camera and the audience to see and feel exactly what this moment in life feels like for the mother and wanting to be as brutally honest and close to the character in that way, without any vanity.

You know, I remember when I transitioned from making theater to making movies, the thing that made me excited was that you can go really close to somebody in a movie, you can get right up in their pores and their nose hairs, and you can feel what it is to be them. And we often don’t do that in movies, because it makes people uncomfortable. But making a movie that’s exploring a woman’s aging body and changing body, I wanted it to feel like, oh, we’re really getting to see something that in another film we were never allowed to see quite this intimately.

RY: I think that’s one of the great triumphs of the film, I was so excited to see bodily fluids on screen. And the way we touch and prod our body when we’re alone in the bathroom. That to me felt really, really exciting. Thank you for that.

MH: My pleasure. I didn’t quite realize, but it’s the second movie I’ve made with menstrual blood in it. And it’s not intended to be some calling card or something! But I do think there’s a little quiet revolution in showing menstrual blood or other female bodily fluids, because it is not something that we’re often allowed to see and feel in film. There have been some men who’ve been a little disturbed by that, whereas more than half the audience at some point in their life bleeds. I think that’s somehow jarring and it just shows how we’re so uncomfortable with that and yet people can get their heads cut off, and blood and war, and all this other blood is fine but a tiny little spot of menstrual blood and people freak out.

RY: Normalize menstrual blood! The kick that i have been on is why do we not see more birth on screen, you know? It boggles my mind that we see this violence, we see the sex, but when it comes to the daily blood of it or the realities of what women experience? It’s too gross, we can’t do that.

I think it’s interesting that there’s such an overt transformation at the center of the book, but then it’s really about these subtle transformations within a relationship.

MH: Right, a big part of this was also wanting to show birth. If you are somebody who chooses to go through birth you’re really unequipped for it because the depictions of it have been so sparse and when it actually happens so few people tell you the truth about what it’s going to be like and how bloody but also euphoric and incredible and deeply spiritual it will be. The whole experience is so powerful—so deeply powerful and non-intellectual—how do you capture all of that gore and beauty and let it be normalized yeah?

As I adapted your book and sat with it for many months, I kept going over different versions of the script and what I might put in or what I might take out. What became so clear to me was this central question of “is becoming a parent a huge mistake?” like “did i fuck everything in my whole life up by becoming a parent?” I think all of us who have become parents would lie if we said we hadn’t had that thought.

I wanted to normalize those complicated feelings we have around the grief that we go through when becoming a parent, and the loss of our former self and former identity. That is the exploration that Mother goes through and the metaphor I kept using was that she’s just digging, she’s digging through her past, she’s digging through herself, she’s digging through what other women have experienced, and she’s excavating in order to come up with some answer to this bigger question. That her bigger question was “should i have become a mother? did i make a mistake?” and how do you answer that question except for by giving birth again.

RY: Yes. I think the ending was one of those experiences of surprising yet obvious or something—oh, of course this is how it had to end. This is the perfect punctuation to the end of the movie and the answer to the question, absolutely.

MH: I think part of that came also because I was pregnant before the pandemic started and during the pandemic, and I don’t know if i would have become pregnant during the pandemic because it was such a dark time. But I had a friend say to me “you know having a baby is sort of the ultimate act of optimism and faith.” Recognizing what goes into that choice, I think it is somehow a very hopeful act, an that act of optimism at the end, a leap of faith.

RY: I don’t know how closely you follow the response to the film. And I don’t even mean critical response, but have you heard from people who have seen it? From mothers, from women? What has the response been?

MH: I’ve had such an outpouring of love particularly from women and mothers, so many people telling me that they just wept uncontrollably at the end. Yeah, it’s exactly what I would hope for and I think there is something about seeing birth portrayed realistically that’s really cathartic.

RY: I’m excited to show it at Refocus in Iowa City and hear what people think. One of the moments I thought about a lot—and served as inspiration for the whole idea of the book—is childbirth. When I was giving birth to my son—it was a complicated birth and he wasn’t coming out—and afterward my husband said he had to leave the room at one point and I said “why did you leave the room?” and he said “I was going to pass out, you were making noises I’ve never heard come out of a person before.” And I’m like, “yeah.”

MH: That’s really locked into that idea of how animalistic we get in pregnancy and in birth. Almost every man i’ve heard described their partner giving birth they all get this like wild look in their eyes like someone who’s been to war. My dad tells the story of my mom giving birth to me, she was in it for so many hours and at some point I was getting distressed and the doctor looked at her in the eyes and said “this is the moment you have to push as hard as you’ve ever pushed, it has to happen now.” And she turned into an animal and this vein was popping in her head and he says “something came over her that I had never seen before” and she just transformed and that thing of pure instinct kicked in. These noises that come out of us that are so not anything we’ve ever made you really tapped into that and that was also the idea for the end. How do you tap into your animal instincts to our advantage when you need it.

RY: It’s so powerful. A source of yeah immense power.

MH: (pause) Yeah, it’s a wild experience wild

RY: Do you want one more question or should we end there?

MH: We can do one more question. I need to ask you one more question, I feel like you’ve been asking me so many.

RY: Well you made a movie, that’s so cool.

I am actually genuinely curious about this—not that I wasn’t curious about the others—but the the film got delayed, it was supposed to come out a year earlier than it did, and I wonder how was that a different movie? Would a different film and come have come out? Because I know you did some editing and work in that yea.

MH: I would say it was still very much the same movie but I did take advantage of the fact that we could pull back and reflect—something that you almost never get to do when editing a movie. I had time to watch and re-watch and think and I did do some rearranging, which is my favorite thing to do in the edit. Jorma always comments that most directors don’t quite do as much of that as I do. I love seeing if I put the pieces back together in the wrong order how it feels. So the big shift that came between the movie coming out a year earlier and now, was putting the grocery store scene right at the very beginning of the movie. The movie had always started with the scene of making breakfast and every day feeling like the day before. But that scene in the grocery store was such a powerful performance of Amy’s, and it puts the audience right on her side where you are like “oh, I see where she is emotionally.” It had always been about 20 minutes into the cut—and it was always powerful wherever it was—but i thought this could just be a quick shortcut right into the heart of the matter. We could just drop the audience—boom—right into the deep end if we move this to the front. That came to me maybe December of last year after the movie had been delayed and luckily everybody was game to sort of open it back up and we spent just a few days re-editing it.

RY: I thought it was such a brilliant move. It just immediately grounds you as a viewer. I know exactly who this character is and I know exactly what the dilemma is.

MH: It’s also this mix of comedy and sadness and surrealism and it kind of sets up the tone. What you’re doing in the first five minutes of a movie is teaching the audience how to watch the movie, so that scene feels like it really teaches the audience “oh, you’re gonna be a little bit on your toes, things are not gonna be what they seem.” There’s a real wink wink to this all.

RY: I thought it was the perfect final edit, I was really excited when I saw it.

MH: It was a real gift that I got to go back in. That really rarely happens. I guess if we hadn’t been on strike it wouldn’t have happened.

RY: So, one good thing.

MH: Yeah, it was really hard to wait a year for it to come out but I do believe things happen when they’re meant to happen. Now feels like the right time for the movie to be coming out for whatever reason, it just does feel right .

RY: I can’t wait to see what more happens and not be responsible for it in any way!

MH: Just watching somebody else’s kid have a tantrum, and not our problem!

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Marielle Heller is an award-winning director, writer, actor, and producer who has built an impressive and multifaceted career carefully constructing a unique and compassionate voice that has earned her critical acclaim. She most recently wrote and directed Nightbitch, starring Amy Adams, which tells the story of a woman thrown into the stay-at-home routine of raising a toddler in the suburbs, who slowly embraces the feral power deeply rooted in motherhood, as she becomes increasingly aware of the bizarre and undeniable signs that she may be turning into a canine. Heller’s screenplay is an adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s acclaimed debut novel of the same name.

Previously, Heller directed A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood starring Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers, which earned him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. She previously directed the three-time Academy Award-nominated film, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, starring Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant, just three years after the release of her highly lauded directorial debut, The Diary of a Teenage Girl, which earned her an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature as well as a DGA nomination for First Time Feature Film.  As an actor, she starred as Alma Wheatley in director and writer Scott Frank’s critically acclaimed Netflix limited series “The Queen’s Gambit” alongside Anya Taylor-Joy.

Heller is also the founder of Defiant by Nature, a production company focused on telling stories that uplift, inspire, and entertain while simultaneously shining a light on women and non-binary creators. In a first look TV deal with Paramount Television Studios, the company will develop and produce new scripted series for television, some of which Heller may direct, while also shepherding in new voices and talent.  The company’s first release was a filmed version of the Pulitzer Prize winning and Tony nominated play What The Constitution Means To Me, written by and starring Heidi Schreck and directed by Heller, for which she received a DGA nomination.

 

Rachel Yoder is the author of Nightbitch (2021), her debut novel named a best book of the year by Esquire and Vulture and recognized as a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction. Formerly the 23/24 Trias Writer-in-Residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, she now serves as Assistant Professor of Screenwriting and Cinema Arts at the University of Iowa. Her stories and essays have appeared in publications such as Harper’s, The New York Times, and The Paris Review. With Mark Polanzak, she is a founding editor of draft: the journal of process.