“It’s a hard industry to be a woman”: Marielle Heller on making a film for mothers in ‘Nightbitch’

During the pandemic’s early days in spring 2020, Marielle Heller was on her own with an infant and a toddler, in a remote house in the woods, while her husband was away working. It sounds like the start of a horror script – but instead it was the perfect mindset to get her in the mood for feminist fable Nightbitch, adapted from Rachel Yoder’s bestselling novel about an isolated mother who finds something darker unleashed in herself.

“Rachel’s book felt like it was written just for me. It was like she was saying all of my deepest, darkest thoughts out loud,” remembers Heller. “I was very much in my own head and feeling overwhelmed and isolated. This book felt like a lifeline.”

Annapurna Pictures had optioned Yoder’s book before its 2021 publication, and already had Amy Adams excited to star and produce. Adams and the Annapurna team thought Heller – whose feature credits comprise A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood, Can You Ever Forgive Me? and The Diary Of A Teenage Girl – would be the perfect director (she also joined the group of producers as well).

Adams plays the unnamed ‘Mother’, who pauses her career as a successful artist to be a stay-at-home mom to her toddler son. When Mother starts experiencing changes in her body, she realises it is not normal postpartum transformations, there is something wilder going on. Scoot McNairy as Husband remains oblivious to his wife’s crisis and is often absent on long work trips away from the family home.

Heller says this film is “the most personal movie I’ve ever made”, and she found Yoder “wonderfully generous and understanding of me taking her book and her story and all of her experiences and also infusing them with my own”.

Adams was also amply collaborative – they had many Zoom calls while Heller was adapting the screenplay, during which “we talked mostly about our kids and being mothers and what we related to about Rachel’s book. Early on, I knew we were on the same page. We understood what we wanted this movie to be.”

Nightbitch was not the most straightforward adaptation. “It’s an interior book that’s very subjective,” says Heller. “What’s beautiful is the voice – it’s a funny, witty character who has so much to say.”

Early on, she made the key decision to have Mother voice her inner monologues so the audience can hear her darkly funny thoughts. “It felt right, from a character point of view,” she says. “She feels so invisible in her life and that nobody’s listening to her.”

With toddlers, packs of dogs and a canine transformation, Nightbitch was never going to be a simple shoot. Heller had started auditioning toddler twins in a casting office but realised she needed to take them to a playground for a few hours to see their real personalities.

“We met so many sets of adorable, wonderful twins, but it was important to me that we had twins who felt like they were real kids who were playful,” she says. They tried to make the set as fun as possible for the twins jointly cast in the role of Son – Arleigh and Emmett Snowden – and make filming feel like a game.

Even scenes without kids and dogs were challenging to bring Heller’s vision to life. “I’d say one of the hardest scenes to nail technically was the kale salad scene [where Mother reunites for a dinner with her old art-world friends], which is also one of my favourite scenes in the movie,” she says. “There was this poignant emotional truth that I wanted to capture, which is the feeling like all your friends are more successful than you, feeling like you have nothing smart to add to a conversation.”

Balancing the hubbub of the restaurant with space for Mother’s internal monologue presented a number of technical challenges and creative choices. “The sound design is really fun within the scene too,” adds Heller. “It’s like she falls underwater as she’s speaking and then, slowly, bits of the restaurant come back in.”

Creative partnership

Heller has now worked with director of photography Brandon Trost on three features. “We have a very easy, close working relationship. When I started directing movies, with Diary Of A Teenage Girl, I could talk to him from an emotional point of view, and he could help translate that into the technical, which was helpful because I’d not gone to film school.”

California-­born Heller started her career as an actress and studied acting at UCLA and RADA.

“Over the years I’ve learned more about lenses and angles and blocking,” she adds, “but we’ve always had this easy way of talking where I can talk from a character point of view.”

Nightbitch includes more VFX work than her past films. “It was a learning curve,” says Heller. “Every film has immense challenges, and a lot of my challenge for this film was trying to take what I saw in my head and learn how to explain it to people who could bring the details to life. Like, how could I describe the tail that comes out of her?”

Those human-to-canine scenes were seamless thanks to the collaboration between visual-effects supervisor Stuart White, special effects make-up prosthetic designer Vincent Van Dyke, and prosthetic make-up artist Thomas Floutz. 

“The transformation needed to feel positive and euphoric and liberating and not negative like An American Werewolf In London or The Fly, where there is a monster coming out of you,” says Heller. “There had to be a euphoria that informed it. When Amy looks at that tail, she’s not totally repulsed, she’s fascinated with what’s happening.”

Naturally, this story of an artist struggling to juggle her work-life balance has Heller also reflecting on her own life and work. “I’m always thinking about how I can do it better, or how I can try to advocate for other mothers or other parents within our industry, because I think it’s a hard industry to be a parent in. It’s a hard industry to be a woman in – in any capacity.”

Heller hopes to change the industry from within – she founded Defiant By Nature, a production company focused on working with women and non-binary creators. She also tries to lead from the top on her shoots.

“I’ve tried to advocate for that on all my sets, about more sustainable working hours and offering childcare,” she says. “When I did Neighborhood, we were doing 10-hour days so we could all make it home to our kids. With this film, I wanted a family-­friendly set where kids could visit.”

After premiering in Toronto, Nightbitch was released by Searchlight Pictures in the US and UK in early December. “I love that mothers in particular are feeling so seen by this movie, because that’s how I felt when I read Rachel’s book,” says Heller. “There are so many laughs of pure recognition. I also have been moved by people who don’t have kids coming up to me and saying, ‘This movie made me think about my mom, I want to go call her right now. I know the way she sacrificed for me, but I didn’t get it until now.’

“There are so many things we don’t talk about when it comes to women – whether it’s our bodies, our pain, our medical issues. I just hope this film demystifies some of that shame and lets conversations happen.”

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