Nightbitch star Amy Adams and director Marielle Heller developed what Adams calls “a shorthand of honesty” while making the Searchlight supernatural comedy.
“I felt from the very beginning, Mari and I have just had a shorthand of honesty. We’ve never really tried to present anything other than our authentic perspective on any subject matter, and we just immediately understood each other from an intellectual and artistic point of view, and I think we just brought that through the whole process,” Adams said at during a Q&A following a screening of Nightbitch at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival on Thursday.
Adams received the Outstanding Achievement in Cinema award at the annual festival in Savannah, Georgia. She also gave a masterclass on acting to SCAD students.
“I just innately trusted her and when, when we did start talking about it really, it was immediately just a sort of connection and collaboration and experience and of artistic, I don’t want to use the word ambition, but yeah, what we wanted to say. There was a real connection over our truth,” Adams added.
Nightbitch stars Adams as a stay at home mom who turns into a dog at night. It offers a deep look into the joys and struggles of motherhood as well as the importance of shared responsibility between parents. Scoot McNairy plays her on-screen husband, with Zoe Chao, Mary Holland, and Archana Rajan playing her newfound friends.
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More About Nightbitch From Amy Adams and Marielle Heller
“I feel like we mostly connected in the beginning as mothers, truthfully and talking about our families and our own experiences, and that that kind of set the tone,” Heller says. “I think if we had tried to dive right in to what we wanted to do with the project, or if you had had this, like, grand vision of it all, I would have been like, Oh no, no, no.”
They also reflected on motherhood during the pandemic, which is when the project began.
“If I’m honest, it was during a period of pandemic where, like, my daughter was doing at home schooling, and I was like, ‘Here’s where I’m at. I can’t do fourth grade fractions, so my daughter thinks I’m stupid,’” Adams joked. “We just had that honest — it was just like, ‘where are you at?’ Like, reaching a community and a connection over a shared experience. And we just went from there. And it was just an understanding that we’d always be honest.”
“I was on Zoom with you, hiding from my kids, like, running around, trying to be like, ‘I just need to talk for one second,’” Heller replied.
“I just had so much trust and faith in Mari,” Adams continued. “And really what you’re seeing, aside from a couple edits and scenes that she’s already talked about, that’s the script she wrote. That’s first draft, or at least the first draft that I saw. She was just so connected with the material. I really thought any notes would just be performative. I was like, I love it. I so understand what you’re doing.”
Heller says it was challenging to adapt Yoder’s book into a movie because of how much takes place in the characters own mind.
“Early on, when starting to look at Rachel’s beautiful novel, pretty quickly, I realized it was not very cinematic, because it was very internal. And the book is a lot like kind of a big internal monologue. But what I loved so much about it was the voice and the humor the character of Mother,” Heller says.
“I just related to her so much, and I felt like she just had such a unique perspective. I always talk about this when I think about writing movies that you have to like, love your main character in a very, very deep way. And I loved her. I understood how she saw the world, that she sees the world through this very funny, sarcastic, kind of f—ed up lens. And I was like, I love her, and I know her. She’s me.”
Based on the book of the same name by Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch arrives in theaters in December from Searchlight Pictures.
Main Image: Marielle Heller and Amy Adams at SCAD. Getty Images for SCAD Savannah Film Festival