Nightbitch director Marielle Heller: ‘Half our population menstruates, and we can’t talk about it?’ | Canada Voices

Marielle Heller makes deeply felt films about artists coming to terms with just who they think they are in this world. In 2015’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl, an aspiring graphic novelist thinks her pathway into adulthood is via an affair with her mother’s boyfriend. In 2018’s Can You Ever Forgive Me?, an author forges a future by illicitly imitating her icons. And in 2019’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, a writer comes face to face with his fears of inadequacy through a series of encounters with children’s TV host Fred Rogers. But things get a little hairier for Heller in Nightbitch, the director’s adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s darkly comic novel that finally arrives in Canada next week after premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival this past fall.

Focusing on an unnamed woman (Amy Adams) who sacrifices her visual arts career to become a stay-at-home mother for her young son (played by twins Arleigh and Emmett Snowden) – whille her businessman husband (Scoot McNairy) travels for work – Nightbitch uses the anxiety of suburban domesticity to scratch away at the divide between life and art, work and family, motherhood and misogyny. And then there are the dogs, with Adams’s character slowly becoming convinced that she is turning into a furry, feral creature.

The morning after her film’s TIFF premiere, Heller sat down with The Globe to discuss her pet project.

You started the premiere last night off on a good note by bringing the two adorable little boys who play Adams’s son out on-stage. Honestly, it gave me a little pang because I was out there late at night, my three little kids were at home …

I know! My eldest was back in our Airbnb here in Toronto, waiting for me to come home, too.

So you brought your eldest with you – that’s as good an opening to talk about your own work-life balance in a film about just that topic.

It’s impossible, it’s horrible. My daughter had awful diarrhea a few days ago, so I was home with that. Kids, they don’t care if you have a movie premiering. She woke up at 5:45, screaming, crying, only wanting me.

Kids just don’t understand the movie-junket lifestyle.

They don’t think it’s cool that you made a movie. They just don’t care.

Your last film, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, was about a father struggling to feel connected to his child, and this is from the mother’s perspective. Did one inform the other?

I keep thinking about how both these movies are sort of about coming-of-age in middle age. There’s that sense that we don’t talk about how, when you become a parent, it changes so much of your sense of being. Who we all think we are in this world. It’s like going through adolescence over again, this new awakening into the next phase of our life. Yet we don’t talk that much about how it’s such a major shift.

There’s one line in the film that sucker-punched me, when Amy’s character says, about mothers, “We are gods.”

It’s true! I try to understand why there’s misogyny in the world, or what the root of it is, and can’t help but think that there’s some jealousy in play. That we’re the ones who get to create life. Is that it – the root of misogyny?

That power and jealousy dynamic felt very present in the audience last night. Especially when Scoot’s character says the absolute wrong things over and over.

I feel that every man I’ve talked to today has said, “Oh, I’ve done all those things that he said. Like, ‘Yeah, I’m babysitting tonight,’ when it’s my own kid.” I thought that was so funny, because a lot of it was taken from my own marriage, and I can make fun of my husband that way. I don’t think every man is okay with that. But even when you’re in a very equitable marriage and you have kids, suddenly you fall into weird gender roles. We’ve had a lot of discussions about division of labour and invisible labour and acknowledging that work.

There’s an interesting visual style being played with here to get that theme across – walking the line between the life of a mother that is visible and the one that isn’t, the real and the surreal. Especially in regards to the changes experienced by Amy’s body.

I think we aren’t comfortable talking about women’s bodies in really honest ways, other than objectifying them and thinking of them as sex objects. The tail scene really freaks audiences out. But it’s very funny to me. It’s supposed to be the most disgusting scene in the entire movie. It was fun to watch 1,700 people last night experience it.

Variety’s report, saying it “weirded out” audiences, framed it in a very unfair way.

Yeah, I mean Clayton Davis’s column was so misogynistic, it’s crazy. I mean, we’re fine seeing people’s heads cut off, with that kind of blood, but not period blood?

I feel he was, unintentionally, exemplifying the film’s point.

This is why we need this film. Half our population menstruates and we can’t talk about it? Give me a break.

As you said last night, you love to say this title aloud. Was there any point at which you were asked to consider a different one?

It was always Nightbitch. Never anything else. Nobody ever tried to broach it or change it. No one ever dared. I was all geared up and ready to fight for it, but thankfully no one asked me to.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Nightbitch is available to stream on Disney+ starting Jan. 24.