The film recently screened at the 2024 Savannah Film Fest, where multiple Oscar nominee Amy Adams received the Outstanding Achievement in Cinema Award. Director and writer Marielle Heller was also present for the Gala Screening.
Heller noted that the film came to her at a time when she was thinking about her space in the industry, amid the pandemic. “I had just had my second kid and I had moved out into the woods and I was really not working in that moment,” the director explained. “Because it was COVID, I sort of thought maybe I’ll never work again. It was that weird period time where I didn’t know if there was even a future of the world. Everything was in question and I was raising my kids and I couldn’t even imagine a world of going back to set. “
“This book brought me back to Hollywood in a funny way because Rachel’s book was so meaningful to me and it reflected my experience so completely that adapting it was really fun,” she said. “It was really cathartic. We were talking today on a panel of women directors about how really you should write, not because you’re thinking about exactly what the end product will be, but for the art itself, for the product of just writing. Even if we never made this movie, I was just happy to write this script because it felt so cathartic to write it while my daughter was napping.
“We’ve never tried to present anything other than our authentic perspective on any subject matter, and we immediately understood each other from an intellectual and artistic point of view,” said Adams. “we’ve just brought that through the whole process. I immediately trusted her and when we did start talking about it, it was immediately connection and collaboration of experience.”
“We did have such a strong source material and also the script that was adapted,” she explained. “But I think it was based on our conversations. There was just [an] innate, universal connection I had with her, not only from the perspective of being a mother, but being inside of a relationship, being a daughter, feeling isolated, invisible. There were lots of things that I loved about Marielle’s script and about the book that really gave me opportunity to explore some darker feelings in a monologue that I have with myself. It was very exposing, which was scary at times, but also very cathartic.”
Nightbitch hits theaters in December.
