‘Nightbitch’ Director Marielle Heller Has a Dog in This Fight

“So I just… wait, is Ethan Hawke behind me?”

Marielle Heller has just lost her train of thought. She’s sitting in the cafe she frequents enough to be on a first-name basis with the owner, and she thinks the Before Sunrise actor just walked in. To be fair, the Brooklyn neighborhood she lives in is crawling with creative types, and apparently Hawke is a regular as well. Heller slowly turns to look, only to confirm that the scruffy-looking hipster-dad dude, one of a gajillion who also reside in the area, is not Hawke. Which she says is just as well. A movie star sipping a cappuccino behind her would have been distracting, the filmmaker admits, and given the movie she’s promoting, Heller has a lot to unpack in a little amount of time. She settles back in her seat, sips her tea, narrows her eyes and asks, “Where were we?” Then she remembers: “Right. We’re in the woods of northwestern Connecticut. It’s 2021. And I am fucking losing my mind.”

This is after Heller and her husband, writer-director and Lonely Island member Jorma Taccone, had temporarily decided to relocate their family from New York to the Nutmeg State while the pandemic was in full swing. It’s also after she’s given birth to their second child, and after Taccone has returned to work in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on the MacGruber TV series.

“I mean, I had just graduated out of some of the hard stuff [with my first child], and then it was like I’d rewound the clock and did it again,” she says. “It was a little bit like, ‘Oh, why did I do that?’ I mean, it was obviously a wonderful thing, too. But I had a six-year-old and a newborn, my husband was away, and I was just stuck in my house alone with two kids. It felt like I’d somehow gone back to the 1700s, living in this rural area and baking bread on a wood-burning oven. I was so isolated. And then I read this thing…” Heller pauses, before adding, “Have you ever felt like someone made something or wrote something, and it was like they were spying on your brain?”

The book was Nightbitch, Rachel Yoder’s novel about a stay-at-home mom suffering from the relentless, emotional-roller-coaster grind of raising a toddler. During the day, the unnamed protagonist — she’s a former artist referred to simply as “Mother” — suffers from every possible variation of exhaustion, frustration, shame, anger, boredom, and the sensation that she’s the worst parent in the world. At night, she finds herself inexplicably turning into a dog and roaming the neighborhood, occasionally killing a squirrel or a cat. Amy Adams was working on developing a movie based on the bestseller, and having been a longtime fan of Heller’s work, sent it to the filmmaker as a possible collaboration. “I just felt like, ‘Oh, my God, I have to do this,’” Heller recalls. “It was saying all the things that I didn’t know we were allowed to say.”

And if there’s one thing that Heller’s take on Yoder’s liberation fantasy captures to a T, it’s the simultaneous sense of shock and recognition in seeing the less-than-Instagram-friendly aspects of motherhood in all their messy, chaotic glory. There’s the sense that all those dirty little secrets — the public humiliations, the nagging self-doubt, the checked-out spouses, the numbing repetition of daily routines, and the ego death by a thousand parental-duty cuts — that characterize the experiences of so many 21st-century moms are being displayed with an uncomfortable degree of candor. For some, watching Adams’ Mother on the verge of a nervous breakdown may trigger PTSD. For others, this extraordinary and extraordinarily raw adaptation will echo Heller’s feeling that someone has indeed been tapping into their innermost thoughts. And that’s before the star of Enchanted begins barking and digging holes in her front lawn on all fours.

“I was the resident babysitter in my neighborhood growing up — I’d changed a lot of diapers by the time I was 12 years old,” Heller says. “I was a camp counselor. I was the ‘auntie’ to a lot of my friends who had kids early on. So I thought I was, like, the most prepared for motherhood out of anybody. And I think the thing that I couldn’t have anticipated was the sheer weight of responsibility and how crippling that could be. That, and the monotony of it. There’s this thing you love so much, and it also bores the shit out of you so much of the time. It’s just that it’s taboo to talk about this stuff.”

For Heller, motherhood and moviemaking have been intertwined since she first started working behind the camera. She became pregnant with her son, Wiley, a month after wrapping production on her directorial debut The Diary of a Teenage Girl, based on Phoebe Gloeckner’s coming-of-age graphic novel. Heller then spent the bulk of the postproduction trying to hide her pregnancy from her crew and collaborators, “because I was afraid they wouldn’t take me seriously as a filmmaker. Which was ridiculous, since there was no indication that I needed to hide it. Everyone was incredibly supportive. But I was just so nervous that being pregnant would somehow tank the culmination of years’ worth of work, which is fucked up. The first question I asked when I went to see an OB-GYN was, ‘I have a movie that’s supposed to come out in January, am I gonna make it?’” (She remembers being at Diary‘s Sundance premiere and nursing her son backstage.)

By the time Heller made her follow-up, the Oscar-nominated Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018), she felt like being occupied with the ins and outs of filmmaking was harder on her now–two-year-old son. The joy of doing what she loved professionally was mixed with the guilt over the thing that meant the most to her personally, and Heller started advocating for more sensible, family-friendly hours when she began working on her Mr. Rogers biopic, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019). “The ethos that you have to suffer — it’s the Hollywood way,” she says. “But I found myself going, ‘This has to change,’ where once I would go, ‘Look, I’m fine, I’m fine, I can do everything!’ And when Amy and I first started talking about Nightbitch, almost every conversation we had was about what we felt as moms in this industry and trying to navigate both things at once.”

“This needed someone who was not going to flinch,” Adams says, calling from her home in Los Angeles a few weeks later. “And having been such a huge fan of her previous work, especially Diary, I knew Mari would be unflinching. But she was also remarkably supportive, and immediately set up this familial atmosphere with the kids, which brought this incredible sense of play into everything. It helped a lot, considering where I needed to go with this. She made what we were doing feel transgressive but made me feel safe enough to be vulnerable.

“When I first became a mom,” she added (Adams’ daughter is now a teenager), “I felt… I don’t want to use the word ‘shame’ per se, but I felt a huge responsibility to be good at it. And you put added pressure on yourself to be all things to all people. That’s a common experience for new moms. And Mari inherently understood that. It’s a personal movie for her.”

“I kept telling Amy, embrace your animalistic side,” Heller says. “By which I meant: Let go of what people think of you or how society tells you to act. Trust your gut instincts. It’s not a coincidence that Mother becomes a more present mother when she taps into her inner animal. Some of the best, most fun moments I’ve had as a parent are when I let myself go into a fugue state by playing with my kids in an almost primal, childlike way.”

Which doesn’t mean the director didn’t have the occasional issue with the four-legged cast members. They say you should never work with kids or animals, and Nightbitch is a movie that relies heavily on both. “The twins were amazing!” Heller exclaims, referring to Arleigh and Emmett Snowden, who took turns playing Mother’s three-year-old son. “The dogs were a challenge. I know no one does DVD extras anymore, but I would love to include raw footage of filming in the park with the dogs. Because it was like six or seven trainers hiding in bushes, all issuing commands at once: ‘Lucy! Lucy, over here!’ ‘Mandy! Man-dyyyy!’ For Halloween, the entire camera department all dressed as the dogs. They even took on their individual characteristics for the day.”

A joke about men acting like dogs leads to talk of the Husband character, played by Scoot McNairy. A largely absent, somewhat clueless dad who pings between between oblivious and an outright prick, he’d become one of the more divisive aspects among Nightbitch‘s early viewers. They had no issue with Adams metamorphosing into a furry husky, which Heller briefly shows via a few VFX shots and some well-timed cuts. Some, however, either couldn’t believe her husband could be so unaware of or insensitive to his partner’s struggle, or that — spoiler alert — he’d eventually come around to apologizing. Heller was initially miffed by the criticisms. Today, however, she’s laughing about them.

“I mean, when I was writing drafts of this script, Jorma would read pages and go, ‘OK, fuck off. This is just mean,’” Heller says. “Like, there’s a scene where Scoot’s character is asking how many scoops of coffee to put in the coffeemaker, and his reaction was, ‘Come on, I know how to make coffee.’ But he has asked how many scoops before! This is why I have referred to it as a horror movie for men — it’s like, Oh, no! No, this isn’t what we’re supposed to talk about. Like, literally multiple men who worked on the movie were like, ‘This movie scares the shit out of me, because when my wife sees it, she’s gonna be so mad at me!’”

Indeed, a sequence in which Mother and Husband get into a vicious argument that ends with him asking what happened to the woman he married, and her replying, “She died in childbirth,” is one of the more painful screen fights in recent memory. Only Marriage Story‘s verbal tête-à-tête comes close to matching its sting. Heller is quick to point out a scene that follows, in which we watch him solo parenting and cleaning flung spaghetti off his kitchen floor. “I gave him both that argument, because I wanted him to make a compelling case for what this experience has been like for him, and that moment alone with his kid, because I wanted to see him actually grow. Scoot has been in long-term relationships before, so he understands the dynamic. He’d ask: ‘Just how much of a jerk am I here?’ I’d tell him, ‘It’s not that you’re being a dick, it’s just that you’re not thinking about it.’ That makes it easier to be like, ‘Everything’s fine’ and dismiss it. Even when things aren’t fine.”

Heller notes that she and Rachel Yoder talked about the way in which the husband in the book is never held accountable for his part in Mother’s struggle or their splintering relationship, and that it was always her intent to “dig into the dirt of a marriage” as much as Mother’s ability to reconnect with her former self. “I have this thing where I like it when men grow and change,” Heller says. “I like it when couples earn the chance to stay together. I mean, that’s how couples remain couples. That’s how my husband and I have stayed together for as long as we have.

“There are all these expectations around motherhood,” Heller continues, as she gets up from the table, “and the best and worst aspects of child-rearing, and social expectations around who does what when you co-parent. No one talks about these things, unless its just you and your friends talking among yourselves. When I read Rachel’s book, I was so struck about how it captured what we were talking about. But I wanted to widen the conversation.” Heller nods at some fellow mom-types sitting nearby, who nod back. Then she scans the room one last time, presumably to see if Ethan Hawke has dropped by, and goes to pick up her kids.