The celebrated director discusses Amy Adams’ transformation in Nightbitch, where she embraces the raw, untamed power of mothering. By challenging the sanitized, idealized portrayals of matrescence upheld by society, Heller’s film becomes a bold feminist statement, illustrating the multifaceted reality of maternal life—including its struggles, desires, and transformative essence. Nightbitch confronts traditional gender roles and the expectation that women remain endlessly nurturing and composed; it pushes back against patriarchal norms that dictate how mothers should behave and feel. The director’s work reclaims female agency, recognizing that women can be powerful, flawed, and unapologetically authentic.
From the depths of a tree-lined suburban street, a call sounds. The Mother seems to be trapped in time, living the same day over and over again. Her once-ambitious nature as an emerging artist has now been replaced by that of a stranger—a caregiver who devotes her every waking moment to her offspring. She seems to have lost all track of time, the weeks and days and hours melding into one long dazed montage of the same frozen package of hash browns being ripped open and thrown onto a sizzling skillet, swapping out soggy diapers for fresh new undergarments (soon to be soiled again), tiny train toys clinking, tiny hands throwing spaghetti at the wall, book baby moms coddling screaming toddlers at the local library, bubbly bath-time suds sloshed onto damp linoleum floors, an endless search for sleep that will never come to fruition, rinse, lather, repeat. Somewhere, a husband rings from states away, his unsolicited advice echoing through landlines to reassure the Mother that “happiness is a choice,” coaxing her to continue raising their two-year-old seemingly by herself while he spends more time on the road earning their rent than he does at home divvying up their supposedly shared responsibilities. It’s all enough to make you scream. Make you howl. Make you turn into a dog. Make you other than. Make you Nightbitch.
Based on the novel by Rachel Yoder of the same name, Nightbitch is the latest adaptation from powerful visionary Marielle Heller, starring the timelessly iconic Amy Adams. In the film, Adams struggles to adjust to her new life as a stay-at-home mom, longing for the days when her schedule was characterized by the work she curated for her art gallery. Although her heart overflows with love for her son, she can’t deny that she feels torn between her old life and the new. Maternity has altered every facet of her being, both mentally and physically. It’s not talked about in polite society, but being a mother is, to put it simply, tough. It’s beautiful and life affirming and incredibly rewarding, but it is also exhausting and thankless and confusing and downright terrifying to be responsible for the well-being of a whole other person. It swallows you whole, shakes you up at your core, and spits out a version of you that you never knew existed, something raw and primal and different. In the case of Adams’s character, known only in the movie as “Mother,” these changes include sharper canines, sprouting hair in strange places, prophetic dreams, and the newfound belief that she is turning into a dog.
For director Heller, the notion of motherhood triggering a type of lycanthropy was not only a wickedly apt metaphor, but a relatable one as well. “I have this memory of when I first became a mom, where I felt this animalistic desire to protect my baby that I couldn’t believe was real,” the filmmaker tells me as we sit down to discuss her latest efforts. “I remember walking through Target with my newborn baby strapped to my chest and somebody who was kind of mentally unstable, a man in the store, started following me. I remember thinking, if he comes near my baby, I will kill him. Like, I could rip his head off.” There’s a primitive instinct that kicks in for parents when they feel their child being threatened by an outside source. Something that allows meek women to lift cars to free their infants trapped underneath. Something that overrides logic and reason and feels more akin to the forces of nature. “We go through our lives thinking we can reason our way out of the fact that we’re animals,” Heller remarks. “And then something like birth happens, and you can’t deny that you’re an animal anymore. There’s no way to logic yourself out of that experience.”
Adds Heller, “I think our mind has a really hard time with that dichotomy. We are these intellectual beings, but we are also animals, and how do these two things work together? Society really focuses on cutting off our bodies from our primal selves, and the parts of us that are just animals. In my mind, Nightbitch became this metaphor for that primal, animalistic part of ourselves, our rage, all the things that we suppress. The movie is about trying to integrate those parts of ourselves.”
Yoder’s work cast such a spell that it actually enticed leading lady Adams to get the ball rolling in the first place. Paired with longtime collaborator Annapurna Pictures, the starlet co-optioned the bestseller and sent it over to director Heller to gauge her interest in adapting the book for a film.
“The novel was sent to me when I was about six months postpartum with my second child, and it was the pandemic, and I was living in the woods, raising two kids, losing my mind,” remembers Heller. “It felt like it was written about my life. I found Rachel’s writing so surprising and funny and insightful into the experience of motherhood, and just isolation too. What it feels like when you almost don’t remember how to speak to anybody else, which I think we all experienced during the pandemic. Whether you’re a parent or not, we all went through this real period of being alone with our brains.”
Although Heller found herself eager to begin the process of bringing the novel to the screen, she was also careful not to be too strict with the source material. The Can You Ever Forgive Me? director may have made a name for herself with her Oscar-nominated 2018 stunner, but she initially broke out on the scene with her 2015 indie sensation The Diary of a Teenage Girl, based on the novel by Phoebe Gloeckner. In other words, this isn’t her first rodeo.
“It’s actually death when you’re too faithful,” Heller explains. “I feel like you have to let it change and grow in the ways that it will when you adapt it.” When pressed to reveal her process for adaptation, the director relayed: “You have to absolutely love the source material, and get to know it so well that you can then throw it away and start over. There’s this perception that with adaptation, you’re just translating, and it really isn’t the process to me. It’s much more about shifting mediums completely. You have to find the inspiration of how you felt when you read the book, and try to translate that to how you might feel when you see something. It was fun to work on, and I brought in so much stuff from my own life. It was very cathartic writing the script.”
There’s something very special about the feminist themes at work in Nightbitch. In a similar manner to Jennifer Kent’s 2016 breakout hit The Babadook, a metaphorical interpretation of the many ways in which grief can manifest itself into a demon that eats away at our daily lives, Nightbitch also unabashedly explores murky subject matter. Heller takes topics often talked about in hushed tones and quiet corners and brings them to the forefront of discussion, aiming a spotlight at taboo talking points in bold new ways.
“I think when we tackle themes like motherhood, it’s very easy to try to pen our versions of what it is to become a mother into what we’ve seen before,” muses Heller. “It’s easy to want to classify any state of being a woman into something that is either good or bad, this or that. I thought it was really important to show all of the messiness, and the complete picture of what it is to be a mother.”
Like any female groomed by society to chase after impossible physical standards, the filmmaker is also interested in stirring up a conversation about the worry and joy and acceptance that comes with getting older. In a unique and surprising way, she shows how bodily autonomy can be achieved simply by acknowledging the fluctuation of women’s bodies over the course of time. “To deal with women’s bodies, and women’s aging bodies, is a radical form of feminism,” says Heller. “I’ve realized, as we’ve been putting this movie out, that people are pretty uncomfortable with talking about women’s changing and aging bodies, and even just the ins and outs of what our bodies do. Whether it’s birth, or menstruating, or lactating, or aging and sagging, women’s bodies are somehow oddly taboo. It was important to me to be upfront and honest in a real, pull-no-punches way.”
Successful genre coming-of-age stories like Ginger Snaps and Jennifer’s Body have popularized the idea of women turning into werewolves as a parallel for entering adulthood, as if menstruation is the last and final step of life of becoming a person who identifies as female. The truth is, women go through several deaths and rebirths over their lifetime, and the introduction of motherhood to the female form actually just signifies the start of yet another cycle.
“I do think it’s another coming-of-age,” says Heller. “We tend to think of teenagehood as this huge transformation in our lives, but I think there are multiple stages in our life where we go through big transitions. I know for me and a lot of my friends, as we all became parents, I witnessed this major shift happen, ether it was becoming a parent and seeing yourself in a totally new light and this loss of identity as your single self or having this suddenly new role of becoming a mother and having to care for another being, almost before yourself. And that’s a complicated transformation that we tend to see on Instagram as just this positive thing, but it’s actually a big internal struggle for a lot of people. It’s a really complicated experience. There’s such a wide range of feelings around it, even if it’s something that you’re consciously doing.”
In the year 2024, we’re still debating the merits of Roe v. Wade. This year also marks only the 50th anniversary of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which allows women the right to open up a credit card account without a man’s consent. For as far as we’ve come as a people, it’s clear that much of society still views women and their right to their own bodies as a talking point instead of a personal choice.
“It just feels so clear how much it needs to be a choice,” says Heller about the decision of whether or not to have children. “We have to make becoming a parent something that is a choice, and not something that anyone is forced into.” This is clearly a concern that Heller, along with anyone with a moral compass, finds disconcerting, and the filmmaker voices her opinions in a fiery way, through her art. Heller gets heated about the discussion of women’s rights to their own bodies; then she calms herself and continues. “But anyway, I just felt like it was such a major shift, and I didn’t feel like people were talking about how different you might feel on the other side of it. I know for myself, in the same way that as I became a teenager and got my period and got boobs and everything, I was like, ‘Who am I? I’m suddenly a totally different person. I don’t recognize myself in the mirror, and I don’t recognize how my brain thinks anymore.’ I felt the same thing when I became a mother, where I was like, ‘I don’t recognize what’s happening to my body. I don’t recognize my brain. I don’t recognize my needs and desires. I feel foreign to myself.’ And that experience felt not talked about very much.”
Aside from the celebration of forbidden conversational topics and the inherently feminist messaging, Nightbitch is also, at its core, just a very funny film. “I don’t know that I could have gotten through some of the darker moments of becoming a mother without a lot of laughter,” director Heller surmises. “I think that we’ve all been in situations where somebody is dying, or there is some horrible situation you’re in, and something funny will happen, and the laughter you get in that moment is almost more potent and wonderful than any other laughter you’d have at any other point in your life.”
With a slew of Academy Award nominations under her belt, Amy Adams has more than proven her ability to deliver incredibly moving and even tear-inducing dramatic performances. Her capacity for the craft is seemingly limitless, and it’s both rewarding and enlightening to see her skills stretch in new environments, as her role in this project allows her to put her range on full display via the world of comedy. Still, as someone who has become known for executing emotionally charged performances, even the icon herself felt a slight sense of trepidation at the thought of dipping a toe into such starkly new territory.
“Amy is an incredible actress, but she’s also a mother and a very relatable person, and somebody who just feels so grounded in her emotional life that she made perfect sense for this character,” states Heller. “If anything, I felt like the part that she was the most nervous about was the humor of the script, and I was like, ‘I got you. We’re gonna figure this out together.’ I think she’s actually very funny in the film. People haven’t seen her in that type of role before, but I think her performance is really very nuanced, and it holds many truths at the same time.”
Being a performer herself, director Heller finds a certain sense of camaraderie with her cast that aids in her quest to create a safe and encouraging environment. “One of my favorite things about directing is working with actors from a real peer-to-peer perspective,” she beams. “I understand how hard what I’m asking from an actor is. When I’m asking them to go to a vulnerable place, or push themselves emotionally, I know what is required for that to happen.” For the filmmaker, that shared experience continues to be one of the highlights of her craft. “I think I’m just a little more sensitive to what actors feel and need based on being an actor myself, and understanding the emotional toll that it takes going to those darker places,” says Heller.
Scoot McNairy shines as the woefully ignorant but wholly endearing “Husband” character, although his presence in the Mother’s life is not announced until several minutes into the movie. “I was very conscientious about the fact that when you get introduced to the Mother, you’re almost thinking she’s a single parent, because she really feels that way and we’re in her head,” the director expounds. “We’re experiencing the world through her eyes, and in a lot of ways, she feels so alone in her life. She really spends the majority of her time with her two-year-old. I was aware that when he shows up, you kind of go, wait, oh, she has a partner. But I was totally fine with that, with this idea that we’re catching up to her experience. She’s so sleep deprived. She’s like a zombie walking through her life, not knowing one day is melting into the next. She doesn’t know when the last time she took a shower was, or changed her clothes. or any of that. So I liked this idea that he sort of pops up after we’ve really gotten a sense of what her weeks are like, and how exhausted she is, and how much she’s stuck in the rut of parenting—walking the same path to the library, back to the park, in her kitchen, making breakfast, making lunch, making dinner—and that not until we really understand the monotony of her life do we introduce the fact that there’s sometimes a husband around.”
In the same way that the Mother feels frustrated by her husband’s misguided efforts, so, too, does the film itself seek cognizance with like-minded peers more so than it aims for solutions for problems that reasonably cannot be fixed.
“I don’t know if it’s even society who puts these types of limits on women,” comments Heller. “Obviously, everything comes down to our societal norms, but I do think there is this expectation that when you become a mother, particularly, much more than for fathers, that you’re going to give up all of your own selfish ambition in order to raise a kid. I think just in general, we don’t value women doing things for their own selves. As a society, we tend to encourage men to follow their ambition, if we’re really being binary about it, and women to help to serve the greater society. I grew up in a feminist household, with a mother who worked and who was also an artist, and yet somehow, I still felt societal pressure to give up my career, or have my career be less important than my husband’s career, or make sure that I was putting my kids first—and I do try to put my kids first, but I also need to have my own life and my own art. It’s a very complicated thing to juggle, and I at least try to be honest about how hard the juggling is.”
Overall, Heller just wanted to be honest about the struggle of motherhood. Like the Mother in the movie, it’s not necessarily about finding a solution. Sometimes, succeeding in life just means finding someone who sees you, and accepts you, and will commit to laughing through it all with you. It’s about leaving behind the rugged individualism of being a lone wolf, and finally finding your pack.
Top Image: AMY ADAMS ON THE SET OF NIGHTBITCH COURTESY OF SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES © 2024
