The Wrong Girls director Dylan Meyer and stars Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat discussed the stoner comedy movie’s weird scenes, great friendship, and wild drug trip while speaking with ComingSoon’s Tyler Treese. Neon releases the film in theaters starting today.
“Two codependent best friends living paycheck to paycheck and bong rip to bong rip get caught in a case of mistaken identity that throws their lives into chaos,” says the synopsis.
Tyler Treese: Kristen, there are large portions of dialogue in this film that aren’t spoken. It’s just you and Alia looking at each other, and we hear your thoughts. How was filming those sorts of nonverbal conversations? We don’t see that very often.
Kristen Stewart: It was fun. I think, other than the cats, it was kind of the most technical thing that we had to do because the movie is so handmade and pretty much practical. If you’re looking at a giant squid or having a drug trip, we were immersed in those environments and not really having to make so much stuff up.
But we recorded our little internal thoughts for each other and then played them on set for everyone. Everyone could just hear our internal thoughts, which was horrible.
Basically, we could react to exactly what we thought we might be saying, but then we could tweak it afterwards to really fit the moment that was chosen. It’s cool. It’s nice to add a little bit of… I also hate talking, you know what I mean? I love just looking at people. That’s my favorite. What about you?
Alia Shawkat: Acting is reacting.
I love how weird this film gets once Molly and Frankie take the drugs. You add a bunch of fun visuals. We get Kumail Nanjiani and Seth Rogen’s voices. Drug trips are so hard to pull off, and a lot of movies do them poorly. How did you approach that, Dylan?
Dylan Meyer: Well, I’ve done a lot of drugs in my life, and I think that helps.
It was fun for me because I was working with a drug that doesn’t exist, so I didn’t feel bound to recreating my own personal experiences exactly. But I wanted it to creep in the way that drugs creep up on you and start very subtly.
I think the way they get messed up in movies a lot is that they’re too big, too fast, too narrative, or too linear in some way, and too focused on trying to convince people that you’re doing a drug moment. Whereas this is actually pretty subtle until we go into the ocean void.
I just knew there was nothing freakier than what’s in the deep sea, so I licensed all this underwater footage from amateur divers on Instagram, and my brother-in-law cut together the crazy fish montage that’s in the movie.
We used really old lenses that were kind of funky from the ’90s to create more practical-feeling but exaggerated effects. I really wanted everything to be as practical as it could because the girls are a very DIY group of people, and the whole movie needed to feel handmade and made by friends. It wasn’t striving for a very glossy perfection, but rather something that felt lived in. So it was important for me to do that with the drug-trip stuff as well.
Alia. I love the relationship between Molly and Frankie. It’s so much fun, but there’s also that codependency, and we see them explore that dynamic as the film continues. What do you like most about seeing that relationship change a bit over the plot of the film?
Alia Shawkat: I guess characters have to change a little bit for there to be a story arc, but I like that, in a way, they don’t change too much. I like that change is important, but they don’t really change much out of their dynamic.
They just stay best buds, and that’s the important part. Maybe society and the world are like, “You’ve got to move on. You’ve got to go move in with your boyfriend.” Maybe she does do that, but she’s like, “I still want to hang out with Frankie every day of my life.”
I just think it’s a really great friendship on camera. It’s very true to heart.
Thanks to Dylan Meyer, Kristen Stewart, and Alia Shawkat for taking the time to talk about The Wrong Girls.