SPOTLIGHT November 2024: Marielle Heller, Multi-hyphenate Cinema Queen, NIGHTBITCH Director

Only months after the jaw-dropping success of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, Marielle Heller’s highly anticipated film Nightbitch solidifies 2024 as a hell of a year for women’s horror filmmaking. With its world premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival and a US theatrical release slated for December 6, the Amy Adams fronted Nightbitch stands on its own merits as an unequivocal must-see. But—when taken in the context of Heller’s broader career—it becomes even more fascinating. In this spirit, the AWFJ is thrilled to put the October Spotlight on director/writer/actor Heller, one of the most intriguing multihyphenates working in the screen industry today.

BEGINNINGS

The LA born and bred Heller grew up the eldest of three children, including her sister Emily who is a highly successful comedian in her own right. Even as a child, Heller was drawn to the performing arts, beginning her acting career in the Alameda Children’s Musical Theater, later moving from high school theatrical productions to studying theatre full time at both UCLA and London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

While dedicated to the craft of acting and working at this point of her career at places like the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the American Conservatory Theater and San Diego’s La Jolla Playhouse amongst others, as she told Brooke Marine at W Magazine in October 2020, Heller found herself becoming increasingly “discouraged” by the lacklustre roles available to her: “The women I was playing on stage—the girls, really, I was playing a lot of young parts—were one-dimensional, and I didn’t feel in control of my own creativity. I felt like I was waiting for people to cast me in things, and even then, I would think about how I could write that play better or how I would change the script so that it would be more interesting”.

Shifting her attention to writing and directing, from this perspective it makes sense that Heller would ultimately dedicate herself to creating much richer, more complex characters for women and girls to play. The industry, for its part, recognized the importance of Heller’s work, with her soon being awarded the Maryland Film Festival Fellowship, the Lynn Auerbach Screenwriting Fellowship (named after the late Associate Director of Sundance’s Feature Film Program), and being selected as a Sundance Directing Fellow.

THE DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL

Heller’s feature film debut as writer and director was an adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s 2002 quasi-autobiographical graphic novel, The Diary of a Teenage Girl. A moving and strikingly authentic 1970s-set coming-of-age drama starring Bel Powley as the 15-year-old protagonist, the film also boasted an impressive support cast, including Kristen Wiig, Alexander Skarsgård, and Christopher Meloni.

With such high-calibre A-list talent to help Heller achieve her vision, despite it being her first time in the director’s chair Heller took to the task like a duck to water, and the film received near-unanimous critical acclaim after its premiere at Sundance in 2015. It was nominated for the DGA’s award for best first-time feature film director and won a slew of awards including the Berlinale’s Grand Prix of the Generation 14plus section, the Best First Feature Award at the Independent Spirit Awards, and—of course—the AWFJ EDA Award for Best Woman Director.

Reflecting on the peer recognition the DGA nomination in particular brought her, Heller told Julia Felsenthal in a January 2016 interview with Vogue, “I was an actor and a writer, and I discovered directing in making this movie. I realized that I didn’t really want anyone else to direct my movie. So I had to learn to direct.” She continued, “It’s an incredibly difficult job, one that I have so much respect for. I know I have so much more to learn. It really means a lot that this new passion that I’ve now dedicated the past couple of years to—that my peers think I’m on the right path. It was pretty crazy to be the only woman on that list as well.”

AWFJ’s support of Heller and The Diary of a Teenage Girl saw it named as our Movie of the Week in early August 2015, where AWFJ President Jennifer Merin wrote: “Told from a teenage girl’s unfiltered point of view, this is not an easy-to-watch movie, but the uncomfortable moments raise important and highly relevant questions about how teenage girls cope with their burgeoning sexuality, and the role parents play in their discovery and adjustment.”

CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE HER?

For her sophomore feature, Heller once again turned to a literary autobiography adaptation, this time bringing to the screen controversial American author/forger Lee Israel’s 2008 book Can You Ever Forgive Me?. In Heller’s film of the same name, Melissa McCarthy puts in a career best performance as Israel who—struggling after a book about Estée Lauder flopped and battling an increasingly serious substance abuse issue—turns to faking letters from dead celebrities to sell for a tidy profit. When her racket expanded to literally stealing authentic letters from libraries and other archival institutions, the FBI became involved and Israel pleads guilty to conspiracy to transport stolen property.

Co-written by the great Nicole Holofcener (who was also attached to direct an earlier version of the film), while the publication of Israel’s book was perhaps understandably controversial, Can You Forgive Me?— like The Diary of a Teenage Girl before it— was met with sweeping acclaim at its world premiere at Telluride and subsequent theatrical release. Aside from both McCarthy and co-star Richard E. Grant being nominated for Oscars, Golden Globes and BAFTAs for their performances, Can You Ever Forgive Me? was also included on the National Board of Review’s list of the best films of 2018.

The film also saw Heller become a regular highlight of AWFJ’s Movie of the Week focus. Here, AWFJ member Liz Whittemore wrote, “Can You Ever Forgive Me? boasts not only spectacular performances but a script [that] takes on mental health in a uniquely female-centric way. Melissa McCarthy is known for her over-the-top, physical character acting, though as real-life author Lee Israel, she is subdued in her depression, anger, and alcoholism. These issues are dealt with realistically, not sugar coated for theatrical purposes”.

A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD

In 2018, with A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Heller’s previously signature focus on women characters shifted to one of the most iconic figures of masculinity in American popular culture, Fred “Mister” Rogers. Another literary adaptation—this time inspired by an article in Esquire Magazine by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster called Can You Say…Hero?—Tom Hanks famously starred as the beloved host of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. The film was another slam dunk for Heller, with Hanks nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar and the film itself making Time magazine’s list of the year’s best ten films.

That the film tapped a nerve was undeniable. In her beautiful review of the film for AWFJ, MaryAnn Johanson wrote, “I started sobbing from the opening moments of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, and I didn’t stop crying for two hours. And then after I left the cinema and ran into a fellow film critic who had also just seen it, I literally could not manage a word of discussion without bursting into tears again.” She continued, “This film wrecked me. Utterly wrecked me. In the best possible way. I saw myself in it. It was speaking to me in that same way that Mister Rogers always magically seemed to be doing from out of the TV when I was a little kid. And I really needed its message. The whole world does right now.”

Yet despite the mountain of acclaim the film received, that Heller herself was not nominated for any major Best Director award felt like the most egregious of snubs. Speaking to Michael Shulman from The New Yorker in December 2016, Heller talked about her receiving a message from her agent telling her that year’s nominees for the Golden Globes Best Director Award were all men: “I was, like, Yeah, that’s what I expected…I think the unconscious bias is strong. I don’t look like a director to people.” She continued, “Hollywood is the Land of Make-Believe for me…The Land of Bullshit and Make-Believe.”

NIGHTBITCH

In this context, we can perhaps appreciate why Heller’s forthcoming film Nightbitch is such a bold and exciting swing. Sure, it’s technically another literary adaptation – this time based on Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel of the same name – but this wild horror fantasy is far from the biographical terrain that had so strongly marked Heller’s previous three films. And while both The Diary of a Teenage Girl and Can You Forgive Me? certainly allowed her to explore the nuances and complexities of the gendered experience of women and girls, Nightbitch in many ways feels the most ferociously, aggressively feminist of all her movies yet.

In Nightbitch, Amy Adams plays an unnamed woman who is struggling with her life as a stay-at-home mother and a toddler who won’t sleep, additionally plagued by an increasingly feeling that she is literally becoming a dog. Thus far, critics have been less compelled to embrace Nightbitch the way they have her earlier films, but the audacity of the generic swing from award-worthy biopic adaptations to the more risque terrain of horror alone demands our immediate respect. Heller played the game – and she played it well – and her reward was nothing less than one of the most disgraceful Oscar snubs of all-time when it came to A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. So why should she play nice? It is time for Heller to show us the beast within, and we welcome it.

Heller has, it must be noted, not completely given up on acting, either, and she famously appeared as Alma Wheatley in the blockbuster Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit in 2020. To put her in a box or to frame her with rigid expectations ultimately does her a great injustice; if you had told me five years ago that the director of the Mr Rogers movie would make a feminist horror film, I simply wouldn’t have believed you.

WHY WE CHOSE HER

Marielle Heller is a force of nature, and we chose her for our October Spotlight because we wholeheartedly champion and celebrate the dramatic shift she has taken away from the kinds of films she has traditionally made, even though that comes at a significant risk. Nightbitch is nothing less than audacious considering how easy it would have been for her to stick to her relatively safe, tried-and-true formula of literary biopic adaptations. At the heart of Heller’s work lies a fundamental kind of integrity, and a feeling that she takes her craft extremely seriously despite the ups and downs. In an interview with Claire Armistead at The Guardian in November 2020, she said “I hate the narrative that people have to be tortured in order to be good artists. I think it’s a solipsistic view that people use in order to be selfish. I don’t think we have to be jerks to make good art either, but somehow we as a society have romanticized that idea.” For Heller, “Writing, directing—it’s just torture every time and it doesn’t seem to get any easier. And yet I love them and I’m not going to stop doing them.” — Alexandra Heller-Nicholas