In the days around its August release, Bottoms has been called “one of the most quotable films of the decade”, “blisteringly funny”, an “exercise in kamikaze feminism” and more, while currently holding a score of 96% on reviews aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. But when we speak, director Emma Seligman only wants to boast about her bonafides as a Charli XCX Angel. “Since you’re asking — you’re not asking this, but I’m just gonna give you a humble brag, that I made it into her top, like, 0.5% or whatever,” she says with the breathless intonation of a stan. “Listen! I consider it a huge accomplishment.”
It comes as no surprise that her screenwriting playlist is also Charli-heavy, consisting mostly of industrial Pop 2 bangers, and warbly, intimate tracks from the artist’s lockdown-era project, how i’m feeling now. “I love her more experimental stuff,” she says. “But I love her music in general, every time she releases anything I’m immediately listening to it.”
Bottoms, she explains, owes an artistic debt to queer musicians — and not just because Charli (alongside orchestrator Leo Birenberg) helped compose the film’s score. Music videos by Hayley Kiyoko, MUNA and King Princess provided the requisite aesthetic inspiration where she found a void. “I feel like there are so few sexy, visually dynamic representations of queer stories, especially not in a positive or fun way,” she says. “Queer movies have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to doing stuff that’s funny and weird and sexy.”
Cinematically, the film draws from the bawdy teen classics that emerged as a genre in the 00s: American Pie, Superbad, Mean Girls and Juno. “Looking back, I think those are my favourites because they’ll have the most shallow characters, but there will still be a lot of heart in those stories,” Emma says. “I mean, I wish I could speak to more female-led teen comedies that I did love, but those weren’t raunchy!”
Bottoms is a delight because it’s a rare breed of big studio production with a compelling original premise, following Josie (Ayo Edebiri) and PJ (Rachel Sennott), two queer teen dirtbags on their circuitous quest to get laid. Under the guise of female empowerment, the “gay, untalented, and ugly” pair round up a group of classmates keen for self-defence training, including their mean-girl cheerleader crushes, Brittany (Kaia Gerber) and Isabel (Havana Rose Liu), roping in a bewildered Mr. G (Marshawn Lynch) to be their slapdash club’s advisor – and the only adult supervision in the vicinity. “I’m going to reverse-stalk my stalker!” yells one new recruit in the film’s trailer. “I’ll be able to kill my stepdad!” screams another.
High school in Toronto, where Emma grew up – around a film-loving family and festivals like TIFF and Hot Docs – seems far kinder. “It was kind of like Glee,” she says of the drama department she was “heavily involved in” at the public high school she attended as a shy, Jewish teenager. “There were jocks, true nerds, stoners, and movie-slash-art nerds like me,” Emma says. “I was unique. I was pretty emotional, pretty intense. Not a full nerd but pretty nerdy. Super hormonal. You know, just regular ol’ angst. And deep insecurities.”
The film, she makes clear, would not have come to be without Rachel Sennott, a close creative collaborator whose off-kilter brand of comedy fuels Bottoms’ blackly comic heart. Vulture’s Rachel Handler aptly describes the “Quintessential Rachel Sennott Character” in a recent profile: “whimsically delusional, bitchy, with an unself-aware banality”, as true of her Bottoms’ protagonist as the LA girl parody that lives in Twitter infamy. In an older interview, Emma credits Rachel’s Virgo-coded tendency toward hyper-organisation for introducing a timeline to their work together and “[hitting] the ground running” with the project. So what does she bring to the table as the Taurus?
“Oh, my God, I don’t know! She would be fine without me!” Emma says, before reconsidering. “I think I’m a little more detail-oriented.” She cites the example of one edition of the script that didn’t make linear sense after some of Rachel’s hasty revisions. “I’m not trying to out her right now, but we always joke that I have to remind her: there needs to be a plot. I think as a director I can creatively zoom out a bit more sometimes.”
Looking at the bigger picture of her own career then, what’s next for Emma? “I just want to be able to tell more queer and Jewish stories in genres that are unexpected for those characters,” she says. If Shiva Baby – her excellent 2020 debut feature about a day in the hectic life of a college student and part-time sex worker – is anything to go by, we should be in for a real treat. Emma met Rachel at NYU, “when she auditioned for the short film version of Shiva Baby, which was my thesis project in college.” It sounds like it was love at first sight. “I just felt like I knew her already. She felt so familiar to me and relatable, and we just bonded very quickly.”
Good thing it’s Emma Seligman’s Hollywood now: few will argue with Bottoms’ commercial success as “one of the most encouraging box office stories of recent memory” or the precedent it sets for raunchy, queer stories. So we’ll be seeing more of her creative vision in the future, but not quite so soon. “I’m chilling right now!” she announces, and it’s not just time for a holiday because of the ongoing writers’ strike.
“I sort of made these movies back-to-back, and the year in between that I spent living in my parents’ house during COVID, so I’m taking my time. I have other ideas, and things that I think will be next, but I’m cautious to pick what that is — each movie will take up the next three to five to seven years of your life!” She’s got it all figured out.
Credits
Photography Michael Tyrone Delaney