Nightbitch, a film that has drawn intrigue all year, is getting closer and closer to release.

The film recently screened at the 2024 SCAD Savannah Film Festival, where Amy Adams received the Outstanding Achievement in Cinema Award. Director and writer Marielle Heller was also present for the Gala Screening.

Per Searchlight Pictures, Nightbitch follows Adams’ character, only referred to in the film as “Mother,” who “pauses her career to be a stay-at-home mom, but soon her new domesticity takes a surreal turn.” It is based on the novel by Rachel Yoder.

What Amy Adams thought of the novel which ‘Nightbitch’ is based on

Adams was involved in the production from its inception.

The actress said during a Q&A following the film’s screening, “When the book was presented to me, it was actually Sue Naegel, who was then at Annapurna Pictures, who reached out and said, ‘We have this property. Would you be interested in developing it with us?’ And I think it was just such a unique perspective and such a unique narrative. The tone of the book, if you’ve had a chance to read it, is so special and so singular. And I think anytime I get my hands on something that really bears no relationship to something else [and] it’s its own thing, that’s a great opportunity and a great launching point for wonderful expression and material. Immediately, we thought of Marielle Heller to do it. So she was her first phone call and we were really, really lucky that she signed on and saw herself in Mother.”

Why Amy Adams thinks Marielle Heller was the right person to direct the film

For Adams, Heller came to mind as someone who could bring this story to the big screen.

“I’d seen some of her other work, and I knew that she had a really unique relationship with tone and visual storytelling,” she said. “She wasn’t afraid to step out of genre-specific films and do stuff that defied genre and also kind of work in unique storytelling techniques. I knew that she would have a really interesting take on how to tell this story, and I’m so grateful that she signed on.”

Heller also noted that the film came to her at a time when she was thinking about her space in the industry, and the world, amid the pandemic. “I mean, the truth is, I had just had my second kid and I had moved out into the woods and I was really not working in that moment,” the director explained. “Because it was COVID, I sort of thought maybe I’ll never work again. It was that weird period of time where I didn’t know if there was even a future of the world. It was sort of like everything was in question and I was raising my kids and I couldn’t even imagine a world of going back to set, truthfully. “

She also noted how this “period of time of total isolation and the world changing” was able to present a new perspective and be a reintroduction to work.

“This book was the thing that sort of brought me back to Hollywood in a funny way because Rachel’s book was so meaningful to me and it reflected my experience so completely that adapting it was really fun,” she said. “It was really cathartic. It felt really good. We were talking today on a panel of women directors and we were talking about how really you should write, not because you’re thinking about exactly what the end product will be, but for the art itself, for the product of just writing. And even if we never made this movie, I was just happy to write this script because it felt so cathartic to write it while my daughter was napping.”

The connection shared by Amy Adams and Marielle Heller

“We’ve never really tried to present anything other than our authentic perspective on any subject matter, and we just immediately understood each other from an intellectual and artistic point of view,” said Adams. “And I think we’ve just brought that through the whole process. I just immediately trusted her and when we did start talking about it, really it was immediately just a sort of connection and collaboration of experience, of artistic, I don’t want to say [the] word ambition, but there was a real connection over our truth.”

This project also allowed both Adams and Heller to reconcile some things within themselves and their own lives.

“I think that we did have such a strong source material and also the script that then was adapted,” she explained. “But I mean, I think it was based on our conversations. There was just [an] innate, universal connection I had with her, not only from the perspective of being a mother, but being inside of a relationship, being a daughter, feeling isolated, feeling invisible. There were lots of things that I loved about Marielle’s script and about the book that really gave me an opportunity to explore some sort of darker in a monologue that I have with myself. And so it was very exposing, which was scary at times, but also very cathartic.”

Nightbitch hits theaters in December.

Nightbitch

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