How ‘Nightbitch’ director Marielle Heller made a coming-of-age movie for parents

Filmmaker Marielle Heller didn’t set out to make “Nightbitch” a movie for parents, but perhaps it couldn’t have turned out any other way. Based on the book by Rachel Yoder and written and directed by Heller, “Nightbitch” focus on a stay-at-home mother (Amy Adams) who slowly realizes she may be transforming into a dog as she raises her young son (played by twin boys Arleigh and Emmett Snowden).

“I made this as a movie to hopefully make people feel less alone when they are going through the experience of raising a child,” Heller tells Gold Derby during our Meet the Experts: Film Directors panel. “It’s a little bit of an acknowledgement and recognition of what an enormous transition it is to become a parent. If you do become a parent in your life, it’s a bit of a coming-of-age period, just like adolescence. It is a big identity shift we go through, and I think we don’t always give that enough weight.” Watch the video interview above.

But despite the film’s often uncomfortable and realistic depictions of parenthood – when the child won’t sleep in his own bed, thus meaning the parents also can’t rest, the scenes almost feel ripped out of a horror film – Heller says “Nightbitch” has also spoken to those viewers without children. “I’ve had people come up to me and say, ‘You know, I never wanted to have kids, and your movie just really validated that,’” she jokes. “But other people watched it and said, ‘This really made me think about my mom.’ Young people particularly, have been like, ‘I want to go back and see this movie with my mom. It gave me so much perspective on what my mom went through when she was raising me.’ That is beautiful. It’s a nice effect that the movie is having on people.”

“Nightbitch” debuted at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, and won praise for Adams’s go-for-broke and vanity-free performance as the ostensible title character. (None of the main characters in the film are given proper names.) But while Adams has generated awards buzz for her performance – this would be her seventh Oscar nomination if she makes the cut in January – arguably the key performances in the film are from the Snowden twins. Heller found the children, who had just turned 3 when “Nightbitch” went into production, after spending hours looking at Facebook groups for twins and holding public auditions.

“I met and auditioned so many twins for these roles because I felt like it was one of the biggest decisions in the whole movie,” she says. “And by ‘auditioned,’ I mean I hung out in a park and played with kids for hours on end. And it’s a moment where I think if I was a male director, someone would have called the cops. But as a female director, nobody did. I could hang out at the park without my own child playing with other people’s kids, and it was fine.”

For Heller, the Snowden twins’ natural presence (they weren’t actors before being cast in “Nightbitch”) and their comfort level with Adams onscreen helped her avoid the pitfalls of other films she saw where kids played a central role.

“One of my major goals, almost more than anything in this whole movie, was trying to capture what felt like an authentic mother-child relationship. Because I watch movies and I’m like, ‘Who the hell is this kid? This is not a real child. This is not how kids act, and this is not the bond between a mother and a child,’” she says. “That relationship is a very deep relationship. It’s as layered as a marriage, and I wanted to capture what felt like an incredibly nuanced, deep relationship between a mother and a child.”

Heller says the amount of work that went into creating a caring and careful environment for the boys was huge – but as the director she was also sure to give Adams space to find her performance as well.

“Amy could feel taken care of in the way that she knew she wasn’t responsible for the kids, so she could be doing her internal work as an actor, and I was handling the children in so many ways,” she says. “Her instincts as not their parent, may be to be more attentive or more connected to them when I needed her to be in a different headspace. So it was a lot of work.”