‘We all knew what we were getting into!’ Gross-out lesbian comedy Bottoms and its audacious director | Film

Bottoms is a high school movie stuffed with all the great high school movie tropes. There are nerds and jocks, slow clappings, grand gestures on the football field, graffitied lockers and a sad montage that unfolds to the sound of Avril Lavigne’s Complicated. But its leads are PJ and Josie, the “ugly, untalented gays” who set up an after-school fight club with the sole aim of having sex with the cheerleaders. Girls punch each other in the face, teachers read porn magazines in class, everyone pretends to be “empowered” – and, somehow, it still manages to be a feelgood delight. Thrillingly, it may be the least earnest film I have seen in years.

Its director, 28-year-old Emma Seligman, is in London, explaining how a comedy about amoral, horny teen lesbians gets made. Not easily, and not quickly, it turns out. She and her co-writer Rachel Sennott – who plays PJ and who also starred in Seligman’s debut, Shiva Baby – started working on the idea six years ago. It was rejected by “every studio bar one that was semi-interested”, until Orion Pictures finally gave it the go-ahead. “We were certainly aware that we were not making something that was incredibly palatable, but Orion just got it,” Seligman says. “I felt pretty encouraged to just go for it. If you signed on to do this movie – whether you were financing it, or you were one of the actors, or you were doing the sound edit – you knew what you were getting in to.”

Surprisingly, given that they dreamed up the idea for Bottoms six years ago, it changed very little on its journey from page to screen. “Because the movie is so absurd, it existed in its own world,” Seligman says. “If we were trying to make something more timely, it might have evolved more. But, if anything, the jokes that were written six years ago are just more relevant.” One character says that her vagina belongs to the government, a line that was written long before Roe v Wade was overturned.

The film’s era is hard to pin down and this vagueness is deliberate. There are flip phones and CD Walkmans. That was a practical choice, as well as an aesthetic one. “We just decided early on that we didn’t want technology in it, or social media, because we knew we wouldn’t be able to keep up with how teenagers communicate, and we didn’t want to talk down to our audience.” But it also allowed Seligman to indulge in an alternative history. “On another level, I wanted to put queer characters into all the different decades of teen movies that we missed out on seeing ourselves in.”

Seligman had no specific references in mind at first, but once she and Sennott decided Bottoms could work, they watched older queer classics including conversion-therapy satire But I’m a Cheerleader and cult spy school comedy DEBS. (There’s a nod to the former in the film, as two girls go on a date to a place called But I’m a Diner.) “The one queer teen reference I had was Jennifer’s Body,” says Seligman, referring to the much-reappraised horror starring a flesh-eating Megan Fox. “I love that movie so much. That was the only reference I had in my head for two teen girls kissing in a way that was coming from desire, and not, like, Cruel Intentions, or just practising. That was a big moment.”

There is a sex scene in Bottoms, but it is more implied than explicit. “You can only do so much in terms of advancing representation. I didn’t feel comfortable doing any sort of graphic sex scenes, even though I know many male directors before me felt comfortable doing that,” she says, drily. “There was still a question mark of, ‘Is this objectification? Is this? Does this feel inappropriate?’” Even so, she says the scene in question goes further than originally planned. “I just felt like, OK, well, we need to see something that shows the character has achieved her goal before everything goes south.”

Bottoms has a lot of fun with “empowerment” culture. The fight club is a place where girls talk about their problems and secrets freely, but it only exists so that PJ and Josie can “get cooch”. Seligman explains: “And that’s what felt empowering, to show the shittiest versions of these characters. I think Rachel and I see a lot of pressure for female friendships on screen to be super supportive and loving and not complicated – and, like, ‘girlboss’. Those things are awesome, but we were really excited to show characters who are ready to manipulate that idea, as opposed to genuinely promoting it.”

In Shiva Baby, Sennott plays a girl who attends a family shiva. During this mourning period, she meets both her high-achieving ex-girlfriend and a married man who has been paying her for sex work. It is a concise, claustrophobic comedy, shot on a tiny budget, and adapted from the short film that was Seligman’s undergraduate thesis at New York University. The full-length version was due to premiere at the SXSW festival in 2020. “We finished it half an hour before we found out the festival was cancelled [due to Covid],” she remembers. “I just assumed it would sit on a shelf, but I like to live with low expectations. I don’t know if that’s a Jewish thing, or a Canadian thing?”

But Shiva Baby didn’t just sit on a shelf. It travelled widely, won awards, and turned Seligman and Sennott into names to watch. Given that she lives with low expectations, did its success take Seligman by surprise? “Yes and no,” she says. “I think deep down, I wanted to believe that it would be successful. My highest expectations were that we would premiere at a festival, that we would find distribution, and it would allow me to make my second movie.” What she didn’t expect was the level of support it found online. “It was bolstered by so many young people and queer people and young women online, who watched the movie at festivals, virtually, before it was released. I feel like everyone came together for their communities.”

Shiva Baby cost $200,000, but Bottoms had a budget of $11.3m. Seligman admits that the shift, particularly in terms of scale, was not easy. “With Shiva Baby, maybe a week into the process, I felt like, ‘This is my movie.’ With Bottoms, I only really got there towards the end.” On the former, she worked with friends from film school. Now, she was leading a much bigger crew. “All these men and people much older than me that were technically working under me. Even though they were all very lovely, it was a group of people I wasn’t used to working with. I was taken out of my comfort zone.” One of the film’s producers is Elizabeth Banks, star of The Hunger Games and Pitch Perfect and the director of Cocaine Bear. “She just puts it so simply. She says there’s no way to learn how to make movies other than to make them. So I just had to jump in.”

Shiva Baby and Bottoms have been released “pretty much back to back”, so Seligman is now in what she calls an “ideating phase”, taking her time with whatever will be next. She is sure, however, that she will keep working with her core crew of Sennott, her director of photography Maria Rusche, and The Bear/Black Mirror’s Ayo Edebiri, who plays Josie in Bottoms. Firstly, she says, it’s just nice to have your friends around you. “And there’s something so satisfying about knowing that you have a shorthand with someone. They get your style and you get their style.”

Will Seligman hear the call of the massive movie franchise, as indie film-makers Chloé Zhao and Barry Jenkins have done before her? Has she been tapped up by Marvel yet? “I haven’t,” she says. “I’m not opposed to any genre and I would be honoured to be considered for anything. But I don’t know how good at that I would be, or if that’s what’s meant for me.” She smiles. “But, you know, if it could be really gay? For sure.”