Within the first few minutes of “Bottoms,” the raucous teen comedy from “Shiva Baby” team Emma Seligman and Rachel Sennott, it’s clear this ain’t your average high school movie. The movies follows a pair of queer high school BFFs (played by Sennott and “The Bear” breakout Ayo Edebiri) who start a fight club at school in order to pick up chicks. It’s a straightforward premise, executed flawlessly, for a delightfully over-the-top queer teen comedy. With a late August release date in hand (just in time for back to school!), “Bottoms” could be the big hit of the late summer.
Sennott and Seligman wrote the script together, with Seligman directing and Sennott starring. Although they were a hot creative team riding on the success of runaway indie hit “Shiva Baby,” the duo said during a recent panel that they faced plenty of pushback for the violence, action, and hilariously mean characters in “Bottoms.”
“They were like, ‘ground it, ground it,’” Sennott said of early notes they received. “Sometimes in movies from women or queer people, [the characters] need to be so good, and we wanted them to be nasty little shits. And they still are friends, so we wanted to really strike that balance, but we felt like we got good notes and were able to tow the line.”
Sennott and Seligman were on hand to speak to a thrilled audience after a raucous screening at the Provincetown International Film Festival this weekend, where Jordan Firstman opened his questioning with: “What motivates you more, blood or pussy?”
Blood ended up being a pivotal part of the movie’s shock comedy, with an epic final fight scene leaving an array of dead bodies during a wild twist on the classic “big game” high school trope. The scene played like gangbusters in the packed theater, eliciting stunned cries and mouth-covering laughter.
“It’s cool to see how people respond to the fighting. ‘Scott Pilgrim’ was a reference on the action side,” Sennott said. “When we first announced the movie we were like: It’s a fight club movie. And they put it in quotations, like, and the girls start a ‘fight club’ where they ‘fight.’ And we were like, no, it’s actual fighting. So it’s nice, girls deserve to beat each other up. I just love hearing everyone engage in the action.”
Seligman added that, once on set, there were still some doubters who didn’t fully grasp the intensity of the violence in the movie. “Even when we were shooting it, some of the crew members and some key people on the team were like: ‘Wait, do we really need a stunt coordinator though?’ We‘d written in the script: ‘Hazel punches him, he throws her to the ground,’” she said.
But thankfully, they found producers who not only understood the humor, but encouraged them to take it further. Orion Pictures executive Alana Mayo was instrumental in supporting the duo to stay true to their nasty, disruptive vision.
“No one else wanted it but Orion, which has been around for awhile but has recently been revitalized with this amazing group of young women who completely understood it,” said Seligman. “Alana Mayo, if anything she pushed us to go further with the campiness and the absurdity. But I think there was a lot of hesitancy from the overall industry in terms of who the script was being sent out to.”
“I remember getting some notes that were like, so the girls shouldn’t be mean, and we were like that’s the whole point,” said Sennott. “A lot of people were scared for the Gen Z audience, they’re like: ‘We don’t find it offensive, but the younger generation is so sensitive.’ We think we deserve to laugh and have fun like this, and everyone deserves to have a character that’s shitty and bad but funny and whatever.”
MGM will release “Bottoms” in theaters on Friday, August 25.
