‘It’s my own hair. I Can Really Grow Whiskers’: Amy Adams and Marielle Heller on Toddlers, Incontinence and Nightbitch | Amy Adams

I must be careful in describing the movie Nightbitch. Not because of spoilers, but because there is a very real danger that I will go through it frame by frame. And not because it is flawless in its portrayal of motherhood in the early years – what it does to the self, to relationships, to the body, to one’s orientation to the world. Rather, because I’ve never seen it told on screen, from the mother’s point of view, with anything like this accuracy.

“Becoming a mother is such an over-idealized moment in culture,” says its director, Marielle Heller, the words pouring out over her star, Amy Adams, when I meet them in London. “And then when you go through it, you’re like, ‘What?! That’s not what I expected.’ And then you have a sense of failure because you assume that everyone else has the idealized version and that there is something wrong with you.”

Adams, who is more soft-spoken and conciliatory, says, “I think every mother feels like: why am I doing so badly?” Heller continues, “Why does everyone else seem to be doing so well?” Adams concludes, “I think it contributes to the isolation, this feeling of not wanting to admit your struggles.”

Heller, 45, is recognizable from The Queen’s Gambit, where she played the heroine’s adoptive mother and manager with a raw intelligence shining from her eyes. She is better known as a director (The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can You Forgive Me?, A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood).

Adams, 50, looks Hollywood-perfect, as you’d expect unless you’d seen Nightbitch, where her transformation into a hasty mother you might see by soft acting is hauntingly convincing. I ask if it was difficult—having been exquisite on screen ever since her 1999 debut, Drop Dead Gorgeous, in which she embodied perfection (although it was in 2005, with Junebug, that critics fell in love with her)—to swing into creepiness. She seems a bit surprised by the question. “I really wanted to be present in the physical truth of the character. Even though she’s judgmental of herself at times, I didn’t really judge her. It’s more in the surveillance that I recognize the judgment I might have.”

Nightbitch is an adaptation of the magical-realist novel by Rachel Yoder. Adams’ character, Mother, has given up her job as an artist to care for her baby full-time; he is about two and a half. Her husband, who continues to work, is a nice guy – or rather you can catch the scent of the nice guy he used to be. Now he’s the monster who thinks looking after a toddler is like walking around with company and doesn’t understand why his wife can’t just be happier or at least buy milk.

Her motherly love mingled with feelings of excruciating monotony; her sense of having been exiled from the worlds of adult conversation, physical attractiveness, intellectual stimulation, creative spark and thrown into a domestic prison where forms mean more than words: it all becomes too much. The magic intervenes and she turns into a dog. If you love your children but have ever been driven up the wall by your role in their creation, and you also love dogs, it may feel like Heller has felt the keys to the vault of your psyche.

In truth, it’s obvious why this story isn’t told more often: Complaining about the mothering experience sounds a lot like you’re not grateful enough for your precious offspring. Apart from everything else, you wouldn’t want it too you – having the one mother who was not grateful. Heller smiles crookedly. “Grateful is what we always want women to be,” she says. “It is very rare that you actually feel it when you are in the middle of something challenging. Then there’s the cycle: I should be happier, I should be this. And you don’t feel that.”

We don’t talk about it either, because, as Heller says: “You’re so sleepless, it’s a blur, the months right after giving birth. I remember thinking: if anyone knew how stupid I feel, how much I don’t feel competent to operate a car myself … It would be so bad for feminism if people knew how much I feel , that my brain is not working.”

Alongside the emotional experience – its nuance and complication, the fact that it’s no bed of roses when you was promised one of them – the physical reality of creating a person and bringing it forth, devastation, is so sparsely depicted in the film that when I saw it, the audience split along generational and gender lines. All the women my age (51) laughed out loud. Most of those who were younger or male had their mouths open in disgust. “We’ve made the joke that this is a horror movie for men and a comedy for women,” says Heller. “There’s definitely a sense of: you can’t say it out loud.”

Mom doesn’t turn into a dog solely by tactful CGI. It starts with hair in all the wrong places. “It’s my own hair,” Adams says. “I grew it out for the movie. I was like, ‘Mari, you know, I can really grow a mustache. I can do this for you.'” The scene where she gets a tail is breathtaking: Imagine how cruel convincing it is to squeeze an abscess, but now imagine that it is huge, and then a thin, scraped tail shaft appears.

“There’s this look that Amy gives at the end of that scene that’s like, ‘Well, isn’t that interesting?'” Heller says fondly. “It makes me laugh every time because it’s not how you expect her to react. And we talked about that. All transformations have a bit of euphoria about them.”

Adds Adams: “I wanted to show this radical acceptance of change. Here we are. So what? Maybe I’m just hairy now. Maybe I have a tail. I feel like aging: oh, so here we are this morning. That’s what we’re working on.”

There is no reason why you would have seen a woman grow a tail in a movie before. The strange thing is how, as Heller’s sister told her, “I can’t believe how good it feels to see menstrual blood that looks real in a movie.”

“And I was like, ‘Oh, this is my second period blood movie,'” says Heller. “I never realized that. Obviously, it’s something that I want us to show, because I want it to be normalized. I think I’ve always felt like that: From going through puberty and got my first period, my body is so weird and ugly and interesting and you never really see it in those terms.we’re supposed to be perfect and we don’t fuck and we don’t smell always wanted to see it rougher and more real.”

Next we talk about incontinence. While it’s not news to me that women have this conversation after having children, I’m tickled to have it with Adams, whose daughter was born in 2010. (I remember going on a trampoline and a friend said, “I hope you’ve got your tenners,” and I said, “It’s really not that expensive,” then I realized halfway through that she meant Tenas, the incontinence pads.) “I’d go to exercise classes and they’d say, ‘OK, now, jump jacks,’ and I’d think: you’re kidding if you think that’s happening,” she says. This is to me the feminist frontier that menstruation was to Heller’s sister: even though we talked for ages about peeing our pants, I thought: of course I never have to write to.

When they shot the film, Heller’s daughter was exactly the same age as the child in it. When she adapted the novel for the screen, she was pregnant and then had a newborn, which made it easier, she says—details would insistently suggest themselves. And working with young children is not the recipe for disaster that patriarchy makes. “It’s a cliché of acting school that you prepare, you prepare, you prepare, and then you throw it away and you’re spontaneous and present in the moment,” says Heller. “And you could say that the goal is to be open to the magic that can happen in the moment. But man, you stick a three-year-old in there – you can’t be anything but in the present, present and spontaneous. Because they are never going to do exactly what was planned.”

For Adams, recreating the mother-toddler dyad was almost like slipping into mime. “I have always related to my characters with physicality, but when you work with the little one, you have to be so physically present. It just changes the whole drudgery of your walk.”

Midway through the movie—and I hope this isn’t a spoiler, but rather exactly what you’d expect to happen when a character has become so animated by frustration that she’s turned into a dog—the parents have such a disastrous quarrel that the relationship almost falls apart. I told Heller and Adams that this segment feels idealized. “What did you think was idealized – a man who said ‘I was wrong’?” Heller asks. Well, yes, pretty much. I have never seen such a total rollover in nature.

“This is becoming a bit of a crusade for me, to show men apologizing in a movie. Every movie I put it in, people say it’s idealized. Or people say we could cut it out , that the movie doesn’t need it, that it’s implicit. And people say, ‘Well, that’s not realistic.’ There is something really problematic about the fact that we think it is not realistic for a man to take responsibility and apologize.”

The funny thing is, in the midst of all the shedding and the hair and the dog transformation, in the midst of the ugliness of marital strife and domestic strife and the kaleidoscope of love and fear and shame, the most embarrassing part of the movie is when Mom goes into town for dinner with his friends from before and say something crazy, in the “cute, my little kid said” room. It’s absolutely fingernails down a blackboard.

Adams took that bit in her stride: “I embarrass myself all the time, so I have a high threshold for embarrassment. I say something completely ridiculous all the time.” Heller remembers meetings in Hollywood—suddenly being in a room full of men and thinking, ‘I only know how to talk to two-year-olds.’

This is the final explanation why this story is so rarely told: having a baby is such a deep, mature and social experience – losing oneself and one’s place in the world, creating a new self and finding a new place – but its language is baby talk and its materials are poster paint if you’re lucky (before diapers). It seems that it was just waiting for two clever and quite different imaginations – and a bit of magical realism.