As the buzz surrounding acerbic female-centric black comedy Bachelorette continues, Leslye Headland —who adapted and directed the film from the play version that she’d written—has expounded in interviews on the difficulty that test audiences had with watching women do cocaine (“Oh, OK, well, if they were all 40 and men and it was called Hurlyburly and starring Christopher Walken, you’d love it”) as well as the pigeonholing she experienced when the script first began to make its rounds in the industry.
When I first started getting read… it was like, ‘So you’re a female Neil LaBute! And you wouldn’t say, ‘You’re a gentile Neil Simon,’ you know what I mean? You wouldn’t say, ‘You’re a white John Singleton.
Headland’s philosophy, unsurprisingly, reflects the one in the film:
Fuck everyone. Fuck it. Because they don’t know what’s going on. I look at women who are married and have children and they’re totally miserable, and I look at women who have children and they’re totally happy. It just… it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you don’t get those things. “Everyone’s just running around trying to get the thing to put on the top of their pile to say, ‘Look, I’m okay. I am okay because I have these things,’ and you’re just not gonna be okay.”
Bachelorette’s Leslye Headland: “You’re Just Not Gonna Be Okay” [The Hairpin]
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