‘Bottoms’ director is hitting her stride

Since its debut at South by Southwest film festival this March, writer-director Emma Seligman’s upcoming sex-comedy “Bottoms” has deservedly been racking up immense buzz for being one of the most raunchy and outrageous films of the year.

At just 28 years old, Seligman is already somewhat of a cult sensation, riding the wave of heartening reactions to her debut indie feature “Shiva Baby” (2020). Starring Rachel Sennott as a young, directionless Jewish woman attending a stressful shiva with her parents, Seligman has already once proven that she is capable of writing the fine line between nerve-wracking tension and queer camp.

But “Bottoms” is a different beast altogether. Following Josie (Ayo Edebiri) and PJ (Rachel Sennott) as two unpopular queer high schoolers who decide to start a fight club as a chance to meet popular cheerleaders, the film is able to be silly and satirical in a way that the tight claustrophobia of “Shiva Baby” never allowed.

In a roundtable discussion with the Daily Trojan, Daily Bruin of UCLA and The Daily Californian of the University of California, Berkeley, Seligman — who co-wrote “Bottoms” with Sennott, mentioned that she mostly wrote “Shiva Baby” alone in her home while she wrote “Bottoms” out in public at coffee shops with Sennott. She’s filled with nothing but praise for Sennott, “who’s so silly and funny and makes me laugh during the writing process.”

“That’s the only way I was able to write both of them, in their own way because they were so different,” Seligman said.

Seligman also spoke to the marked difference in the budgets of her movies — “Shiva Baby” cost $200,000 while “Bottoms” had a budget of $11.4 million. Directing ”Bottoms” was especially different in how enormous the cast and crew were, the level of stunt training and “the amount of sort of freedom you’re given creatively, to do what you want.”

Dressed in an elaborate ruse of feminist bonding, Josie and PJ behave with that familiar crude, sex-crazed messiness that many 2000s high school movie characters had, with a vast library of references to help balance the campy tone with a more emotional groundedness.

“[‘Bottoms’ is] like ‘Bring It On’ (2000) and ‘Mean Girls’ (2004) and even kind of ‘Superbad’ (2007) a little, where there’s a lot of heart to the movie and you care about the characters, but also they’re able to get away with quite a bit of camp or quite a bit of raunch,” Seligman said.

Which is certainly true of Josie and PJ, who are hilarious together. Seligman writes their desperation with an authenticity that definitely rings true with LGBTQIA+ audiences.

“Sometimes it can feel like there’s pressure because [the movie] is queer. And there hasn’t been too much representation in terms of our reference points,” Seligman said. “[It] feels really fun and fresh and empowering to just do whatever and have the characters be queer.”

Seligman and Sennott wrote “Bottoms” in six years, over an evolving landscape for women in film.

“We were really tired of seeing female characters that needed to be understood and needed to be treated like fully well-rounded humans, where we need to understand their backstory in order to know why they’re being selfish or being shallow,” Seligman said. “We were slowly encouraged to ground it a little bit in there to care more about the characters, and therefore have it be funnier.”

On the intersection between violence and teen girls being a key feature of the film, she explained, “there’s a lot of angst in you at that age, and there was something empowering about creating these images. But like, by us and for us.”

This sentiment in itself brings originality to a genre that has often had trouble with woman characters exhibiting any negative traits without needing to atone heavily for their sins by the end of the movie.

“We definitely got a lot of people being like, ‘This is way too offensive,’” Seligman said. “And I was like, ‘I don’t think you would be saying that about “American Pie” (1999) or “Superbad” or any of these movies with straight male leads.’”

Of the next step in her directing journey, Seligman said she wants to work with Sennott again though not with the same short turnaround from back-to-back hits “Shiva Baby” and “Bottoms.”

“I’m taking a little bit more time to sort of figure out what the next endeavor is,” Seligman said. “But I hope that it’s equally weird in its own way.”