A lot of the reaction I saw to the trailer questioned why there has to be another female-driven comedy about a wedding. Was that a convenient event to center the film around, or was there something you wanted to explore about wedding culture?
I find some of the reactions to the film really fascinating. What always comes up is how they’re such bad friends for ripping the dress. No one says, “It’s so interesting that you had these women destroying a symbol of femininity that seems a bit outdated!” Everyone’s like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe you made them ruin the dress.” I really grossly misunderstood how people care about wedding dresses. I thought everyone would get it, that this was a big metaphor for what was going on, this whole culture that’s being sold to women, and how silly it is. I mean, nobody looks good in white, and there’s this poor girl squeezing herself into this idea of femininity and goodness, and she doesn’t need to because she’s already that way. Weddings seem so absurd to me. It’s just not at all what I want; I’ve never wanted it, I don’t understand how is this the defining moment of your life. I could understand the birth of a child, but spending all that money? What do you think the average that an American white female spends on a wedding? A semester of college or whatever, depending on where you go. One day for that much money. So to set it there just made the most sense to me.Not to put myself on the same level, but most of the filmmakers that I really love have subverted genres. Those are the guys—and I say “guys” because most of them are men unfortunately—that I lean toward. Here’s Tarantino’s war film, what’s going to happen? How does Kubrick make a horror movie? I wanted to make a wedding movie that wasn’t like the typical wedding movie. If you think of wedding films from the last ten or fifteen years, everybody knows exactly what’s happening at the end of the movie. It doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy them. You can totally say, “That’s a clever line or that’s a clever obstacle or that’s a great performance,” but at the end, they get together, there’s usually a speech about why they love each other or why they’re such good friends, and then it’s over. With my characters, I just wanted them to do the right thing. I didn’t want them to talk about it; I didn’t want them to apologize. I wanted the audience to have to sit through what owning up to your mistakes is like, because that’s what the characters have to sit through.
Leslye Headland Talks About Her Brutally Hilarious Bachelorette
I love this fucking movie and I think Leslye Headland is a badass. And I don’t want to give it away, but her answer to the last question absolutely slays me.
