If you’ve been paying any kind of attention to the work that Kristen Wiig has been doing over the last couple of years, she’s been consistently taking more unexpected roles than just about any other former “Saturday Night Live” cast member before her. In addition to more high-profile parts in films like BRIDESMAIDS (for which she received an Oscar nomination for co-writing with Annie Mumolo), ANCHORMAN 2, THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY and the recently released THE MARTIAN, Wiig has been attaching herself to smaller-budget, more dramatic work in such films as HATESHIP LOVESHIP, THE SKELETON TWINS, WELCOME TO ME, THE DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL, and her newly released NASTY BABY. And that’s not even counting the work she’s done for television, including “The Spoils of Babylon,” “The Spoils Before Dying,” and “A Deadly Adoption,” all done with her frequent partner in crime, Will Farrell.
In the year or so to come, it looks like Wiig will be back on the big-budget train, with roles in ZOOLANDER 2, the Paul Feig-directed GHOSTBUSTERS, the recently delayed Jared Hess-directed MASTERMINDS, THE HEYDAY OF THE INSENSITIVE BASTARDS (and anthology film based on the short story collection by Robert Boswell), and the all-star animated feature SAUSAGE PARTY, which I’m pretty sure will be R-rated.
I had a chance recently to sit down with Wiig and her NASTY BABY writer-director, Sebastian Silva, the Chilean-born filmmaker behind the unconventionally wonderful movies THE MAID, CRYSTAL FAIRY & THE MAGICAL CACTUS, and MAGIC MAGIC. NASTY BABY is the largely improvised story of a gay couple (Silva and Tunde Adebimpe) and their best lady friend Polly (Wiig) who are on a path to get Polly pregnant while they all enjoy a type of domestic bliss living in Brooklyn. But there are a lot of other things going on in this story, and it all leads to a 90-degree turn in the tone and genre that comes out of nowhere and will likely test audience resolve at every showing. I happened to love the damn thing, and applaud any film that manages to surprise me, without going completely off the rails. I spoke with Wiig and Silva in Chicago between Q&A screening that we did for NASTY BABY on its opening weekend, and they are clearly very close friends that play off each other in conversation. Please enjoy and be warned that pretty much this entire interview is laced with spoilers about the film, so proceed with caution…
Capone: There are a lot of ideas converging in NASTY BABY—there are people trying to have a baby, thoughts about the state of the art world, a story about a neighborhood pest, and of course, testing the limits of a friendship. But where did the idea for this movie actually begin?
Sebastian Silva: The original idea came from having a neighbor that was somehow like a Bishop [a neighborhood homeless man, played by Reg E. Cathey]. It sounds so generic, and I love that I came up with the name Bishop because I’m really against the Catholic Church in general, but everyone’s got a Bishop Everyone has at some point got a person that’s like a threat, right?
Capone: He’s like one of those people where you think, “If this one guy just wasn’t in my life anymore, my life would be so much better.” Everyone has a person like that.
SS: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Capone: And then when that person’s gone, another person comes.
Kristen Wiig: Exactly.
SS: And especially when that person is the same for the whole neighborhood, and the neighborhood is gentrifying. So, that’s where the original idea came from—the idea that there are underprivileged people who can disappear, and there won’t be any consequences, and what does that say about privileged people and about those unprivileged people and the system that we live in?
Capone: So how did THAT become a story about these characters…
KW: …trying to have a baby? [laughs]
Capone: Exactly.
SS: I guess it was because, when I started writing it was called I CAN KILL, meaning anybody can kill. I CAN KILL was like an idea that me, Sebastian Silva, I could kill. Like, what if, right? And then it was going to be me, and I wanted to have a partner, because by the time that I was fantasizing with this idea, I had a partner, and he would count me down, and we would laugh about it, and he was the person that I would tell about killing this person. We also talked about a “Law & Order” episode where a homeless man disappeared from the neighborhood, and the cops would go around asking, and everybody would hide information. So I really liked that that neighbors came together and decided to hide information.
So then the baby thing came out, I think that the idea that I was going to be taking life away in the movie was something I wanted to see happening. I just wanted to see myself doing that. And then bring life and take life away. I wanted to see both of them. I wanted to see myself bringing life and taking life away. I do live in that neighborhood where a lot of people are having babies, and a lot of my friends are having babies, and it’s a conversation that I have at least three times a month or more with people that ask you, “Do you want to have babies?” So it felt like a great thing to bring about, and also the fact that it’s very unapologetic, about like a gay couple having babies. I’m not opening a discussion about it; it just is.
KW: That’s not what it’s about. You don’t comment on it. It just is
SS: I don’t comment on it. And whenever we comment on it, we sabotage the conversation purposely. So yeah, that’s how it came in. It was a very organic process. In the beginning, it was not going to be a baby, but he was going to have a squirrel, a baby squirrel. And the movie was going to be called BABY SQUIRREL. It went from being called I CAN KILL to BABY SQUIRREL, because I was obsessed with this baby squirrel image. I think I’ve shown it to you. I think you can stop the world with this picture. It’s the cutest picture of a baby squirrel.
I found out in New York, when they go and like cut trees in parks and stuff, there are stranded baby squirrels because the mom leaves, so they give baby squirrels away to normal civilians, and then they take care of the baby squirrels for like two weeks, and then you let them go. You can actually adopt a baby squirrel in New York City. So I wanted to do that, and I started doing research, because Freddy was going to adopt a baby squirrel, and he was also going to kill a man, so I was starting to mix things up, then the baby seemed like a better idea, then I brought the Nasty Baby videos [his character, Freddy, is an artist who has created short films of himself and friends acting like infants as part of an art installation], then he’s going to have a baby, and it all came out tighter very organically.
Capone: You could still make that squirrel movie. No one else has done it.
SS: I know. Baby squirrels are really cute.
KW: They’re so cute.
SS: Look at this picture [he begins to pull the photo up on his phone].
KW: You should put the picture on the website for the article.
Capone: Kristen, when you first read Sebastian’s outline for the film, what was it about Polly that you thought, “I like this woman.”
KW: Initially, it wasn’t even about the character. It was about wanting to work with Sebastian, and then all of the things I learned about what the movie was going to be were so attractive to me. We were going to be improvising a lot of the dialogue with Sebastian. We were shooting for three weeks. We were shooting in Brooklyn. The budget was low. We were going to run around the city and make this movie, and to me, I was like “This kind of filmmaking is so attractive.” I was a huge fan of his work. We talked about the script. I saw the outline. It was like 20-25 pages…[Sebastian finally finds the squirrel photo] Oh my gosh. That’s so cute.
SS: That’s unreal. How could something be so cute in the world?
Capone: Did you take that photo?
SS: No. You just Google “baby squirrel.” It makes me want to bite it.
KW: It’s really cute.
SS: Sorry to interrupt.
KW: I don’t even know what I was saying. Oh, yeah. We just started talking about what the character was going to be and what the movie was going to be. I mean, I don’t know. People always ask me…
SS: It’s more about the movie.
KW: Yeah, people are asking about my choices and they think maybe I deliberate more than I do, and a lot of my choices aren’t as conscious or calculated as people think. I just get a feeling about something. And sometimes it’s yes; most of the time it’s no. With Sebastian, we talked on the phone, and it’s like, yeah. There wasn’t even a question. I didn’t doubt it at all.
Capone: Based on the films I’ve seen you in the last couple of years, I do feel like there’s a sense of “That sounds good. These are good people. I get along with them. Let’s do it.” Not a lot of deliberation.
KW: [laughs] Yeah, you get a feeling. Like with anything in your life, with a friend you meet, or you go on a date, or you look at an apartment, or you want to buy a car. You’re just “Yes or no, something feels weird.” It doesn’t come out of not caring about anything. If anything, it’s about being in touch with what you want to do, and I wanted to work with him. It sounded fun.
Capone: Do you get bored doing the same thing over and over again? With something like this, do you like it because it’s different? “I haven’t done that yet, therefore I’d like to try it.”
KW: Yeah, I don’t like doing the same thing over and over again. I don’t think “bored” is the right word. There is part of me that’s like “I did that, so let’s try something else.” And sometimes that’s not good.When I was younger, I would take tennis lessons, and I was like “I think I figured it out. Now what can I do?” Instead of getting really good at something. But I just like trying different things; that stimulus is something that feeds me in some way. I don’t know how to explain it.
Capone: You said in the Q&A that the whole point of the movie is the big turn at the end of the film. Yet, you spent an incredible amount of time building up this baby storyline only to totally change the focus. Was that part of a big manipulation?
SS: Right, because the baby story is what triggers the murder. It’s like they feed each other, these two stories. They could not be separate.As I said in there, consciously I build up the narrative in a way that people would have as much time to hang out with these three characters and sympathize with them so much that it would be really hard for them to judge them or not to forgive them when they commit this crime and to feel sympathy and compassion for them when the crime is being committed.It’s natural to feel that way. The movie is very manipulative. Like I said, Freddy is apologizing as he’s killing. He’s doing that and crying, right? But it’s possible that regular people, like those guys, that’s the way maybe they would commit a crime. It’s not so much a crime that they plotted, or it’s coming out of violence. It’s not coming out of violence. It’s coming out of protecting. So it is a crime, and it is really unfair the way the Bishop dies, but then again you make the audience be very conflicted about it.
KW: Yeah. It makes people talk.
SS: It makes people talk.
Capone: It upsets people, too.
KW: Yeah, what would you do? Like you were saying, we spend all this time getting to know these people and liking them, and then they do something horrible. A lot of people are like, “Yeah, but what else are they going to do? And that makes sense.” Other people are like, “Wait, this is horrible.” And they talk about it.
Capone: Isn’t it funny how they justify it?
KW: Yeah. Always.
Capone: People justify the crime.
SS: But it’s justifiable in the way that it’s more human. It’s more human to justify it because, yeah, again good people make mistakes. Good people make wrong decisions, and then you have to forgive them. Yeah, I don’t know if everybody that has killed somebody, for instance, deserves to go to jail. There are different types of crime. Of course, we don’t have the system to go and… I mean, yes. We have a jury and stuff, but that doesn’t work. All of these black kids that have been killed by police this year…
Capone: Or over-incarceration.
SS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m completely skeptical about the justice system anyway. Things are not black and white ever. They’re just not. Things are all grey. Everything is in a huge grey spot. So like I think it’s good that people get a check on that. It’s not like everybody that’s killed somebody is an asshole or a criminal.
Capone: You mentioned earlier that this is the most improv that you’ve been asked to do in a film. I’m actually a huge fan of improv done to get to the dramatic heart of something. We’ve seen the comedy improv done—you’ve done it. I think it’s tougher to capture on film the dramatic heart of something via improv. Was that a challenge that you wanted to conquer: “Let me see if I can do this.”
KW: Yeah. The goal is different. When you’re allowed to improvise in a comedic movie, you’re playing a character and you have to still do this scene within the world. And yeah, the intention is to get jokes in there and to be funny. If you’re going to improvise, you have to add information that is different and unique, and ultimately is going to make people laugh. So you’re giving information. You’re still this character, but the point is to be funny and to add humor and elevate the scene.
With a dramatic improvised scene, you’re really playing a character and just making up the dialogue but you know what world you’re in, and you don’t really get to go too far out of the park. You have to just stay in the world and just be normal, and it was so interesting, because I didn’t really know what to expect. Part of me was like, “Oh yeah. We’re improvising. That will be easy. I’ve done it my whole life.” But then showing up and doing it and not being funny, not having that element to it, which to me is what improvising was—adding jokes and humor, and now you take that away and you just have to make up lines for your character it’s like “Oh my gosh. Wait, what do I do?” [laughs]
Capone: All your tools are gone.
KW: Exactly. But when you’re really in it, people get so scared of improvising. “I could never do that.” If I just say, “You two people on the couch talk about your last vacation, and you pretend you’re afraid of flying and just talk.” You could do it. Anyone could do it.
SS: Yeah, and you could like say to somebody that’s never acted before, “So look. Sit on that sofa. You’re going to talk about abortion. You’re pro abortion and you’re against it. And then talk about it.” People do debates like that. They need to argue, and whoever is in charge of the debate decides which side you’re going to take. That’s somehow acting. You can tell them, “You guys are debating whether you’re going out tonight. You’re a couple. You’re tired, and you’re hiding something from him. Go.” Anybody that has some perception and common sense can do it. I’m not saying that acting is completely easy.
You need to have some skill and act natural in front of the camera, but I feel that even if we work together again and you have a very specific character. You’re like some evil lady that lives in a castle or something like that, I think the way I’m going to work in movies from now on is always going to be somehow improvised in the sense where I’m like, “You’re this woman. Make sure that you know this woman so well that you can talk freely like her. You can say whatever you want from inside this woman’s head. So yeah, I don’t need to give you words for it. This is the information you need to get. Be the woman, give the information. Just be the woman. Do whatever you want. Take a glass of water. Just be yourself.”
KW: Yeah, like if someone’s going to come in, and you just want them to leave the room, you’re going to get a much more natural reaction than doing like, the script says, “Get out. Get out. What are you doing here? Close the door.” If you just say like, “Tell them to get the fuck out” and then yell at them until they leave, it’s more natural. It’s just the nature of how we talk.
SS: Yes. So it would add a reality and grounded-ness to the acting. Now that I’ve done these improv movies, my next movie is a way bigger movie than I’ve ever made, and it’s fully written. I like the dialogue. People that read it like it. But then I’m going to go and do exactly what I did with NASTY BABY, and it’s a scripted movie. I’m going to do exactly the same, because the acting looks better. It’s better acting. It’s a better performance, it looks real, you feel you’re there, it’s not stiff. Yeah. You have more options. It’s good stuff.
Capone: I love how completely subversive and risky the film is, with the changing genres. I know a lot of people are really against it.
KW: Yeah, but it’s fresh and different in the world of the movie.
Capone: People tell me so often that they don’t like a film because it can’t decide what it wants to be tonally. What’s wrong with that? Maybe it doesn’t want to be just one thing.
SS: The industry is crazy. I live in New York, so I don’t go so much to Hollywood, and I never read other people’s material anyway. I write my own stuff, but people in Hollywood and studios or investors for movies that are a little more expensive, they need to know. Not in Europe, truly, or in South America, but in America, they need to know the genre. It’s key, and if it’s two genres and you’re like, “I don’t know. It’s a little bit of everything.” They’re like, “Is it a dramedy then?” And you’re like “Fuck, it’s not a dramedy! It’s something else.”
KW: That’s happened to me. You write a script, and they love it. They’re like, “This is amazing. I love it. What’s the hook?” And it’s like, “I don’t know. But do you like the script?” “We love it. We’re doing it. But we just need to know what the hook is.” And I don’t know if I speak in that language. I don’t know what I’m supposed to say.
SS: That you like it is the hook. It’s weird. I don’t know, man. I realize how many people use the term “small movie” for an independent film.
KW: They just mean budget.
SS: Yeah, I know it means budget, but it is a term that I don’t agree with so much. I don’t like the term so much because I feel like movies that are very simple and minimal, they’re not like a huge budget films, have opened my mind so far and expanded my vision. Like with Bergman’s SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE, it’s not a small movie, of course. It’s a six-hour TV show. But that’s a simple movie. It’s a dialogue-based movie. It has two characters on a sofa, and I’ve never been so inspired.
Then you go watch a huge movie, a studio movie, and my mind shrinks. I’m tasting the popcorn more than I’m feeling anything with the movie. I don’t feel anything for any character. I know how it’s going to end. So the experience is way smaller. So in terms of smaller and bigger movies, the experience is so much smaller and predictable. I find that we’ve come to a place where normal movies are the Hollywood big movies, and if you really think about those movies, they are fucking crazy.
KW: Don’t you think that’s changing a little?
SS: Not so much. I mean, they keep on remaking movies—remake, remake, remake.
KW: I know, I just feel like a lot of those movies don’t make as much money as they think they’re going to make.
SS: All of the Disney movies. It’s like, put Meryl Streep in this now. They remake a Disney [animated] movie into a live-action film.
KW: I love Meryl Streep.
SS: Yeah, I love her so much, of course. It’s an example of how Hollywood has become a very weird, eccentric industry where people think that that’s the norm, but it really isn’t. It’s so much more normal to see normal people having human struggles and identifying with them. That’s really normal to me, but then it’s the weird movies, the weird indie, the weird little movies. It’s not weird. It’s so natural.
