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How far would you go to impress your high school crush? Well, for high school students PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri), the protagonists and "ugly, untalented gays" in Bottoms, this involves starting an extracurricular fight club and fabricating a sordid summer break spent in juvie. They're hoping to impress cheerleaders Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) and Brittany (Kaia Gerber), who are beautiful, popular, and – worst of all – ostensibly heterosexual.
For a while, it seemed like the movie, which is the second feature from Shiva Baby director Emma Seligman, may not even get a UK release date, premiering on Prime Video instead outside of the US. "I'm so happy that it's coming here," Seligman says when we sit down to chat at a central London hotel. "I really hoped that it would, because I felt like UK audiences might appreciate it on a different level."
There's been plenty of online buzz surrounding the movie since it was announced back in 2021, which is at least partially responsible for the film's international theatrical run, and Seligman is grateful for the "amazing" support. "I attribute the success of my first movie to people online talking, mostly young women and young queer people," Seligman says of her critically acclaimed debut Shiva Baby, which also starred Sennott, this time as a floundering college student who encounters her high school ex and sugar daddy (with his wife and child in tow) at a Jewish wake. "That's the best source of marketing, which you can't predict or plan for, but it's the highest compliment. To me, success is people just talking about your movie, and I'm grateful that it's in a positive way."
Sophomore season
On the surface, Bottoms doesn't have a lot in common with Seligman's 2020 debut feature. The former is a vulgar high school comedy, while Shiva Baby is tense and comically nightmarish. Both films, however, are primarily concerned with sex, queerness, and a sense of suburban claustrophobia, though Seligman says she didn't consciously set out to further explore these themes in her sophomore feature.
"But thinking about it in retrospect, when I started writing Bottoms, I was 22 and so I didn't have much more life experience beyond figuring out the turmoil of, like, wanting validation and acceptance, and going about that through sex and romance and dating and whatnot. So, it makes sense that that's the only thing I could come up with," she laughs.
Bottoms wears its silliness on its sleeve, lovingly parodying '90s and '00s teen movies. Seligman cites a range of movies as inspiration for the film, including high school movies like Saved!, Bring It On, and She's the Man (along with Wet Hot American Summer, Grease, and American Graffiti). In an homage to teen movies past, Bottoms ends with a blooper reel, which Seligman says she "fought very hard" to keep in the final cut. "I missed blooper end credit sequences! I was happy that I won that battle."
But there's also the bloodier side of Bottoms, for which she says she looked to action flicks like Kick-Ass and Attack the Block. Filming the movie's fight scenes was "challenging, but really fun and exciting to flex a different muscle and learn a whole aspect of filmmaking that I had zero familiarity with before. Very empowering."
Setting up a fight club in your high school gymnasium is easier than PJ and Josie anticipate – as long as they can get a faculty member to supervise the group. The pair rope in their clueless (and newly divorced) teacher Mr. G, played by former NFL running back Marshawn Lynch. "We wanted someone unexpected for the role – originally, we were thinking more down the line of a dramatic actor who'd never done comedy before, and that wasn't really working out," Seligman explains.
She admits that she didn't know who Lynch was until she watched his episode of improv comedy Murderville, but that was all the convincing she needed. "We just offered it to him," she continues. "We had a few conversations because I think he was surprised by the casting and wanted to make sure that I was trustworthy – that I was going to, like, take care of him because this was his first movie. I think he ended up taking it on, from what he told me, because his sister is queer and it felt important to him to do that for her."
Needle drops
Along with Edebiri and Sennott's easy chemistry and consistently funny performances (which, like Lynch's, were often improvised), Bottoms' soundtrack forms a solid backbone for the film – including an expertly timed Avril Lavigne needle drop. "'Complicated' was the one song that was written into the script," Seligman admits. The movie's score, meanwhile, was composed by Charli XCX (whose song 'Party 4 U' also provides a perfect accompaniment to the movie's final scene).
Seligman tells us that the hyperpop singer-songwriter was a fan of Shiva Baby and struck up a friendship with Sennott after watching it. "She offered to work on Bottoms in a way where I think she thought she was offering to do a song or something, and then I just asked her to do the score. Because I thought, when am I going to get this opportunity again, to have my dream artist offering themselves up to me?" Seligman says. "She understood the tone of the movie. She's got such a wide range of emotions in her work and such a cool style that elevated the movie. I don't know how else we would have achieved that with a regular score."
The music of Bottoms captures the movie's energy: it's bold, fun, and fresh. Like PJ and Josie, Seligman pulled no punches to get what she wanted. She tells us that "no one wanted" the film before production company Orion eventually came on board, and it's hard not to draw similarities between the movie and its protagonists. No one wants you, until the hottest girl in school is making out with you on a football field – or Charli XCX is asking to work with you and people on Twitter are clamoring to see your movie on the big screen. The first rule of this fight club? Shoot your shot.
Bottoms is released in UK cinemas on November 3. For more, check out our guide to the rest of this year's biggest movie release dates.
