Stop me if you have heard this one before: In her latest movie, the brilliant Amy Adams plays a new mom who is overwhelmed by her son’s inconsistent sleep schedule, his fussy appetite, and the droning repetition of the day-to-day schedule that includes play dates, kid music, and messes. But at night, “Mother” (Adams) believes that she’s turning into a dog. OK, wait… I was with you until that part. But that’s the plot of NIghtbitch, an adaptation of a 2021 novel written by Rachel Yoder that burrows into the primal feelings of motherhood, and features a blistering performance by the always reliable Adams. When is Adams not good? It’s very rare. In fact, there’s a scene in Nightbitch that maybe was too convincing, as it forced several crew members to leave the set while director Marielle Heller filmed it.
This isn’t a spoiler. In fact, it might make you more curious for the lengths that Marielle Heller and Amy Adams went to create the atmosphere on Nightbitch. Throughout the movie, when the evening approaches, the overwhelmed “Mother” (Adams) begins to give into some animalistic urges. We’re never 100% sure if they are real or imagined. And in one, Mother thinks that she sees a growth on her lower back. It starts as a boil. But as she digs at it, it bursts open, and a dog’s tail emerges. It’s beyond gross.
This isn’t a spoiler. In fact, it might make you more curious for the lengths that Marielle Heller and Amy Adams went to create the atmosphere on Nightbitch. Throughout the movie, when the evening approaches, the overwhelmed “Mother” (Adams) begins to give into some animalistic urges. We’re never 100% sure if they are real or imagined. And in one, Mother thinks that she sees a growth on her lower back. It starts as a boil. But as she digs at it, it bursts open, and a dog’s tail emerges. It’s beyond gross.
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00:00I want to ask about the creation of Amy's tail.
00:03I want to know if you went through different iterations
00:05before you landed on the strands that you got into them.
00:08You're talking about with the needle, yes?
00:09That part of the tail?
00:11Yes.
00:13Okay.
00:14Well, spoiler alert for people who haven't seen the movie.
00:16The biggest kind of most disgusting groany scene of the movie
00:20is when she pops a cyst on her lower back that reveals a tail.
00:26Um, the creation of that was very complicated.
00:30We made a prosthetic version of her body
00:33and it was puppeted and operated basically with hand doubles
00:38and people underneath who were squirting out pus
00:42and feeding hair in through it.
00:46I found this whole process hilarious.
00:49There were some people on set who were so disgusted
00:52that they actually couldn't be in the room while we filmed it.
00:55Um, you know, it was interesting because I wrote it
01:01knowing that I wanted it to be sort of the most viscerally disgusting moment
01:06that you saw on screen.
01:07But, um, everybody reads something slightly differently.
01:11So then you would, one person would come in with one idea
01:14of like what the hair might look like
01:15and it would be like, no, I think it needs to be more like this.
01:18And everyone would have a different version of what that tail needed to look like.