With three native Southern Californians at the helm, The Wrong Girls was always meant to be set in the unique weed culture of Los Angeles.
Ahead of the release of the stoner comedy, which premieres Friday in theaters, writer-director Dylan Meyer and stars Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat told Deadline “it was a dream” and “really necessary” getting to film in L.A. after qualifying for the California Film & TV Tax Credit.
“We almost didn’t get to. I mean, this is a movie that’s had a lot of different lives, and we almost made it in Vancouver, we almost made it in New Orleans, we almost made it in New Jersey, which was gonna be really crazy, really difficult,” said Meyer. “We were scouted there, we found one house in all of New Jersey that looked like Los Angeles. I think the weed culture and the culture of the girls is very specific to that time and place. We’re all townies and as I felt covering towny culture of Los Angeles that’s devoid of ambition and not connected to the entertainment industry at all was really important, so I didn’t want it to be set anywhere else.”
Stewart, a lifelong Angeleno who stars as Frankie in the movie, said “it makes me so happy” getting to shoot in her hometown. “I have so many friends that are hurting. my brother’s a grip, he’s working construction. He should be making movies. That’s fucking crazy,” she said.
“It also has a kind of L.A. accent. The movie would be so different if it didn’t take place there,” added Stewart. “There were a couple of times where we’re like, ‘Oh no, I think we’re not going to get the tax credit and we just don’t have the cash to stay, and so we’re going to go to New Orleans,’ and it just would have had such a different identity. It needs to sound like it’s from L.A. It can’t have a fucking southern accent. We came up with the word ‘dude.’ It has to stay home.”
Shawkat, who plays her best friend Molly, agreed that L.A. “has a way of really holding people,” adding of their characters, “Those girls wouldn’t survive in New York, they wouldn’t last a week. They’d be on the corner, shaking.”
In The Wrong Girls, Frankie (Stewart) and Molly (Shawkat) are codependent stoner best friends who have to come up with a way to pay the rent in 24 hours, all while discovering a mysterious drug that allows them to read minds and communicate telepathically.
Having come up with the idea 14 years ago, Meyer said, “Well, I’ve been smoking weed with my best friend for a really, really long time, and no one had ever made a movie about us. I felt that it was an underserved audience, and I knew that because I was a part of it, and I could see that no one had come along and really knocked this missing piece out of the park. It’s so personal to me that because of just the dirtbag way I’ve been living my life for a long time, I knew that those girls were underserved. And I felt that female friendship is worthy of a whole movie in the same way that men and their friends getting into stupid shit is worthy of a whole canon of movies.”
Stewart, who has long expressed her desire to make a stoner comedy and ultimately met her now wife Meyer in the process of bringing it to the screen, raved that “it fucking feels good” making an upbeat movie of this nature amid the current state of the world.
“Shit’s rough right now, and it feels really nice to fall into something like a best friend movie, and also one that is like pretty fucking irreverent and also super earnest,” she explained. “It just has the tone that, I get it, because it’s fucking real.”
And with an ensemble cast that includes LaKeith Stanfield, Kate McKinnon, Geena Davis, Tony Hale, Seth Rogen and Kumail Nanjiani, it felt “really validating” for Stewart.
Shawkat added, “I think the fact that everyone said yes, just reminded us, ‘Wait, this is as cool as I think it is, cause these people also think it’s cool.'”
Bringing a queer, femme strain of comedy to the male-dominated genre, Meyer noted “I do get the impulse to sort of build out the universe” with a potential sequel, in the fashion great stoner duo franchises like Cheech & Chong, Jay & Silent Bob, Method & Red and Harold & Kumar.
“I’ve been asked about a sequel, and there’s room in this material for that to happen. They basically get superpowers at the end of the movie,” she explained. “I always wanted to shoot a post-credit scene where it was Geena and Kate experimenting on the girls in the in their lab. But I don’t have any plans for [a sequel] currently.”
Meyer admitted, “There’s so much left there. But I also think it’s hard to compete with the first one of anything. So far, this is just one that’s a complete story, but I could easily write for them forever. There’s no shortage of material for me in that area.”
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