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The Canadian director Emma Seligman was only twenty-four when she shot her first feature film, the 2020 comedy “Shiva Baby.” In the movie, which is based on a short that Seligman submitted as her thesis project in N.Y.U.’s film program, an adrift college student named Danielle, played by Rachel Sennott, attends a pressure cooker of a shiva for a family member. There, she is forced to simultaneously contend with her pushy Jewish parents, her poised and successful ex-girlfriend, and her hot-and-cold sugar daddy (not to mention his wife and baby). Despite being produced for the relatively minuscule budget of two hundred thousand dollars, “Shiva Baby” gained digital-screening momentum during the pandemic, becoming an audience favorite when it was finally released in theatres in the spring of 2021, and, later in the year, on HBO. (In 2022, the movie won an Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award.) Seligman, who had returned to her native Toronto to wait out lockdown at her parents’ home and had been taking babysitting jobs to make extra cash, was suddenly indie cinema’s next big hope.
While in the process of developing “Shiva Baby,” Seligman was also co-writing, with Sennott, the queer-teen sex comedy “Bottoms,” which, after the release of “Shiva Baby,” was bought by Orion and shot last year in New Orleans for a multimillion-dollar budget. In the off-kilter, high-jinks-heavy movie, Sennott and Ayo Edebiri play two lesbian teen rejects who forge a plot to seduce their school’s hot cheerleaders by running a fight club for girls. A gay-skewed tribute to teen comedies of the late nineties and early two-thousands like “Bring It On” and “But I’m a Cheerleader,” the very funny “Bottoms” combines campy weirdness with sweet absurdism. On a recent summer afternoon, I met with Seligman, now twenty-eight and back in New York, at the West Village café in which she and Sennott would meet to work on their screenplay for “Bottoms.” We spoke of indie and commercial cinema, male validation, and whether you need to be a dick to be a good director. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
Growing up in Toronto as a movie-loving kid, were you a pretentious, ambitious teen? Were you, like, “I want to do great things”?
I feel like sometimes I rewrite history a little bit. I want to say that I just loved movies like all my friends loved movies, but then I go back and read old journals where I’m, like, “I’ve got to get to New York,” and I don’t remember that at all. But I wasn’t watching Kubrick movies. It was golden-age-of-Hollywood movies, or “E.T.,” or stuff that was coming out, like “Easy A” or “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist.”
When did you have a sense that you actually wanted to become a filmmaker?
I was part of this high-school group called TIFF Next Wave. It’s twelve kids from across Toronto, and you have your own mini film festival, and through that I was starting to see the curtain pull back a little bit. But I really realized I wanted to get into film when I started directing theatre in high school. In grade twelve, I got to direct a one-act play, and once I started doing that I was, like, Oh, my God, I love being in control and having the space to tell everyone what to do and working with tech and music and sound design.
The experience of being a teen girl is usually somewhat disempowering. So, was having this relative power surprising to you, or were you generally an empowered teen?
I think back to being in high school, and it was awful, in terms of being an emotional young girl and the angst that you feel and the lack of agency and starting to understand how much the world is against you and how much the world hates you as a woman, and really struggling with that information. I was trying in this universal way to fit in. I hated my body—that was the biggest thing, as it is for so many people. I didn’t know how to handle my emotions, and so I thought I was crazy. I didn’t know I was queer. It just sucks—it sucks to be a teen-age girl. It’s really the worst thing. [Laughs.] But I look back, and I know that movies gave me a sense of grounding myself. It was empowering to be, like, I have a thing, and having other people recognize it is validating.
For college, you decided to go to school in the States.
My mom really wanted me to go to film school here because it was just such a passion of mine. She just knew there’d be more opportunity for me. When I was applying to universities, I got into N.Y.U. and U.S.C., and I was, like, O.K., if I go, then this is the time to make the decision that I’m going to pursue this. No matter what family stuff I talk through in therapy or whatever, nothing will ever trump how much my parents have supported me and how grateful I am for that. So many people in our community who probably made more money than my parents thought it was crazy that they were going to send me to the States, especially N.Y.U., which is one of the most expensive schools. I never felt pressure from my parents—“Make sure you make something out of this degree”—but I felt that pressure, and I think that ultimately helped me. I put that pressure on myself.
When did you start working on the short version of “Shiva Baby”?
It was my final-year project.
At that point, were you thinking about models of who you could be like? Like, this is the kind of career that I want, this is the kind of movie I want to make?
I’ve always thought that I’d like to make something like “Aftersun” or “Past Lives,” something so still and pretty, and all that comes out when I’m typing is blah-blah-blah, so much dialogue. [Laughs.] I talk so much, I can’t help it. I was really influenced by Lena Dunham and Joey Soloway. When “Transparent” came out, I’d never seen this kind of honest, dark, Jewish storytelling. And “Girls” premièred when I was in high school, and I think it had a more profound effect on me than I even realized. The way Dunham writes about her neurosis and her body and her weird sexual interactions through Hannah—she changed everything.
When did you meet Rachel Sennott?
I met her when she auditioned for the short. She was a year younger than me, but it didn’t really matter because she was skipping class at N.Y.U. to meet any film kids that she could and do all their weird, little lighting exercises. I saw her face pop up so many times and was, like, She should audition. She had a really good face, she was funny, and she had a vulnerability to her. I shot the short right before I graduated, in April, 2017. It ended up being seven minutes. It was a tiny glimpse of what you see in the feature. It was its own three-act story. Danielle has the interaction with the sugar daddy, her parents are there, he comes, wife comes, baby comes, and she’s, like, Oh, my God. [Laughs.] That’s kind of it.
And then how did it get from the short to what ended up becoming your first feature?
Rachel is so structured and ambitious, and she helped me set goals for writing the script. I learned very quickly that she carried around monthly, one-year, and three-year goals in her backpack, printed out. They helped remind her of what she was working toward. She’s a beast. She went to open mikes every night. I watched her work up the standup ladder in the New York alt scene. And I had a feeling: this is a girl who’s going to hold me accountable to my goals.
I remember we caught up a couple of months after we shot the short, and I told her about wanting to make “Shiva Baby” into a feature and my idea for “Bottoms,” which at that point was, like, I want to do a teen sex comedy for queer girls, and I kind of see you in the more Michael Cera role, and do you know that girl Ayo Edebiri? I didn’t know her well, but I met her at a party and found out that she and Rachel were friends. I thought that if I ever made that movie she’d be so perfect in that role because she’s so awkward and sweet and had such a slapstick sense of humor. And Rachel took out a big agenda, a planner, and was, like, So, we should meet up once a week and we’ll work on “Bottoms,” and you’ll come to me with “Shiva” pages? That was all it took. You have to do that thing where you’re, like, It’s gonna happen—we’re going to make these actual movies. We didn’t have a model in terms of what we were trying to do, which is kind of crazy, but it just takes two crazy people, you know what I mean? To just be, like, Let’s do it, let’s spend all our time in this café. [Laughs.]
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