There’s a dangerous sort of intimacy running through “Wilder Than Her.” The kind of intimacy that anyone who has lost a friend, or lived through the dissolution of a friendship in real time, will recognize. The kind that if provoked, might lead you to do the unthinkable.
Jessica Kozak’s directorial debut, which is playing at this year’s Atlanta Film Festival, explores that intimacy through the lens of a female friendship on the rocks. After the sudden death of their friend Bea, estranged best pals Emilia (Sunita Mani), Lucey (Kayla Foster), and Finn (Kate Easton) go on their annual camping trip. But Bea’s absence and the truth of what happened to her looms over the group, giving their getaway a paranoid edge. The arrival of a lone hiker, Zeke (Danny Deferrari), threatens the girls’ already fragile state as the trip slowly begins to go haywire.
“Wilder Than Her” is a strong debut, effectively setting up a dichotomy between the open, yet mysterious beauty of the natural landscape and this close knit, possessive game the girls are playing with each other. It’s hard to know exactly what or who we can trust on screen, and your mileage on the final act may vary. But for Kozak, leaving those sorts of conclusions up for interpretation and playing with the audience’s sense of vantage point was all part of the plan.
Rough Draft Atlanta spoke with Kozak and producer Shannon Reilly ahead of the film’s screening, which takes place at the Plaza Theatre on April 26. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Where did the idea for this particular story come from?
Jessica Kozak: I wrote this script in grad school for screenwriting. Shannon and I met at UCLA in their MFA program. I was in a screenwriting class that was like a feature – so you made a feature in 10 weeks in this class. I really wanted to write a horror movie because I’ve loved horror my whole life, and really this new way of doing horror, which is less in your face and less slasher, and more just the horrors of these real life moments.
Shannon and I had actually traveled to Australia the summer before with another friend who was in the program. Her dad took us out into the outback, and we were camping, and we were in the middle of the woods, and there was no electricity. We were walking around and we were telling each other stories and kind of getting spooked out. I was like, how crazy is it that we’re sleeping in this little tent? Like, if I was going to do something bad, this is where I would come. It was one of those moments where I was like, it’s actually nuts that people go camping in this world where we feel so unsafe all the time! That sparked the idea of wanting to write something on a camping trip.
Most of these movies it’s like, what’s scary out there in the woods? And I thought it would be really interesting to have a movie about, what if the people you’re with and yourself, that becomes the thing that’s scary – setting it in what would typically be a scary place, but actually the horror is coming from within the people you’re supposed to feel safest with.
And then, five years ago, one of my very close friends passed away very suddenly, very unexpectedly. I’d always wanted to write something about female friendships and how when someone dies, the dynamic sort of changes and shifts around. I thought it would be really fun if it was the glue of this friendship that then gets pulled out. I’ve also been really interested in female friendships, and I think those aren’t explored enough in movies and in stories. We see a lot about families and spousal relationships. We don’t see a lot about friendships – and especially within groups of women, who I think have very, very special relationships. They’re also just as intimate, almost, as a marriage. So when they dissolve, it can be really traumatic.
In particular, I feel like we don’t see a ton of stories about female friendships that go horribly wrong.
Kozak: Yeah, I agree. I just never see that happen. And it really is traumatic in a way that we don’t talk about. Because I think they’re so intimate and so wonderful when they’re working, and then they can be so awful when they’re not.
In that vein, there’s sort of a possessive quality that I think comes along with a lot of female friendships, or at least in my experience, and there can be this fluctuating sense of who is closer to who in the group at any given time. Like you said, it’s not necessarily romantic, but it also is, in this weird way. What was it like for you to explore that dynamic?
Kozak: That was totally intentional. Emilia is our central character, and she is feeling less close to people and is kind of feeling gaslit, and then trying to insert herself. Which I think we’ve all felt at times, like you were saying, I think especially in a group of three. There’s this idea that when it was the four of them, these personalities worked because if two were going off, then two can go off somewhere else. So there’s always someone you can gravitate towards. And then when there are three, if two are going off … then one is left alone.
Drawing on my own relationships and my own insecurities, I feel like I’m sort of each of these characters at times. Like this Emilia character is being kind of petty about some stuff and feeling left out about things – unfortunately, I can totally relate to [that]. It’s the side of me that I don’t want to admit that I have, and I want to feel like I’m above it, but then I tend to feel that way. And then sometimes you’re like Finn, who’s living free and wild and doesn’t really care as much, but maybe accidentally is sort of harming people or manipulating people with that. And then of course you have the Lucey character, who’s just sort of the people pleaser kind of stuck in the middle – this sort of doormat. I really feel like at times I’ve been each of those women. I think that we all have those parts of us inside. So I thought it would be really fun to explore those in each different character. It’s almost like there’s the id, the ego and the superego, which we all have inside of us. Each one of these characters are one of those traits.
So Shannon, you knew Jessica in grad school. But when did you first come across this project and think, this is something we need to make?
Shannon Reilly: Jess and I went to grad school together, and then we were able to work on a TV show together too. Then the pandemic hit, and I started working for our financer. This was the very first script I ever brought him. I’ve known about it since the inception of the script, so it’s pretty cool to be a part of it from that early, early stage through to the very end.
Our EP Bob Potter, he read it and he was like, let’s make it. It’s kind of crazy, because we didn’t have casting attached or anything, and it was my first time producing, and it was Jess’ first time directing. He was just so confident that this sort of thing would find a home and people, and would be something we haven’t seen before and something that needed to be made. He greenlit us and inspired Jess to direct it early on, which is very cool because I think often that kind of story, even if it’s female-driven horror, it’s directed by a man or it’s written by men. So to have females all at the forefront was very cool.
Jessica, did you want to direct it from the get go?
Kozak: [Bob] has this guy that he really trusts that he works with a bunch who he had also sent the script. We met with the two of them, and they were like, well why don’t you direct it? I was like, what? No! We should get someone better. And they were like, no you’re being crazy. They felt like they could see it from the writing, I guess with sort of a specificity. They were like … are you interested in directing? Of course I was, but I was like, maybe I’ll sit back and watch, shadow a director on this one and direct the next one. They were like, that’s insane, and if you were a man, you would say yes and figure it out.
After that conversation, I took one night and thought about it. Then I was like, of course I want to do this. I feel so attached to this story, and Shannon had been around from the beginning with it, so we really worked together on so much of it. She was also so supportive. I said yes, and that was the first decision we made after we’d been financed. Then we went out to cast and things like that.
Speaking of the casting process, how long did that take? Was it easy to find everyone?
Reilly: One of the first people we brought on was a casting director, Kate Geller, who had cast “Shiva Baby” and a couple of other movies that were in our budget range. She’s so good – I mean, she’s a New York casting director, so she knows a lot of these really brilliant theater actors.
We knew very early on that Sunita [Mani] was our first choice. Everything we wanted Emilia to be, she just had so inherently. The humor she could bring to it and the depth and all that was just so obvious. So she was very early on who we wanted, and she was the first one we went out to and we got her – which I think we’re realizing after the fact is very uncommon, that you just get your first choice for your lead right away.
For the other characters, Kayla [Foster, who plays Lucey] we had brought on earlier than that through another friend, and she’s been such a fantastic part of all of this. And then Kate [Easton], who plays Finn, was the last one we brought on, sort of the glue to tie it all together. And then Danny [Deferrari] is in “Shiva Baby,” who plays Zeke. He had the Kate Geller connection. And he’s so good in it, like I really can’t imagine any other Zeke.
He was such an interesting character for me to watch because when he shows up, you’re sort of like, absolutely don’t let this guy come hang out in your campsite. But I feel like depending on which other character he’s interacting with, his character changes. You can see him through their point of view even if you’re still outside of it, which was very interesting.
Kozak: I think something with this movie that we really wanted to do was to be in different people’s perspectives at different times. It was sort of this question early on, should we be with Emilia the whole time? It would be so interesting if we’re seeing everybody’s points of view on how this trip is going at different times. [In] one chat I had very early on with Danny, he was like, I love that I get to be basically three different guys depending on which character I’m interacting with. So I think everyone was really excited to be different characters depending on what scene they were in, I think Danny especially. And I think especially with groups of women, sometimes you meet a guy and some people are like, oh god, fuck that guy. And other people are like, he’s great! I thought that was a fun comedic thing to have happening throughout, and he did that so well.
And also, to touch on the casting thing, we were looking very early on at comedic actors, which is why we went to Sunita. We were like, we really want there to be moments where there’s playfulness, and it’s not this heavy drama. It’s also this friend group, and there are funny moments, and they’re connecting at times. So we thought it would be really fun to see a lot of comedic actors playing these roles, and maybe people we wouldn’t normally see in that kind of situation.
The movie is called “Wilder Than Her,” and there’s a song in the movie called “Wilder Than Her.” Did you know that song before you started writing the script and what drew you to it?
Kozak: That happened after I had written the script – or I think it was maybe I was writing the end of the script or something. And it was still untitled for a really long time. The scene where the song happens in the movie was just like, a song is sung here! But I didn’t write what it was yet.
My sister loves Dar Williams, and she does a cover of that song which plays in the credits of the movie. I was listening to it just randomly driving one day, and got goosebumps. I was like, this is the movie – this is the whole movie in one song. All the lyrics were perfect for what the theme of the movie was. So I was like, well that’s the title of the movie, and I’m going to write the song in and hope we can get the rights later. Which we were lucky enough to do.
This is my last question – and I don’t want to spoil too much – but in regards to the ending, and I guess throughout the whole movie as well, what were your conversations like about how much you wanted to show the audience of what actually happened? How much did you want to keep ambiguous versus showing the truth of what occurs?
Kozak: Shannon and I had tons and tons of talks about this. We sent the script to a bunch of people, a bunch of our writer friends, to men and women and different personalities, and everyone had a different opinion about the ending, which was really interesting. I think we landed on, we wanted everybody to know what happened. We want to show what happened, and we want people to know. But how they interpret that, we still wanted to be ambiguous.
“Wilder Than Her” plays at the Plaza Theatre on April 26. You can purchase tickets here.
