Video: ‘Bottoms’ | Anatomy of a Scene

Hi, my title is Emma Seligman. And I’m the director of ‘Bottoms.’ [MUSIC PLAYING] So on this scene, PJ, who’s performed by Rachel Sennott, and Josie, who’s performed by Ayo Edebiri, are about to stroll into their first Fight Club assembly. And they’ve spent their time making an attempt to persuade sizzling women to affix the membership. But they’re about to find that the attendees of the assembly aren’t who they anticipated. “I love David Fincher.” “Oh my god.” “Well, see.” “I guess Sylvie’s cute if she lost her braces and stopped huffing paint.” “She’ll never stop huffing paint.” So for this scene, it felt essential to me to actually arrange the stakes of what these women are getting down to do in that they don’t know what they’re doing. So I needed them to really feel the anxiousness of all these women who’ve come anticipating to be taught self protection them for recommendation and ideas once they made up that they know the way to battle. “We’re going to start with dropkicks, tackling, a little bit of knife play, then punch bucket, which is when we throw you in a bucket and we punch you until you bleed.” “Before that, perhaps stretches, icebreakers, and trust falls.” What was written into the script right here was that PJ is reminding the women that they went to juvie, which is a lie and a rumor that’s been began in school. And she’s utilizing the truth that these women suppose that they went to juvie to her benefit. And they’re making up tales. And so right here she’s asking Josie to pitch in and inform a narrative of her personal from juvie. “Juvie was insane. Once a girl tried to kill me with rat poison, so I took her outside and I punched her ‘til she died.” Josie isn’t pretty much as good at mendacity. And so she makes up this story that sort of goes uncontrolled the place she killed a lady. Rachel and Ayo are fairly wonderful improvisers and had enjoyable making up totally different variations of what that was, in addition to improvising the best way that they egg one another on. Rachel actually improvised how she convinces Josie to throw the punch. “What’s the problem?” “There’s no problem, I’m just — I’m just not going to do it.” “Come on, they want to see the punch.” “They don’t want to see it.” “They want to see — look at them. (WHISPERING) They don’t want to.” “They want to see the punch.” “Who am I going to punch?” “Punch me. Just punch me.” “Punch you?” “Yeah, come on.” “I can punch you?” “Yeah, I know how to take a punch. Something people would always say, ‘PJ knows how to take a punch.’ Come on up. Oh. Ah.” It took fairly a number of tries to land promoting this punch. Getting the angle proper, and getting the fist appropriately matching the place it wanted to go to dam Rachel’s nostril was fairly difficult for some motive.