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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 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 think that the search for male validation was something that I was feeling. The desperation and the pain that was caused from not receiving that validation—I felt it so much in college, and it was the first time I’d ever felt that way. In high school, I’d felt incredibly lonely and insecure about my body, but I wasn’t dating or having sex. I was hoping for that and wanting that, but I just felt like such a loser and that no guy would ever be interested in me, etc., etc.
You were writing “Bottoms” with Rachel as you were prepping for “Shiva Baby.” How did you come up with the idea of girls doing a fight club?