A year after Kristen Stewart made her directorial debut with The Chronology of Water, it’s now her wife’s turn, as Dylan Meyer writes and directs new stoner comedy The Wrong Girls.
The movie stars Stewart and Alia Shawkat as codependent, marijuana-loving best friends who get caught in a case of mistaken identity that throws their lives into chaos. It’s been in the works for over a decade, and is actually what brought the couple together in the first place.
Meyer told The Hollywood Reporter at the film’s L.A. premiere on Wednesday that she “wrote this movie about my best friend and I getting stoned in our house, and then it took a long time to convince people that that was worthy of being a movie.” In those early days, she sent Stewart “this script when we first met so long ago, because I always knew she was the right person to be in this movie. But then we stopped communicating. We didn’t really know each other, so I was like ‘Oh, there that is.’”
The filmmaker continued, “Then when we were together, we were falling in love and sharing all the stuff that we were excited about, and we were working on, and she was like, ‘I want to be in this movie.’ And I was like, ‘That movie’s kind of expensive, I don’t know, that’s kind of over here.’ And she was like, ‘No, I want to be in this movie and you will direct this movie and this is what we’re going to do.’ And her confidence really pushed me to get over some of my own imposter syndrome about doing that.”
For her side, Stewart admitted, “I probably should have read it many years ago when she sent it to me but then we hung out and I was like, ‘You’re the coolest person I’ve ever met, what are you doing?’ And she was like, ‘Well, what I want to do is this.’ And she’s just my favorite writer and this movie is wish fulfillment, mega-time.”
And in a genre that dudes have largely dominated, Stewart noted of their take on the stoner comedy, “I think it’s really obvious that we want to have fun with our girlfriends and lack aspiration but aspire to compassion and just want to get high and laugh all day.”
The movie also features a star-studded cast that includes Geena Davis, LaKeith Stanfield, Kate McKinnon, Kumail Nanjiani and Seth Rogen, with the latter producing through his Point Grey Pictures as well. Stewart teased that after watching Rogen’s stoner performances “over the years, there’s no way I didn’t deliver a few lines just subconsciously” in his style. But Shawkat added that Stewart didn’t need much of Rogen’s input: “She’s teaching us all how to be good stoners and save the world.”
The Wrong Girls hits theaters on Aug. 14.