Meredith Alloway’s new black comedy is less than two minutes long Forbidden fruits To let the audience know how brutal the journey was.
In the first scene of the campy horror film, Apple’s red-haired (well, red-wigged) Lili Reinhart dumps her hot cup of coffee onto the lap of a pervert standing next to her in the mall parking lot, mere seconds after his license plate “#1DADDY” appears on the screen. And it gets wilder from there.
Directed and co-written by Alloway, Forbidden fruits The film revolves around the women of Free Eden, a trendy women’s clothing store in a Dallas mall, which forms a glamorous cult. Apple, Regina George of this mall world, is surrounded by fellow fruitarians named Fig (Alexandra Shipp) and Cherry (Victoria Pedretti), when newcomer Pumpkin (Lola Tong) rises from food court attendant to employee at Free Eden.
Apple and co. Insert a clearly motivated percussionist into the after-hours cult, and things start to go downhill from there, slasher style. The film is based on a play by Lily Houghton, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Alloway.
“When I read Lily Houghton, I had done a lot of research on female criminals and serial killers,” Alloway says. Hollywood Reporter on Zoom days before the film opened. “Women do it for different reasons than men. I’m constantly annoyed when something else comes out about a male serial killer, which is fine as long as there are also women to explore.”
Alway was introduced to Houghton through their mutual manager at Linden Entertainment. The director notes that Houghton loves Jennifer’s body (body Screenwriter Diablo Cody later joined as producer of their new film), and both were eager to create something fun. “What if we slaughter?” The director remembers asking Houghton when they met to discuss the collaboration. “What if we used gender as a tool to help people understand what these people feel, and how violent, messy, chaotic, beautiful, and exhilarating female relationships can be?”
Alloway and Houghton succeeded on that front. Forbidden fruitsThe core group of women are all, in their increasingly troubled way, driven by the bond of female friendship. However, Tung’s Pumpkin is less convinced by the brotherhood element. So, it makes sense for the third act to reveal that Pumpkin and Apple are actually half-brothers, and that Pumpkin is searching for the Free Eden gang to avenge their father’s death.
The screenwriters retained the heightened language of Houghton’s play with Cody’s help.
“I think as women especially, we come up with these codes and these languages and secret ways of communicating, especially when you’re young. [We were] “Take advantage of that,” Alloway notes. “The biggest challenge was finding a cast that could deliver the language, take the world seriously, still understand the comedy and in the back of their minds, be present in the scene and [know] Ultimately, the tone of this is satire.
Reinhart, Tong, Shipp, and Pedretti go in this vein throughout the film, even as it delves into its darker, less ambiguous moments. The group’s ex-girlfriend Pickle (Emma Chamberlain) is the source of much of this darkness, along with the girls’ often vulnerable confessions in the fitting room mirror. “The confessions were the heart of the characters. From the beginning, Lily and I described the film as a razor blade on the Jolly Rancher,” Alloway explains.
Alloway says there was a group rehearsal with the women before filming and many conversations about the characters and the motivation behind parts of the dialogue. “We talked about fashion. We talked about the ways they use their makeup and hair and what they wear as armor for the way they want to present themselves [themselves] To the world,” she says.
The director asked the actresses to make Pinterest boards for their characters and send them direct messages anytime. “It was really fun to see what the girls came up with,” she notes.
The women of Free Eden meet one tragic end after another as the hurricane approaches – Cherry in a mall escalator and Tin crashing into the mall’s skylight. Ultimately, it comes down to Pumpkin and Apple, who fight to the death in a mall fountain, a more intimate moment by choice, according to Alloway.
“I think horror in particular gets a little too much on the gas pedal sometimes, and then by the end of the movie, it gets out of control. I wanted the ending to be intimate, and I wanted the girls to be wet and messy,” she says.
Ultimately, Pumpkin was strangled to death by her half-sister at the fountain, a move Alloway says she hesitated about. “Honestly, I didn’t really want to kill Pumpkin. Up until the shooting, I had an alternate version where maybe she didn’t die, and Sharon found her and came back to life. She didn’t drown. She just passed out,” she admits.
“I was like, ‘No, the whole point of the movie is that the relationships between these women aren’t perfect, that we work in systems that don’t allow us all to survive the way we should. It would be a bow to an ending that wasn’t deserved and wasn’t honest and real,'” she continues.
With the film now out, Alloway says she’d love to know what Apple will do next. “Poor Apple, all her life, she was trying to protect the women around her, including her mother, who also abandoned her,” she says.
Alloway adds: “Being abandoned as a woman can pit you against other women, it can heighten your need to survive, which is what I think Apple is always trying to find. And in that moment, you think, unfortunately, ‘My sister created all this mess,’ and you have a psychological break and just try to survive.” “Apple has had to protect itself for many years and survive.”
