Celebrity Interview: Director Andrew Bujalski and Star Regina Hall Talk on Support The Girls

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Support the Girls Director Andrew Bujalski, and star Regina Hall, sat down with the folks at Magnolia Pictures for an in-depth interview on the making of the film, sexual harassment in the modern age and Sports Bars.

 

The film, which is getting rave reviews for star Regina Hall also showcases up and coming talent Haley Lu Richardson who portrays the lead waitress Maci at Double Whammies, a Hooters style Sports Bar, opposite Hall's Lisa, the General Manager.

Lisa, is the Den Mother to these 20 year old who are simply trying to figure out who they against a backdrop of male dominance, harassment, and the need to be needed and how best to help the girls who decide they don't want to be helped.

Hall's comedic timing is sharp and delivered well. She is genuinely funny. Her breaking point, the arch as Support the Girls presents the day in life, good bad and indifferent, is portrayed with equal authenticity. 

Maci, as is often the case of the food & beverage industry best servers can explain every trick of the trade to increase tips, explain the best times, days and hours to work for the best financial boost and in the same thought couldn't answer a simple question on even a minor subject.

Below is the interview.

Andrew, what made you want to make a movie about a restaurant like Double Whammies?

AB: I wandered into one of these places maybe a decade ago. I don't know what I'd been expecting, but there was something so peculiar about it that I couldn't quite get out of my head. There just seemed to be these tremendous, very American contradictions built right into it. On the one hand, they were explicitly selling a kind of raunchiness, but once you got inside that didn't really seem like the product. It felt like it was much more about comfort and about selling a feeling of normalcy. It really isn't meant to feel transgressive.


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The fantasy at a place like Double Whammies is more like, "you like sports, you like cold beer, you like boobs, and all those things are okay. That's what we do here in America and you don't need to feel bad about it." Seeing how that particular, weird product was distilled and presented made me think about how every job is a kind of performance, one way or another. It certainly resonated with making movies.

Regina, what drew you to this role?

RH: From the moment I read it, I just resonated with Lisa. I had seen Andrew's work and I thought he wrote such a beautifully complex and yet simplistic script. He was able to find the humanity in this space that we take for granted or don't necessarily even think about. I just loved the chord that he touched on with this group of people, these women and girls. I thought Lisa was great: her need to help, her need to fix, her need to save, and her need to be needed. It just resonated on so many levels.

It feels very timely for Support the Girls to be coming out now, but you couldn't have anticipated that issues around sexual harassment and abuse would be at the center of a national conversation when you started the project.

AB: The direction of our culture in the last two years took me by as great (and frightening) surprise as anybody. When I started writing the film my concern was that it might just seem irrelevant. But regardless of the progress of the zeitgeist, you have to hope that what you are doing as a filmmaker will always be relevant so long as you're focusing on human stories. Of course we're now in such a heated time, people might be demanding a political advocacy movie and this isn't that. This is a movie without heroes or villains. It's about a lot of struggling people and all of them have their own failures and demons.

RH: Right before we were submitting to festivals, all the Harvey Weinstein charges came out. We were worried it could be polarizing because of the setting. Would people be able to look beyond the surface to see these young girls and this place that still has integrity? The one scene where Lisa actually has to address a customer's behavior, it wasn't even about groping. It's about what we now call body shaming. She doesn't try to coddle him, or say, "well, maybe he didn't mean it…" The disrespect was enough. Women, all of us, are standing up to say this is not okay. In a setting like Double Whammies, people take it for granted, but we have to create places of integrity wherever we have the opportunity to and then stand committed to them.

Andrew, you've returned to this theme of workplace dynamics and how people navigate their professional personas time and time again.

AB: Whether it's Double Whammies or a computer chess convention, I'm interested in the unspoken rules that people agree to live by. I guess that's what made a restaurant like Double Whammies so interesting to me: there's a perverse set of assumptions, but it more or less works. It's mostly self-policing and it's mostly coherent. For the most part, this is a movie about things not going wrong, it's a story about the rules being followed. However, there are these little eruptions throughout the movie, and one larger scale eruption toward the end, that stem from no two people having precisely the same vision of what the place is supposed to be. Lisa and Cubby (James Le Gros) have very different visions of what Double Whammies is supposed to be, even though they're attempting to follow the same rulebook.

Ultimately what really makes the structure crumble is the televisions going down.

AB: Well that's about the very basic agreement with the customers. When I was writing, I thought, "What would throw off the balance more than anything?" and that was it. Maybe this is my overactive desire to be empathetic in these things, but I felt kind of bad for the guys in that scene because it was a simple contract and it had been broken. As weird and creepy as it gets in there, as tensions are starting to rise, you're still seeing guys that, more than anything, are just disappointed. Revolt is a rough business! Even a silly little microcosmic one like this...

Lisa is also not present in that final meltdown. She seems to be what keeps Double Whammies on an even keel. She is a manager, a den-mother, an enforcer, a host, etc.

RH: We carry so much of who we are with us into every place. Lisa's identity is connected to being a manager there. It's a sense of purpose and commitment. I talked to a couple of female managers. They are committed to their girls and have a sense of integrity about how things are run and how these young girls are treated. Lisa is very comfortable in that space. Her kids are grown, she's probably taken care of children her entire life, and now she cares for these girls. I think there's a self-care that's missing. I think her commitment to Double Whammies is how she's been able to avoid things in other areas of her life.


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AB: A kind of character that I'm always fascinated by is the incurable optimist. It's my experience of life that the people who are the most relentlessly upbeat and positive are almost invariably people who have seen a lot of darkness or have faced down a lot of darkness within. In a weird way (it's a very different tone), Lisa is not unlike Guy Pearce's character in Results. He's another one who wants desperately to believe in his system and wants to see the best in people even though that keeps not working out for him. I'm sure it's more poignant in Lisa's character because her system is all about being good to people: If she takes care of everybody they'll reward her. Well, sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. Sometimes they do or don't in a way she'd never anticipate.

There seems to be a gendered element to what is expected of Lisa in her role at Double Whammies.

AB: At times I thought of her as a kind of Old West Madam. There is a level of emotional engagement that is certainly not something you would expect from a man in the same situation. One owner I spoke to told me he liked female managers because he felt like they were less susceptible to emotional manipulation. Now, that's an owner's perspective and obviously from somebody who's trying to keep his eye on the bottom line, but it was interesting to me to think that that emotional intelligence could cut both ways--you could wield it as a weapon, or perhaps it can be wielded against you. Lisa lives right up to this nurturing expectation, but many of her mothering instincts just blow up in her face.

A lot of Lisa's nurturing seems to come naturally, but you come to realize that her work is really taking a toll on her.

RH: There was a thanklessness that resonated. One of the ways we are able to keep going is when there is a gratitude that you feel. I think that day, as everything went crazy, it was just a storm and she realized she was replaceable to Cubby. What she does is not seen, it's not respected. That's a hurtful feeling. I guess they say Mommies feel it. She gives all of her being, to the point where she realizes that she isn't spending enough time with her husband, and they don't see it. I think she recognizes that and realizes it's not going to change.

She bumps up against the limits of what she can do for the girls.

AB: She's bumping up against the limits of reality. The relationship with her husband, that's the harshest limit of all. This thing that she can do for every 19-year-old who walks into her employ, just doesn't work when she tries it on the scale of a marriage.

She also runs into a hard personal limit with Shaina. Can you talk a bit about Shaina's storyline? Shaina is largely off screen, but the situation with her boyfriend introduces the spectre of violence against women from the very first scene.

AB: It's something that comes up in life all the time where the starkest stakes are also the murkiest. You have a situation where you've got someone with a boyfriend whom there is every reason to believe, in one way or another (or maybe multiple ways), is abusive. So, on the one hand, those stakes are very clear: This is a bad guy and we need to help her. It is very easy to root for Lisa in doing that. Lisa is doing the right thing. Except that it just doesn't work, because Lisa doesn't really know what she's doing, she's just blindly trying to help. Now I happen to think there's some real value in blindly trying to help! If anything, I think the message of this movie is that no matter how many times it gets fucked up, there is always value in trying to be good to people. That's as close as I have ever come to having a movie with a simple message. But this shit is complicated. The one thing our culture is unified on right now is that we all seem to love taking down bad guys--but even when you can identify a bad guy, it's just not that simple, and that's what Lisa crashes into.

Regina, can you talk about the events of the day and why it finally brings Lisa to her breaking point?

RH: Lisa definitely has such an emotional response to Shaina being beaten up by her boyfriend and she goes to work so emotionally wrought. She has an idea of how the day is going to go, but, goodness, so many things happen in one day! I think the one bright spot she had was Shaina. Helping her would make it all worth it. The other girls are going to get promotions and Shaina's going to leave her boyfriend and be able to get a lawyer and maybe things are going to be good. And then Shaina turns on her instead.

Could you talk a bit about Shaina's response ("Do you think helping someone means you get to tell them how to live their life?") when Lisa doesn't give her the money? It feels like it gets to the heart of Lisa's frustrations throughout the film.

RH: It's just that point in life where, and I've been there, where you thought you'd been doing the right thing, but then you don't really know. For Lisa, it was how everything she did translated. There is a wisdom that comes with age, so I think that she thought it was the right thing. She thought she'd built a family with these girls. I think that moment and that statement brought everything into question for her, especially with her husband being gone and what he said to her. I don't know that she reached an answer. After someone says something like that you're angry and you're in shock and you sit with it. And you say, "I don't know." In that moment, when I heard her say it (reading it is one thing, but hearing her say it to me in character is different), I was in shock. After everything, after bringing her into my home, doing my best, after seeing her in a place of such brokenness… maybe Lisa was too close to these girls? It makes you question everything.

AB: That particular line is so elemental, I feel like you could apply it to just about any relationship, personal or political. Lisa's been through a lot at that point. In the final scenes I think she's trying to relearn her relationship to the other girls. It would certainly be easy for her to fall back into that den-mother role. Maybe if you saw these characters again a week later, they'd all be working at the Mancave and everything would be more or less as it was. But Lisa has plenty of reason to question everything about how she treats these relationships: what she's getting out of it and what others are getting out of her kindness. I think we leave them all in a real moment of doubt. All we can do is hope that they've learned something useful from all the calamity.

Support the Girls opens August 24, 2018. See it.

Interview provided by Magnolia Pictures and included for use in the films promotional notes to media.