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More than 15 years later, Jennifer’s Body continues to pack a punch for its intended audience, and director Karyn Kusama is grateful for the film’s cult status.
After writer Diablo Cody expressed interest in making a sequel, Deadline spoke with Kusama about the “fun and crazy” idea for the followup and reminisced about making the original 2009 comedy horror ahead of her reunion with star Megan Fox at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures’ screening and Q&A on Saturday, as part of its “monstrous feminine” Halloween-themed programming.
“I know she’s working on it right now, and I’m very excited to hear what comes of it,” said Kusama of Cody’s sequel. “I know some of the bones of it, so I’m not going to give anything away, but it sounds fun and crazy like the first film. And I have no doubt that Diablo will do something absolutely incredible with it.”
After the original film was mis-marketed, in addition to suffering from fallout of the media’s attacks on Fox, Kusama said she’s “just so grateful that the film managed to find its audience” with its current cult status. She was particularly flattered by a recurring nod in Prime Video‘s Overcompensating, which featured a cameo from Fox.
“For the part of me that has a healthy ego that I try to keep in check, to have Jennifer’s Body be like the antidote to another classic film that I worship,” said Kusama. “But the idea that Jennifer’s Body would be somebody’s Godfather, that just tickles me all the way down to my toes.”
Johnny Simmons, Amanda Seyfried, Karyn Kusama, Megan Fox and Adam Brody attend the Toronto International Film Festival Midnight Madness screening of ‘Jennifer’s Body’ on Sept. 10, 2009 in Toronto, Canada. (Jason Merritt/Getty Images)
Read on for Karyn Kusama’s memories of making Jennifer’s Body, Pete Wentz‘s audition and the dawn of Kyle Gallner’s “scream king” tenure. Although the Academy Museum’s screening and Q&A is sold out, standby is available.
DEADLINE: Obviously this movie was mis-marketed to begin with. Tell me what it’s been like seeing this cult following come up over the years.
KARYN KUSAMA: I’m just so grateful that the film managed to find its audience, perhaps on a different timeline than any of us might have expected or hoped for, but I’m just so thankful that the work continues to speak to people. I’m just so satisfied by that.
DEADLINE: I was curious, did you happen to see that it was mentioned and Overcompensating with?
KUSAMA: Yes. For the part of me that has a healthy ego that I try to keep in check, to have Jennifer’s Body be like the antidote to another classic film that I worship, but the idea that Jennifer’s Body would be somebody’s Godfather, that just tickles me all the way down to my toes.
DEADLINE: I think I commented on Instagram recently that it’s my Citizen Kane.
KUSAMA: I love that. And I also love the fact that the slow return to the film by different audiences is so much my experience with movies as well, and so, to kind of feel like I could be part of one of those groups of films, that find its people over time is so gratifying.
Megan Fox in ‘Jennifer’s Body’ (2009) (Doane Gregory/Fox Atomic/Courtesy Everett Collection)
DEADLINE: Do you remember how you first became attached, when you first read the script and knew that you wanted to direct it?
KUSAMA: I had gotten the script, and I think I might have been turned off by the title even, and sort of put off reading it. And this was before Juno had come out, so I was aware that Diablo Cody was like a new voice on the scene, but I wasn’t really kind of aware of this project until I just decided to dig in and read it. And the experience of reading it, to have it be both so funny, so scary, so kind of tragic. All of that lit up for me, some of the films I’ve just loved over the years that are often hybrids of different genres, and that I have this incredibly emotional relationship to. I immediately felt that about Diablo’s script, that I just saw a way into it, even with the kind of secret language between those two girls and the sense of high school absurdity, which I think is so real for so many people. It just felt very emotionally authentic to me. So, I kind of put my name up in the mix. I think other people were meeting on it too. But when I met Diablo and Jason Reitman and Dan Dubiecki and Mason Novick, the producers, I was able to probably just speak to the themes of it as if they were my themes, and in many respects they are and were so. Once I got to meet Megan and know that she and I were gonna get along, I was on the movie. And we moved pretty quickly actually, now that I think about it.
DEADLINE: Tell me about working with Megan cause she is such an amazing comedic actor, and I feel like it’s awful how she was treated at that time.
KUSAMA: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s sort of her secret weapon is she’s really, really funny, and obviously, what’s behind that kind of humor is deep intelligence, and so she had both of those things but was clearly dismissed, attacked, mistrusted somehow for not just sort of staying in her place. And I feel like this role spoke to something in her that she must have already been sort of wanting to flex a little bit, given how up to that moment, she had been treated in the press, and by her professional colleagues. That must have been incredibly wounding, and so she brought this amazing comedy to the role, but she also has so much pathos, and I loved getting to see her dig into all those sort of different corners of the character.
DEADLINE: I also love the friendship between Jennifer and Needy. It’s just such great driving force behind the whole possession plot. Tell me about building that friendship and working through that on the screen.
KUSAMA: We auditioned so many wonderful actors for Needy, and it wasn’t until Amanda came in that I felt I could understand the role. She brought this really unpredictable rhythm incredible humor, and incredible lack of vanity to the part, which I think is essential to Needy, to be both smart and funny, but also sort of self-deprecating. She just nailed it in that audition. And then I feel like as soon as we were up in Vancouver prepping, she and Megan spent a fair amount of time together. The whole young cast did actually, and that was just a great way for everyone to sort of start. Just being in high school cliques, essentially, and I have a memory of inviting everyone to my hotel room on a Friday night to watch Evil Dead 2, and I ordered pizzas. And it was just a way to have people far younger than me, but about to launch into playing this set of characters who really spoke to me on an emotional level, like in my memories of high school. And so to kind of see the way those relationships developed behind the scenes is as entertaining in my memory as actually making the film.
Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried in ‘Jennifer’s Body’ (2009) (Doane Gregory/Fox Atomic/Courtesy Everett Collection)
DEADLINE: And there’s so many amazing supporting actors in this: J.K. Simmons, Amy Sedaris and Kyle Gallner. Do you have any standout memories from working with the ensemble?
KUSAMA: There’s so many great moments, I mean, Kyle to me, brought something so specific to the role of Colin Gray. He really understood the pretentiousness in a way of that kind of guy, but I found it so touching and so incredibly accurate, that the self-important goth is just such an incredible sort of high school type. But he brought so much humanity to it. Amy Sedaris, I felt blessed that we got her, and she just played the role with this kind of distracted, exhausted quality, that I had to work to not be cracking up any day she worked. And J.K., the same. He did things that, like he would get choked up after the fire and talk about the people we’d lost, and there’s a way that he nrought such a “playing it straight” quality to absurd material that you just can’t not laugh.
DEADLINE: I also love that Kyle, since this movie, has become such a scream king in his own right.
KUSAMA: I know, it’s true. And he’s so good at it. I think the thing is, he’s just a really great actor. And so it’s just so nice when people who can kind of put their head down and commit to a role just get to keep working. And that’s pretty much everyone in our cast, I feel like we saw a completely different side of Adam Brody. In fact, Chris Pratt had a larger role in the movie, but it was about kind of an ancillary story, so we had to cut some of his part down. But I always regretted that because I loved watching what he did in the movie. It is a really interesting population of really wonderful actors actually.
DEADLINE: I swear I wore the soundtrack out when I was in high school. It’s such a good soundtrack.
KUSAMA: Oh, I’m so happy to hear that.
DEADLINE: But I know Adam Brody didn’t actually sing his part, right?
KUSAMA: No, we had another—I mean, he did a great job of pretending to, but we found another band that some of the members could play as the backup band to Adam on stage. So it kind of helped create—they wrote that song ‘Through the Trees’, and they did the cover of Blondie’s ‘In the Flesh’. And they were able to sort of bring enough people on stage who actually knew the song, that it kind of felt like it was really happening.
Megan Fox in ‘Jennifer’s Body’ (2009) (Fox Atomic)
DEADLINE: And did Pete Wentz audition for that part?
KUSAMA: He did, he did. But I was concerned, in my memory of it, that it was just almost too meta, like too much, even though I doubt it would have felt like stunt casting, it felt that way to me. But the irony was that we ended up working with Fall Out Boy’s label, and it was a nice way to sort of honor the tradition that we were both celebrating and skewering in the film.
DEADLINE: That’s awesome. And I love that the Fall Out Boy poster is one of the first things you see in the movie.
KUSAMA: Totally. I hope Pete has a sense of humor about it because it’s all filled with love.
DEADLINE: And now I couldn’t imagine anyone but Adam Brody in that part.
KUSAMA: Oh yeah, he’s so good in it.
DEADLINE: What was your favorite scene to direct? Cause there are so many iconic ones, from the abandoned pool to the the Melody Lane fire.
KUSAMA: There’s a sequence that is particularly long, because it’s intertwined and it’s cutting between Colin Gray going to this abandoned house to meet up with Jennifer, and Needy and Chip having sex over at his house. And I always felt like that scene, that sequence would work best if it was all intertwined and intercut. And we kicked it off with a song by a band that I really loved called Screeching Weasel, and they do an incredible cover of ‘I Can See Clearly Now’. I knew right away that I wanted that song, but I also knew I wanted an homage to Silence of the Lambs, when the senator’s daughter is singing ‘American Girl’ in the car. I always found that such an incredibly effective way to bond with her before she gets kidnapped in that film, and held prisoner. And so, I wanted to sort of honor that scene and see Colin singing at the top of his lungs and just at his most joyous teenage self before he lands at this abandoned, half-finished housing suburb. And so making it and putting those scenes together to create that one sequence, that lands in chip’s inimitable line, “Am I too big?” I just knew that that was how I kind of wanted it to work, and then to see it in theaters and just see how much audiences love that moment. It was a it was a really fun sequence to put together.
Amanda Seyfried in ‘Jennifer’s Body’ (2009) (Doane Gregory/Fox Atomic/Courtesy Everett Collection)
DEADLINE: Yeah, that was definitely one of the funniest line deliveries. I was curious, did Diablo want to be set on fire in the one scene?
KUSAMA: I’m trying to remember if—she was our bartender at the Melody Lane bar, but I don’t think she was allowed to be set on fire. Like, even if that was something she wanted to do, I believe we had a stunt coordinator who was like, “Absolutely not.” So, that did not happen.
DEADLINE: That’s funny though. I have to know, have you talked to Diablo about this potential sequel at all, or is there any movement?
KUSAMA: I know she’s working on it right now, and I’m very excited to hear what comes of it. I know some of the bones of it, so I’m not going to give anything away, but it sounds fun and crazy like the first film. And I have no doubt that Diablo will do something absolutely incredible with it.
DEADLINE: It also recently came to my attention that it was the 25th anniversary of Girlfight. What was it like for you and revisiting that?
KUSAMA: It’s just so wild because, on the one hand, it feels like maybe it has been 25 years, but on the other hand, it feels like maybe a quarter of that. I can’t account for how rapidly time seems to be passing, but I was really gratified that Criterion wanted to release an edition of the film. and that people are finding the film again that way. I look at each of my films as sort of teenagers going off to college and once they get to college, I sort of have to just cross my fingers that they’re gonna be OK. And I think Girlfight is representative of one of the movies that was very authentic for me at that moment and seems to be doing OK.
Director Karyn Kusama on the set of ‘Jennifer’s Body’ (2009) (Doane Gregory/Fox Atomic/Courtesy Everett Collection)
DEADLINE: Do you still box at all?
KUSAMA: I don’t, I’ve ruined—I mean, it’s so funny, I have now persistent issues with my neck and my shoulder, and it’s all because of boxing. That sport is so incredible and wrecks your body. So, I’m now paying for the paying the price for that hobby of mine.
DEADLINE: I really do appreciate you taking the time to talk to me. Like I said, Jennifer’s Body is such an important film to me.
KUSAMA: I really, really appreciate it, and there’s something about people saying that it’s an important film to them, it just means so much to me, because I knew, making the film, that I wanted it to be kind of exuberant and fun and crazy and have kind of a bad attitude in a funny way. And I just so appreciate that people understand I was trying to speak to them. It’s cool.
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Glenn Garner
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