Hello, my name is Emma Seligman. And I’m the director of “Bottoms.” [MUSIC PLAYING] So in this scene, PJ, played by Rachel Sennott, and Josie, played by Ayo Edebiri, are about to walk into their first Fight Club meeting. And they’ve spent their time convincing pretty girls to join the club. But they are about to discover that the meeting participants are not who they expected. “I love David Fincher.” “Oh my God.” “We will see.” “I think Sylvie will be cute when she loses her braces and stops sniffing paint.” “She’ll never stop sniffing paint.” So for this scene, I thought it was important to really define what these girls are planning to do, because they have no idea what they’re doing. So I wanted them to feel the fear of all these girls who expected to learn self-defense and looked to them for advice and tips when they made up that they knew how to fight. “We’re going to start with dropkicks, tackling, a little knife play and then punch-bucket. That’s when we throw you in a bucket and beat you until you bleed.” “Before that happens there may be stretches, icebreakers and a drop in confidence.” What was in the script here was PJ reminding the girls that they went to juvenile detention, which is a lie and a rumor that has been going around the school. And she uses the fact that these girls think they went to juvenile detention to her advantage. And they make up stories. And so she asks Josie to tell her own juvenile detention story. “Juvie was insane. Once a girl tried to kill me with rat poison, so I took her outside and beat her until she died.” Josie isn’t very good at lying. And so she makes up this story that gets out of hand and where she killed a girl. Rachel and Ayo are pretty awesome improvisers and enjoyed coming up with different versions of what that was, as well as improvising the way they stir each other up. Rachel definitely improvised on how she convinces Josie to throw the punch. “What’s the problem?” “There’s no problem, I’m just not going to do it.” “Come on, they want to see the blow.” “They don’t want to see it.” “They want to see – look at them. (WHISPERING) They don’t want that.’ “They want to see the blow.” “Who am I going to hit?” “Hit me. Just slap me.” “Hit you?” “Yeah come on.” “Can I hit you?” “Yeah, I know how to take a beating. Something people would always say, ‘PJ sure knows how to take a beating.’ Come on up. Oh. Ah.” It took quite a few tries to sell this punch. It was quite a challenge for some reason to get the angle right and get the fist in the right place where it needed to go to block Rachel’s nose.
