Marielle Heller Explores the Feral Side of Motherhood

Marielle Heller sat in a post-production facility in lower Manhattan, looking shaken. It was June, 2023, and for months she'd been finalizing edits on "Nightbitch," a movie with a Kafka-adjacent premise: a former artist, struggling to adjust to life as a stay-at-home mother, discovers that she's turning into a dog. That day in New York, things felt nearly as surreal. Forest fires in Canada had sent smoke drifting over the Northeast, flooding the air with toxic ps that tinted the sky the lurid orange of a traffic cone.

Heller had already been feeling off kilter, having just had to put her beloved cat, Cleo, to sleep. She'd also recently had a series of unsettling encounters with animals, including one afternoon when a squirrel invaded the Brooklyn home that she shared with her husband, the director Jorma Taccone, and their two children. (She'd cornered the frantic rodent in a bathroom, then released it into Prospect Park.) And all month she'd been having bad dreams, reflecting the anxiety of releasing a new film. In one of them, she'd shown off a picture of a wolf cub to her friends, insisting that it was a beautiful baby. "I could hear them talking behind our back, saying, like, 'Did they think we would think that was a baby? We know that's a wolf!' And I was, like"—she did a goofy imitation of herself, her voice querulous—" 'Jorma, no one thinks our joke is funny.' "

Mostly, however, Heller was brooding about hostile comments from audience members at early screenings of "Nightbitch," which the film's distributor, Searchlight Pictures, had held at a mall in Southern California. The film, which Heller had written and directed, was an adaptation of a strange, lyrical novel by Rachel Yoder that had become a buzzy hit during the pandemic. In the film, Amy Adams plays the artist character, known only as Mother, who has quit her job at a gallery to care for her toddler son. Sleep-starved, agitated by the tedium of domesticity, and bored by the basic moms around her, Mother spins out, experiencing a wild transformation: her senses sharpen, she sprouts a tail and six new nipples, and she begins craving raw meat. In Yoder's book, which takes place inside Mother's head, it's never clear if what's happening is real, and the story is punctuated by graphic brutality, including a scene in which Mother, driven mad by having to take care of yet another creature—the family cat—tears it apart with her teeth. Heller, who doesn't like horror movies, had muted the violence. Even so, "Nightbitch" was an ambitiously odd film, a cathartic, darkly funny fable about how motherhood changes women, by forcing them to tap into a feral physicality, an experience that is overwhelming but ultimately liberating. The story was fuelled by anger—in particular, the rage that Mother feels toward the character known as Husband, who is always gone on business trips, snores through wake-ups, and breezily describes his own role as "babysitting."

The early cut had inspired prickly reactions from male viewers. "One guy said, 'Why would a man want to see this movie? There's no men in it, and the only one has hardly any lines,' " Heller told me, her liquid brown eyes widening. Another man told a focus group that motherhood was, by definition, a boring topic for art. Heller and I huddled together, whispering, as crew members adjusted the sound mix for a party scene in which Mother is toasted by fellow-artists, who clink champagne glasses in her honor.

Heller, who has no poker face, couldn't hide her frustration from her producers on the day of the screenings. The whole focus-group process, which often involves handing out free tickets at malls, struck her as biased against films like "Nightbitch": few parents were able to attend a Monday-night screening on a whim. To keep her spirits up, Heller kept reminding herself that she'd received tough feedback in the past. Early mentors had been put off by the provocative themes of her début film, "The Diary of a Teenage Girl" (2015), in which a fifteen-year-old sleeps with her mother's boyfriend, then vents her story in confessional audiotapes and becomes a punk cartoonist. Focus groups were iffy about the likability of Lee Israel, the bitingly funny, misanthropic literary forger at the center of Heller's second film, "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" (2018). Yet in just five years Heller had pulled off a remarkable accomplishment: she had directed three smart, idiosyncratic, and critically praised films, each one a richly detailed portrait of an artist insisting on his or her voice, even when the world threatened to snuff it out. In her most recent movie, "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood" (2019), a cynical journalist, played by Matthew Rhys, sets out to write a hit piece on the children's-television star Fred Rogers, only to be won over by his subject's empathetic world view.

Working on "Beautiful Day," which starred Tom Hanks as Rogers, had shifted the way Heller herself viewed the world. She had positioned that film, which celebrated Rogers's philosophy of radical kindness, as an antidote to the cruelty of the Trump era—and since then she had been trying to hew to Rogers's model, to focus on doing meaningful work, not worrying about haters. While making her first three movies, she'd used a different method to cope with focus groups: a flask of whiskey. Unfortunately, since she was recovering from a norovirus infection, she'd had to face the "Nightbitch" screenings sober.

Heller's brother, Nate, who has scored all her films, had joined her at the screenings. "He said it felt like we were in Vegas and there was a 'cooler' in the audience, like, someone who ruins luck . . . who ruins a streak. It felt like someone had just poured cold water on us. Like there was some pervasive, misogynist, male . . . " In response, she was steeling herself for the film's release. "Maybe I'm getting myself hyped up for something that won't happen—but I started thinking, People might really hate this movie. For reasons that make my heart hurt." She'd been playing with a new marketing line, one meant to capture the movie's eccentricity and unusual blend of genres: "Nightbitch" was a comedy for women, but a horror movie for men.

Eight months earlier, in October, 2022, the skies had been clearer. In a leafy neighborhood in Glendale, California, Heller, a forty-five-year-old with dark eyes and a wide, amused mouth, prepared to film outside a house on a street that she had selected precisely because it felt generic: an anytown for an anymom. In the scene, Husband—played by Scoot McNairy—was concerned about his wife's state of mind. Amy Adams stood nearby, looking realistically haggard, wearing a wrinkled button-up; at her feet, Arleigh Snowden, one of the three-year-old twins cast as Son, made vrooming noises with a toy truck. Cheerfully, he said, "I broke it, Movie Mama!"—the name he used on set for Adams.

In the scene, Husband, who is about to leave on yet another business trip, offers some advice. "I read an once that said that structure was the key to mental health," McNairy told Adams, earnestly, and then he added a self-help koan: "Happiness is a choice." Adams slapped his face, hard (a stage slap—they'd add audio later). Then McNairy gave the same speech again, without a slap from Adams, a tipoff that the violence was inside her head. The film was full of similar fantasy sequences—a funny rant by Mother in a supermarket, a wolfish leap into the air—that dramatized the split between her spiky internal landscape and her flat affect.

Heller, an actress herself, laid out the pacing; then, after a few rounds, she gave McNairy a note. Husband is absolutely confident that he's being helpful, she told the actor. She compared it to a bit by the standup comic Maria Bamford, in which a date offers Bamford some self-assured, useless advice on her career: "Just make a funny joke. Then make a funnier joke!"

When they shot the scene again, McNairy's delivery was more layered: his voice was sincere, but his gaze was sweetly robotic. Heller watched intently, caught up in the emotion of the conflict. After Adams slapped McNairy, Heller's eyes misted with tears.

The crew needed extra time to prepare for the next scene, which took place inside the house, in the kitchen. Heller retreated to the back porch, where she sat in her director's chair, nursing her two-year-old daughter, Zadie, who was visiting with her nanny. (Her seven-year-old son, Wylie, was at school.) Zadie looked blissful, winding her silky blond hair into the plastic spiral of Heller's earphone cord. Heller's own hair was chopped short, a look that she'd adopted after growing it out for a role in the TV show "The Queen's Gambit." She wore pink sneakers and hip accessories—on another day, her socks read "MOTHER" and "FUCKER." On the table sat a large purple water bottle printed with a photograph of Taccone and the children, alongside the words "Family Forever."

Heller loved being on set, afloat in inventive spontaneity. A month earlier, she'd been in "prep," the gruelling weeks of location scouting, costume selection, budgeting, and other decisions that could tank a movie before it was even made. She dreaded prep, which, she said, had "all the stress, none of the release" of shooting a movie; on her first film, she'd recorded an angsty voice memo during the process, which she'd saved to remind herself that she'd got through it before. Now she was happy to be immersed in the more playful, physical part of her job, shaping performances. She and the actors had already spent a week bonding, analyzing the characters, and sharing intimate stories about their lives; she and Adams had built warm, trusting relationships with the twins. Heller was particularly pleased that she'd nailed some difficult scenes in a nearby park, including one in which Mother loses Son after he chases some dogs; when the twin playing Son had trouble sitting still, she fixed the problem by telling him to count down for a game of hide-and-seek.

Even so, the long hours were an adjustment. Like Mother, Heller had spent her daughter's infancy at home; now she left every morning before Zadie woke up. The toddler had been regressing a bit to babyish habits, Heller told me—and, to make the situation more bizarre, Zadie sometimes arrived on set to find the twins sitting on her mom's lap. "I felt like I was cheating," Heller told me, with a smile. The conversation was a typical one for Heller, who spoke about her children warmly, often, in detail, and on purpose. She didn't want to make being a working mother look easy, she said; she viewed this transparency as a way of advocating for other female directors. In recent years, she'd become a proponent for "French hours" on American sets—a more humane schedule that skipped a long lunch break, allowing parents to get home before bedtime.

Zadie was still an infant when, in 2021, Amy Adams and executives at the production company Annapurna sent Heller a copy of the "Nightbitch" novel, wondering if she saw a movie in it. Heller and her family were then living in an isolated farmhouse in rural Connecticut, where they had retreated, a year earlier, when Heller was three months pregnant with Zadie. Initially, they formed a pandemic pod with friends, splitting the child care, but by the time she began writing the "Nightbitch" screenplay she was single-parenting two children for the first time, with Jorma away for weeks at a stretch, producing a television spinoff of his comedy film "MacGruber." She wrote her script in a fugue state while Zadie napped, tapping out pages in two-hour chunks and propping Wylie, who was six, in front of the television—feeling guilty about it, then folding the guilt into her work. Old memories swam up from the past, like the time Heller got food poisoning and vomited for hours, then wound up flat on her back in the bathroom, utterly drained—only to have her son toddle in and happily begin nursing. She hoped that other people would also find those kinds of stories funny: the slapstick of tending a newborn, or guarding an active toddler and feeling at once exhausted and hyper-alert, "as if you were on suicide watch." There were so many bewildering, deeply physical experiences that parents forgot about, or maybe repressed, just a few years later.

Heller made some changes to Yoder's novel right away. The protagonist's mother, a Mennonite woman, would now be dead, showing up only in posthumous flashbacks. The cat still died, but in a far less grisly way: "There's no coming back from that," Heller said—she knew she'd lose the audience. Smaller moments shifted, too. In the novel, Mother played "doggies" with her son as a way of encouraging him to sleep on his own, and gave him a wire crate to sleep in; in Heller's script, the kid slept in a dog bed—in the Trump era, Heller told me, the wire crate felt too much like "kids in cages." To Heller, "Nightbitch" was about a woman questioning whether motherhood was worth it, and for her it had been. As a result, there was a warmer, more communal tone to her adaptation. Yoder's novel landed on satire, with neighborhood women hawking healing herbs in a multilevel-marketing scheme; in Heller's version, Mother warms up to the uncool moms that she initially rolls her eyes at during a Book Babies event at the library, recognizing them as her "pack."

Heller's biggest change was to focus the story on what interested her the most: a marriage in trouble, upended when a modern couple slips into retro roles. One day, she wrote a showdown in which Husband accuses Mother of having changed: she is no longer the freewheeling, curious woman he married—the one who challenged him, who was politically informed and adventurous, who didn't get mad about little things. "What happened to my wife?" he asks, in frustration. Mother shoots back, "She died in childbirth."

The exchange felt shocking and right—a bit taboo. Heller passed it on to a mom friend, who urged her to keep going. When Taccone came home and read excerpts, he sometimes felt hurt. "He'd be, like, 'Wow, O.K.—this is a little closer to home than I thought we were going,' " Heller told me.

The "Nightbitch" crew finished setting up the next scene, arranging pots of finger paint and taping butcher paper to the floor. In this sequence, Mother has decided to follow her husband's advice by planning an Art Day. But the idea falls apart. Her son goes wild, smearing paint all over the floor and the walls—and then the cat sprints through the paint. When Mother chases it, she slips, ending up on her back, the way Heller had when she got food poisoning. While the cameras rolled, Adams would first encourage Arleigh Snowden to finger-paint; then he'd make a "big mess"; finally, he'd squirt paint on the kitchen island and run out of the room. A three-year-old was too young to learn lines or take conventional direction, so Heller was planning to use gentle, guided make-believe that would keep the scene feeling fun, like a game.

When the boy arrived, the crew chanted his name: "Arleigh! Arleigh!" He smiled shyly and scooted onto the kitchen floor, to sit near Movie Mama. Heller crouched nearby, beaming. "We're going to make a big, big mess," she told him excitedly. Then she explained the game: Adams would tell him to paint on the butcher paper, but he shouldn't listen; instead, he should get the paint everywhere. "Movie Mama's gonna say, 'Oh, no!,' but it's just a joke."

Once filming began, it became clear that it wasn't going to be simple to get the sweet, giggly Arleigh to make a big mess: the boy had been cast, in part, because he was so easygoing. From the sidelines, Heller shouted instructions—"Big mess! Big mess! Take the yellow bottle and squirt it!"—as Adams yelled for him to stop. Arleigh, a bit warily, squirted the bottle. It was easier when Adams urged him to paint on the paper: at one point, after he made a cute picture of a house, she asked him, "Do you live in this house with me?" Arleigh replied, adorably and sincerely, "No, I work here."

The crew cracked up, but it was important to stay on schedule. Ultimately, Heller got the footage that she needed: Arleigh gingerly stuck his bare heels in the paint, then on the paper; he dabbed some on Adams's nose; he hugged Adams, messing up her shirt.

Once Arleigh left the set, the crew filmed the final sequence, including the fall, which was done by a stuntwoman. Afterward, Adams knelt on the floor of the kitchen, swirling a dirty rag in circles, muttering miserably, "Happiness is a choice" and "What's up with that duck?," the nonsense lyric of a sing-along at Book Babies. Heller told Adams to imagine these strange words bubbling up inside her, as if she didn't even realize that she was saying them out loud. Adams sobbed, "What's up with that duck?," then laughed, then sobbed again—and then, out of nowhere, she slammed her hand against the kitchen island, smearing it with green paint, making an even bigger mess. Everyone in the room jumped.

Heller was a classic theatre kid, an extrovert whose talents first blossomed in the warm terrarium of Alameda, California, the Oakland suburb where she grew up. In her family's comfortably messy Queen Anne Victorian, every day was Art Day: her mother, Annie, a sweet art teacher with Mayflower roots, turned their yard into a fairy garden, making a footpath by laying ceramic tiles with insect designs; her father, Steven, a sardonic Jewish chiropractor from Brooklyn, was a woodworker. Heller's brother, Nate, made music; her sister, Emily, became a comedy writer. But it was Heller, the oldest child, who was the family striver, a go-getter with an entrepreneurial streak. She formed a joke band called the Cactus Cows, handcrafting their merch; once, she rigged up her bedroom with a "Pee-wee's Playhouse"-style system of pulleys. At eight, she got cast in the Alameda Children's Musical Theatre, a professional troupe that staged children's classics such as "Winnie-the-Pooh." At nine, she got a role in a TV special about alcoholism. "I thought, This will completely turn her off," her father told me, of watching his daughter repeat her lines again and again. "And she comes running over and goes, 'Dad, I like it. I feel like I'm floating on air!' She loved the attention, being in front of the camera."

By the time Heller was in high school, Alameda, despite its charms, had begun to feel stifling to her. She was thrilled to be accepted by the tiny, rigorous theatre program at U.C.L.A., which taught Molière and the Meisner technique, rather than musicals. It was a high-pressure environment—you had to audition even to get into classes—but Heller thrived on the competition, winning Shakespearean leads and honing her craft. In her junior year, she fell in love with Taccone, another actor in the program.

During Heller and Taccone's early years, their creative lives happily ran on parallel tracks. Both were the children of artsy, indulgent families with ties to the Bay Area: Taccone's father was the artistic director of the Eureka Theatre, the celebrated venue that commissioned "Angels in America." Together, they strategized about ways to break into an intimidating industry, with Heller booking jobs in regional theatres but mostly waiting tables at L.A.'s vegan mainstay Real Food Daily, slinging seitan to Alicia Silverstone and Moby. When Heller and Taccone bought a condo in Koreatown, they secured a dodgy loan despite the fact that the bulk of Taccone's income that year came from unemployment and from two insurance payouts for car accidents.

Then, in a flash, Taccone's career took off. In 2001, he formed the comedy troupe the Lonely Island with his junior-high-school buddies Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaffer, posting rap parodies and comedy shorts on the Internet years before YouTube existed. In 2005, Taccone was hired to write for "Saturday Night Live." The couple jumped coasts, renting a place on the Upper West Side. It was a huge opportunity—and a shock to their relationship. Taccone, who had vomited twice before his first meeting with "S.N.L." 's Lorne Michaels, was working non-stop, terrified that he'd get fired. He was also suddenly a success in the comedy world, scoring viral hits with videos such as "Lazy Sunday" and "Dick in a Box," and partying with celebrities including Natalie Portman.

Heller, meanwhile, was auditioning to play dead rape victims on TV police procedurals. After her triumphs at U.C.L.A., going on auditions felt like walking into a fog of misogyny—in TV and film, especially, Heller, with her half-Jewish background and wavy hair, was deemed "too ethnic," insufficiently hot. One day, in the craft-services area on the "Nightbitch" set, we spoke about the grind of waitressing, and she riffed off another Maria Bamford routine by doing a quicksilver impression of the world's worst customer demanding a bowl of boiling water with ice. "Boiling, boiling," Heller cooed. "But I don't want the ice to get all tiiiiny."

In 2006, not long before her and Taccone's wedding, Heller flipped open a graphic novel that her sister, Emily, had given her for Christmas: Phoebe Gloeckner's "Diary of a Teenage Girl." The book, inspired by Gloeckner's adolescence in the hedonistic wilderness of San Francisco in the nineteen-seventies, is narrated in the irresistible voice of Minnie, a fifteen-year-old who loses her virginity to her mother's sad-sack boyfriend, Monroe. The story hit Heller like a fever: here, at last, was a nonjudgmental portrait of the artist as a teen girl, radical in its embrace of turbulent experience. Minnie was also exactly the kind of complex female role that Heller, who'd had her own wild years, was dying to play—and, in Hollywood, stories about teen-agers making messy mistakes, sexually and otherwise, were reserved mostly for boys.

For eight years, Heller fought to adapt "Diary," initially staging it for the theatre, playing Minnie Off Off Broadway. After she aged out of the role, she wrote and directed an independent movie based on the material, casting Bel Powley as Minnie. With no background in the film industry, Heller worked new muscles, hustling for financing and pushing back on every no. When Gloeckner turned down Heller's request for the rights to the book, she wrote long, pleading letters, then flew to the cartoonist's home, in Michigan, and befriended her, eventually securing a yes. She persuaded Kristen Wiig, whom she knew through "Saturday Night Live," to play Minnie's mother in the movie. After failing to get her script into the hands of Alexander Skarsgård, whom she wanted to play Monroe, she reached him by texting the comedian Jack McBrayer, who'd described himself as a friend of Skarsgård's in a magazine that she'd read. She wrote and rewrote the material, ultimately completing ninety-nine drafts.

In 2012, Heller got a major break, scoring a slot in the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, with classmates who included Ryan Coogler and Chloé Zhao. Heller was then picked for the Directors Lab, which let her shoot a few scenes from her "Diary" script. She learned to incorporate (and ignore) notes; she found mentors, including Scott Frank, the screenwriter of "Get Shorty" and "Out of Sight," who became a close friend. Ultimately, she raised a tiny budget—a million dollars—to film "Diary," cutting expenses to the bone. Her sister-in-law designed the costumes. In 2015, Heller's bet paid off, with "Diary" selling to Sony Pictures Classics in a triumphant late-night auction at Sundance. The movie won Best First Feature at the Independent Spirit Awards, launching her new career.

For nearly a decade, though, Heller's vision for "Diary" had often felt as fragile as a dream—one that would surely dissolve, like the TV pilots that Heller had sold with a writing partner or the acting roles that she auditioned for. "Jorma was having this totally different experience of the world," she said. "And he would, without meaning to, disparage things that I was doing. As not real. Or as not valid." The couple long ago worked through these issues in therapy; Taccone has become Heller's biggest supporter. But she hasn't forgotten those years of feeling overlooked—talked down to by strangers at dinner parties, or pitied as a failed actress. Many women in her position would have accepted the one role on offer, that of "comedy widow"—the nickname that another "Saturday Night Live" writer's wife used for herself—or had children, then used them as an excuse to give up. But Heller was too hungry. "That's the truth of it!" she told me. "We both were ambitious. So there was a period where my career hadn't caught up to my ambition, you know? And I was aching. There was something in me that wanted to come out."

A decade later, Heller poured those old resentments into her draft of "Nightbitch," which, at its heart, is the story of an artist who is terrified that she'll never make art again. "Diary" and "Nightbitch" sometimes struck the director as bookends, each one a story about a woman whose cravings make her feel like a monster. But whereas Minnie, her body flooded by adolescent hormones, feels grotesquely visible, Mother feels grotesquely invisible—her needs subsumed by those of her child. Heller had timed her own first pregnancy carefully: "Diary" wound up premièring just five weeks after she gave birth to Wylie; she was pumping breast milk while a makeup artist brushed glitter on her eyelids in the Sundance greenroom just before her big début.

Heller said, "My husband got really upset if I made jokes about, like, 'These are my two babies, coming into the world at the same time!' He was, like, 'O.K., one's the human—let's keep this separate.' But, you know, for me, they were really tied." Her "best and bravest" work had emerged just as she became a mother. "Somehow, the really satisfying stuff has flooded right up against the babies."

Heller and Taccone had always known what having kids could do to a marriage. A video that they'd sent out as a wedding invitation played off that cliché: a "meet-cute" rom-com parody was followed by a sly kicker, a title card that read "Six months later," and then by a shot of Heller pregnant and chain-smoking as Taccone watched Nascar on the sofa with his hands down his pants. After Wylie was born, the couple agreed to alternate projects, so that one parent could always be at home. During the "Nightbitch" shoot, they moved into the rental house of a famous friend, in the upscale Toluca Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. When I stopped by for a weekend visit, before Halloween, 2022, their front gate was festooned with construction-paper bats and pumpkins.

The family was gathered in the kitchen, making more decorations. As Zadie struggled to use baby scissors, Heller guided her hand. Easing her daughter around curves, she said, "It's really sharp! Your hand goes there and your thumb goes there. . . . Now open. Yeah! Like that."

"Nice job," Taccone said. Zadie let out happy peeps.

Taccone, an impish figure in a soft gray T-shirt, glued googly eyes onto a paper bat. As we snacked on toffee candies, he described the moment he met Heller, in 1999, on the first day of her junior year. Taccone, who was two years older, had just returned from studying in London; he was dating someone else. But the moment he caught sight of Heller, on a bench with other U.C.L.A. theatre students, with her thick blond hair streaming halfway down her back and an air of sparkling intensity, he was a goner.

Heller, laughing, said that her hair had had a Mormon vibe. "I looked like a polygamist," she said.

"Well, you also had super-short shorts," Taccone said. "It was a cute look. I found it very captivating."

A few days later, Taccone was walking around the parking lot of a Vons supermarket, preparing for the audition that would get him into that semester's classes. He was sobbing openly while reading the climactic monologue from "Our Town"—"Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?"—when he suddenly heard a car horn. It was Heller. She was planning to perform the same monologue, and earlier that day she had gone to the U.C.L.A. library, only to find that the play had just been checked out––apparently, she was now realizing, by him. It felt like Kismet. The two got serious quickly. A year later, they flew to Hawaii to visit his godmother. "We almost broke up there," Heller added, across the table. "Yeah, I don't remember that!" Taccone said, deadpan. "I remember it very fondly."

Cleo, the cat, curled around our legs under the table. They'd adopted her their first year in New York, after they spotted her as a kitten, shivering in a snowdrift, as they stumbled home from an "S.N.L." after-party. That whole period, Taccone said, felt like a blur, "just me focus the entire time." He added, "And now we go to the Oscars!" In the years since "S.N.L.," he had helped make several Lonely Island-ish comedies—among them the hilarious "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping," which he co-wrote, co-directed, and starred in. He'd played the asshole artist Booth Jonathan on HBO's "Girls" and, more recently, Pee-wee Herman in a "Weird Al" Yankovic bio-pic. He'd also written a children's book called "Little Fox and the Wild Imagination," doing the audiobook with Wylie. He thought of the couple's professional lives as fundamentally different projects: he made movies; Heller directed films.

"It's hard to talk while the kids are around," Heller said, with a glance at Wylie, who was spinning in a leather chair, shooting me skeptical glances, his long, tangled hair covering his face. Their son wasn't feeling all that enthusiastic about his parents' demanding jobs lately, Heller told me—it had been a big transition to go from the Montessorian peace of Connecticut, a place where cows wandered up to the living-room window, to Brooklyn and L.A. A few nights earlier, Wylie had asked her, "Why would you possibly make a movie when your child is seven? That's the worst age to make a movie. All the other movies you've made, I was fine!"

At the kitchen table, Taccone asked Wylie if he wanted to weigh in with his own opinions—and then, seeing his son's expression, added, "No, you don't want to. O.K., fine. That's also your right." In response, Wylie let out a long wolf's howl.

Two years later, I spoke to Taccone while he was on the set of an action-horror movie in Finland, and he was able to speak more directly. When I asked about his early years with Heller in New York, he got choked up, describing his own fatigue and anxiety, and how quickly he'd fallen under the spell of a glamorous job. "It's the greatest failing I had in our relationship, that I didn't really believe in her," he said, bluntly.

The couple had been together for their entire adult lives; their marriage had changed, and been challenged, a few times—when they became parents, and when Heller had a cancer scare, getting half her thyroid removed, after making "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" They'd stood by each other. Still, he winced when he remembered the flash of surprise he'd felt when she got accepted at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, a mark of prestige that helped him see her the way others saw her.

During our phone conversation, Taccone praised "Nightbitch" as a brave work of art, specifically because it explored something that was ordinary but hard to talk about—a good marriage that had real problems. There was a moment that he'd specifically asked Heller to put in the film: after Husband apologizes to Mother, he also tells her that he's proud of her. Taccone groaned as we spoke about the scene, because he knew how some people might view it. He said, "Like, it smacks of paternalism or condescension—but it's not, in our relationship! I'm really fucking proud! I'm, like, astonishingly, overwhelmingly proud of what she's accomplished and who she is. She's a really special artist who's doing something challenging."

It was particularly brave, he added, to show that kind of apology "now, in this day and age," when earnest emotion, especially from men, was so easy to dismiss as "cringe": "It's so easy to shit on everything, to get defensive, but anybody who's in a real relationship knows the pain that it causes, the ups and downs . . . and, like, looking at your partner, trying to see that hurt, trying to recognize it—"

He laughed, pulling himself back together: "Thank you for the free therapy session."

After "Diary," Heller got offers mostly for teen films. She didn't want to be pigeonholed; she also didn't want to waste time. She'd been warned that it took women eight years on average to direct a second movie. And whereas men were handed the keys to a blockbuster after a single indie breakthrough, this rarely happened for women. The ground was even shakier for mothers, who often disappeared. Shortly after "Diary" was released, a woman executive, unaware that Heller had had a baby, had told her, "I always want to work with female directors, but they all have kids." That executive was now a mother herself. "I keep my mouth shut," Heller said. "But I'm always tempted to be, like, 'Do you remember that meeting?' "

Determined not to get sidelined, Heller forged ahead: she filmed an episode of "Transparent," which secured her membership in the Directors Guild. Then, in quick succession, she directed "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" and "Beautiful Day"—each a bio-pic, each already in process when she signed up, the rollout for one movie overlapping with preproduction on the next. She even managed to slip in an acting gig: in the two months between the festival première and the theatrical release of "Beautiful Day," she flew to Berlin to play a chess prodigy's adoptive mother in "The Queen's Gambit," a Netflix show written and directed by her Sundance mentor Scott Frank. It was a surprise blockbuster. In her first acting role in a decade, she played a very Hellerian character: a smart, intense woman thrumming with untapped potential. In 2020, she founded Defiant by Nature, a production company whose first release was a filmed version of the Heidi Schreck play "What the Constitution Means to Me," directed by Heller, which streamed on Amazon.

Early in her directorial career, Heller, with her girlish look, had been sensitive about not being viewed as an authority figure. She hid her pregnancy during postproduction on "Diary." (In retrospect, she told me, this was an overreaction. When her crew and producers—many of them parents—learned that she was having a baby, they were supportive.) She rarely mentioned her history as an actress. And although Heller's friends call her Mari—it rhymes with "sorry"—she used Marielle as her professional name, because it sounded grander. Over time, such strategies felt less necessary. She'd established herself, among critics, as someone with a distinct sensibility. She was an empathetic portraitist but not a sentimentalist; she was a socially aware artist but not a polemicist. Heller specialized in alienated outsiders who were easily misunderstood. In the hands of a less humane director, the ornery Lee Israel or the needy, mercurial Minnie might have come across merely as rude or perverted.

Along the way, Heller's unusual path to becoming a director began to feel like an advantage. "I didn't go to film school—I can't talk about Cassavetes and go into, like, some deep film dive," she said. "And then I started to realize that a lot of directors are scared of actors." She didn't know much about camera lenses, but she felt at ease with performers, who didn't live in their heads. She also wasn't intimidated by big stars—she persuaded Tom Hanks to do "Beautiful Day," a project that he'd already turned down, after she chatted him up at a birthday barbecue for his grandchild.

Three months after the "Nightbitch" shoot finished, Heller was back in New York, in an editing bay in lower Manhattan. Pinned to the wall were index cards, grouped in three acts. Anne McCabe, who had edited Heller's previous two films, told me, "Heller does a lot of reordering. Every job." The two women had an easy rapport, speaking in shorthand as they tweaked a Book Babies scene with wailing toddlers. Heller held up her iPhone: she had some fresh sobs to add to the audio mix, taken from a video of a friend's child.

"That sounds more like a toddler," McCabe said, approvingly.

"Less like an infant," Heller agreed.

In about six weeks, Heller needed to present Annapurna with her preliminary cut. She'd been thinking about how to grab viewers, to help them empathize with Mother—you had just five minutes to win over an audience, she told me. When she was editing "Can You Ever Forgive Me?," she and McCabe had pinpointed a scene to help viewers feel sympathy for Lee Israel's isolation: a shot of her in her apartment, reciting dialogue from "The Little Foxes" as it airs on TV, then sweetly offering shrimp to her cat. For "Nightbitch," Heller had decided to open the film with a darkly comic loop of sizzling hash browns and bedtime reading—a rapid-cut, percussive montage that would drop viewers straight into the monotony of Mother's life before they had even heard her voice.

Heller scrolled through the latest edit of the film, which now included dreamlike moments of Mother transmogrifying into a dog—an elegant red husky that Heller had cast for its resemblance to Adams. There were charming scenes of Adams with one or the other of the Snowden twins, the mother-son chemistry as palpable as the flirting in a rom-com. There was a dynamic interaction in a supermarket, in which Mother delivered a wild fantasy oration in response to a former colleague meeting her baby and asking, "Do you just love getting to be home with him all the time?" The body horror was muted, with key exceptions, particularly a scene in which Mother, alone in her bathroom, poked curiously at an abscess on her tailbone, releasing a flood of pus—and revealing a stringy dog tail. Even then, the kicker wasn't the gross-out: Adams's funny response—a muted "Huh!"—was not so different from that of a menopausal woman spotting a whisker on her chin.

The pacing still worried Heller, and she wavered over whether she'd landed on the right structure. "I like it now—a few days ago, I hated it," she said, with a tired smile, pulling her sweater down over her hands. "My friends have been reminding me that I always feel this way."

Among the people she'd screened scenes for was Ryan Coogler. During the 2012 Sundance Screenwriters Lab, they had bonded over their Bay Area childhoods, and they'd kept in touch as their careers had progressed and they had become parents. Coogler told me that she'd impressed him straightaway as "fucking smart," with an artistry that was anchored by optimism. Not long after they met, Heller visited the set of Coogler's début film, "Fruitvale Station" (2013), on a day when he'd fallen behind schedule and felt as though everything was coming apart. "I remember her face, man, because I was down in the dumps," Coogler said. "She was just smiling. She had the biggest grin, like, 'This is just exhilarating—you're doing it.' "

Jessie Nelson, the director of "I Am Sam" (2001) and a co-writer on "Stepmom" (1998), was, like Scott Frank, one of Heller's Sundance mentors. She remembered Heller scribbling intensely in her notebook, eager to sharpen "Diary." "Some of our fellows are more visualists—everybody has different fastballs," she told me. "But Mari kind of had both." Nelson, a former theatre actress, began her Hollywood career in the nineties, when just nine per cent of the two hundred and fifty most popular films had female directors; at some Directors Guild meetings, she and Nora Ephron were the only women in the room. The corridors of the big studios were full of trapdoors. Nelson recalled, "The head of Sony once said to me, 'You rule with a feather,' and at the time I thought, I guess that's a compliment—but, no, it was really telling me, 'You'd better never be a bitch.' "

As the decades passed, Nelson watched many of her peers pull back after they had kids. She felt lucky that she was also a writer, able to work from home while her children were small. "There's a saying that working mothers feel guilt and nonworking mothers feel remorse," she told me. Ephron had summed up the conflict with a trenchant zinger: Your children would rather have you vomiting in the next room than filming on a set. But mothers who dropped their art also struggled, Nelson said: "They lost themselves, they went into depressions." She admired Heller for not downplaying these frictions, which more rarely affected men—it was no good to have women join their industry naïvely, only to be shocked by how hard it was. In a business that glamorized the idea of the icy auteur, implicitly male, who imposed his will on the world no matter what it cost the people around him, she saw Heller as a kindred spirit: "It's all about learning to have your sensitivity be your superpower."

There was another set of women who knew Heller intimately, a circle of friends who, for decades, had met once a month for drinks—Heller's own pack. These days, they all had young kids, and a few were stay-at-home moms. They described Heller to me as a generous friend, but also a leader—"an elder-sister archetype," as her friend Julie put it, who was driven by a sense of justice. Julie, a childhood friend who played in the Cactus Cows, remembered Heller once opening a fortune cookie that read, "You're meant to help others," adding, "She laughed and said, 'Like I don't already feel like I'm responsible for all womankind!' "

That was the complexity of "Nightbitch": it was a parable about motherhood, meant to reflect many women's lives, but the people who knew Heller best could see the self-portrait tucked inside. As Heller edited one scene, she told me, "My hair used to look exactly like Amy's." She added that Adams would sometimes joke, on set, "I'm just playing you." The script was full of Easter eggs about Heller's life. "Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site," which Mother reads to Son, was the book that Heller read to Wylie when he was a sleepless toddler. "Weird Al" Yankovic's wackadoodle song "Dare to Be Stupid," which plays over the film's mother-son doggie games, is a Heller-family deep cut: it was on the soundtrack of the 1986 animated film "The Transformers," Wylie's favorite movie, and in the depths of the pandemic he and Heller had ridden around Connecticut screaming along to the lyrics. She had threaded her early marital struggles into the film, as well as a happy ending, the kind that is possible only when both partners decide they want more.

Before Heller had children, when she was struggling to get "Diary" made, she had a nightmare that she was pregnant with a two-and-a-half-year-old but couldn't give birth. "It was not a subtle dream—in fact, it made me think my subconscious was sort of lazy," she said, dryly.

A decade later, "Nightbitch," too, got delayed: its release was bumped back a year by the Screen Actors Guild strike, which would have made it impossible for Adams to appear on the festival circuit. When Heller wrote the screenplay, she wondered whether, after the pandemic, American viewers might feel more sympathy for a new mother's isolation, her feelings of instability and exhaustion—we were all wearing soft pants in 2021. Instead, "Nightbitch" was débuting in the hard-pants, post-Dobbs era, in an election year. J. D. Vance, the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, sneered at "childless cat ladies" and venerated stay-at-home moms. Online, there was a vogue for "trad wives," influencers like Ballerina Farm, who'd exchanged her toe shoes for an egg apron. A variety of "hetero-pessimist" books—most recently, Miranda July's mischievous novel "All Fours"—portrayed marriage and motherhood as a trap for female artists. Two nights before "Nightbitch" was scheduled to début, at the Toronto International Film Festival, a very different feminist body-horror film had the opening "midnight madness" slot: "The Substance," a bravura camp fable about vanity, directed by the French auteur Coralie Fargeat, that was full of winking cinema-history references. In that film, Demi Moore reproduces, but only a younger, hotter version of herself, after which she ages into a monstrous crone.

In September, Heller flew to Toronto for the "Nightbitch" première. She had booked Airbnbs for her family, including her parents and siblings. By now, she'd had time to absorb those rough early screenings; she was ready to make the case for her film. She'd also had a chance to adjust her final edit. In place of the sizzling hash browns, "Nightbitch" now opened with the more inviting supermarket sequence, in which Adams, puffy-eyed and endearingly candid, speaks into the camera about her fears of being a mother: "I am deeply afraid that I am never going to be smart, or happy, or thin, ever again." In the background, Heller herself makes a cameo—she's just another harried mom in a jean jacket, pushing a shopping cart while struggling to keep Zadie and Wylie from pulling cookie boxes off a shelf.

That scene showed up in the movie's trailer, which had been released online, to the dismay of many horror fans, who, given the film's edgy title and source material, were hoping for something harsher, more like "The Substance." Lying in bed in Toronto, Heller had scrolled through responses on her iPad, bemused. "People were kind of freaking out a little bit," she told me. "I was, like, People think this is going to be cool. This movie's not cool! It's dorky, it's human, it's vulnerable. It's not meant to be cool." Despite its flashes of rage, it was a hetero-optimist movie in a hetero-pessimist age.

We were sitting in her Airbnb, along with her P.R. person and a makeup artist, who was helping to provide "glam." The director sat by the window, her head tilted back, her newly vanilla-blond hair framed by the Toronto skyline. She was hoping for a goth look, she said—a smoky eye to match the pin-striped suit she'd wear to the day's many promotional events, which included a dinner for female directors and the launch of an Oscar campaign for Adams. In the evening, Heller would change into a navy-blue satin number with a plunging neckline, a look that would please Zadie, who kept begging her mother to wear more dresses.

Like prep, this wasn't Heller's favorite part of filmmaking, but she was game. That week, her worst fears wouldn't come to pass: instead of inspiring hatred, "Nightbitch" got wildly mixed reviews. There were raves praising Heller's cinematic daring, with one critic calling the movie "piercingly honest, remarkably sardonic, and breathtakingly brave in the way it lays bare some of women's deepest struggles and truths." There were pans that derided it as a "defanged" version of the source material, insufficiently weird and dark. Many reviews suggested a little of both: in the Times, Manohla Dargis wrote that Mother's feminist voice-overs didn't land, but that Adams's rich, vulnerable performance made the film worth it. This divided reception felt like its own kind of success: "Nightbitch" would generate debate, rather than slip through the cracks.

In the past two months, Heller had made some adjustments to her life. One of them was replacing her iPhone with a flip phone. (She kept her iPad, which was too clunky to tempt her at the dinner table.) The phone had been controlling her, she told me. She didn't want to be a hypocrite when her kids asked for their own phones. And there was something to be said for shielding yourself, she'd begun to believe—some value in retreating to a protected creative space, an Alameda of the mind, in a culture that was shifting closer to the abyss. It was a sensitivity that she shared with her son, who didn't like "jolts." To her surprise, the same wasn't true of her daughter: Zadie, now three, had been mesmerized by a childbirth scene from "Nightbitch," which her mother had been editing at home. Heller told me, "She was sitting on my lap, and she kept saying, 'Can I see that again?' And I was, like, 'What part?' And she was, like, 'The owie.' And I was, like, 'With the blood?' And she was, like, 'The owie part.' " Heller laughed out loud, looking a bit alarmed. "And I was, like, 'What's wrong with you?' And part of me was, like, 'Do you remember?' "

Then something happened that occurred frequently while I was reporting this piece: the women in the room all fell into a loose, funny, graphic conversation about childbirth and aging, trading off-the-record details about our bodies, hormones, stitches, night sweats, and perimenopause. We laughed about the crazy mesh underwear all new mothers stole when they left the hospital, or the way your nipples darkened (so that the baby could see them, Heller explained). There was a long discussion about blood clots. "My best friend said, 'Has anyone warned you? That period you haven't had for a while? It's all going to come out—and it lasts for weeks,' " Heller said, laughing.

Afterward, there was a long pause in the room.

"That feels like heaven," Heller said, as the makeup artist gently touched her face, brushing glitter below her brows.

Heller often spoke about how much she hated movies that made art look easy—no-sweat, effortless genius. The same was true, for her, of portrayals of motherhood. In "Nightbitch," she had tried to make a movie that treated domestic life not as a trad-wife utopia or as a cynical hellscape but as an earthy experience that was unsettling but also richly meaningful, worthy of the same deep attention that Hollywood paid to sexier topics, such as crime or romance. If the film didn't speak to everyone, it didn't have to. Her project reminded me of a Sharon Olds poem, "The Language of the Brag," in which she ticks off the grittiest details of childbirth—"stool charcoal from the iron pills, huge breasts leaking colostrum"—and then compares them, provocatively, to the lyrical works of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg. The poem ends with a statement of purpose: "And I am putting my proud American boast / right here with the others."

Before the Toronto screening, the "Nightbitch" team gathered at Pink Sky, a swanky bistro with twinkly lighting. Heller sat at a curved banquette with her family, including her mother, Annie, who wore a colorful dress designed by her husband, Steven, who'd constructed both their outfits using a new sewing machine. When the couple met, in the seventies, at a bus stop for the Grey Rabbit, a counterculture alternative to Greyhound, she had been wearing purple pants caked in clay. Back then, Annie was a potter, with a degree from the California College of Arts and Crafts. Before she and Steven had kids, she'd told him that she could imagine herself as "a monk or a mom." Either way, she assumed, she'd keep throwing pots. "Of course, it doesn't turn out that way," she told me later, with a warm smile. After Annie had Nate, her second child, she found it "hard to make a pot, trim a pot, dry a pot, fire a pot, glaze a pot. That whole production. So I gave it up."

She was delighted that all three of her children were artists—and, as the years passed, she'd found ways to be creative, part time. But only recently had she been able to get back into what she described, reverently, as "the flow," after decades of raising children and then caring for her elderly mother. In retirement, Annie painted every day, from around 1 p.m. until sunset, mostly landscapes, many of them of Alameda, with titles like "Meadow Vista." She was proud that her daughter, a "compassionate, capable" mother, had been fierce enough to put her art at the center of her life, fighting to make space for what hadn't been seen.