I feel Pretty
Amy Sc hum er turns the body-swap movie – and the romcom – on its head in I Feel Pretty, a high-concept comedy aiming to flip conventions both on and off-screen. Total Film meets the star and film makers to talk self-confidence, internet backlashes and in
Mirror, mirror... Amy Schumer is the fairest of them all in a feelgood farce.
It’s so much more about herself than, ‘Oh good, a guy came and saved me,’” says Amy Schumer of the high concept behind her latest big-screen comedy. There can be few conceits that feel quite so 2018 as a self-love journey precipitated by a head injury sustained in a SoulCycle class, and set to a Rihanna soundtrack, but thoroughly modern is what I Feel Pretty is reaching for. Written by romcom script veterans Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein, who here make their directorial debut, this is their twist on ‘magic movies’ such as Big – and on the romcom genre as a whole. Schumer plays Renee, a thirtysomething with self-esteem issues. She constantly compares her looks to others, and dreams of a new job, but doesn’t have the chutzpah to do anything about it. Instead, she spends her days as an online minion in the basement office of Lily LeClair, an Estée Lauder-esque cosmetics company, and reads about the life of the woman who runs it, the granddaughter of its original founder, who occupies a Kardashian-level space in the celebrity hierarchy.
Then comes the wince-inducing SoulCycle accident, when a bang on the head knocks Renee unconscious and, when she comes around, the person she sees in the mirror is capable, confident and HOT. But unlike the movies to which this body-swap moment pays homage, when Renee comes around she doesn’t actually look any different. She just thinks she does.
It was the scene in which Renee ‘reveals’ her stunning new self to her friends that sold Amy Schumer. “I was laughing just imagining it,” says the Trainwreck star on the phone from New York, as her dog Tati yaps in the background. “That exorbitant amount of confidence has always made me laugh, so I was really into it.”
“It’s always been our desire to make a movie about one person and their journey, as opposed to tying the whole thing up in finding a guy or love,” says Silverstein, who met Kohn at film school 20 years ago. The two are best known for romantic comedies including Never Been Kissed, He’s Just Not That Into You and How To Be Single. “We’ve always tried to push against romcom conventions in the stuff we write, but sometimes that gets moved out in the process of making a studio movie and ends up being a normal romcom.”
As for I Feel Pretty: “For us, this came from a funny idea. We loved ’80s movies like Big, so we thought, wouldn’t this be funny if you took one of those movies and made it without the actual concept and made it all in someone’s mind?”
And while a love story arc does feature, it’s secondary to Renee’s mission to love herself, her relationship with her friends, and those friends in turn dealing with their own confidence. But when the trailer was first released, that message didn’t quite land, and it lit up the internet for the wrong reasons. The ‘joke’ seemed to be Schumer’s character having the audacity to live her life as though she was attractive.
“Let me just say that was the best backlash of all time,” laughs Schumer about the number of commenters pointing out that um, yeah, she is attractive. “I couldn’t really be mad about that. I did understand the backlash, though,” she adds, acknowledging that the message got mangled in the marketing. “It’s not a movie saying this ugly girl learns to love herself, it’s a movie saying this woman who struggles with self-esteem – like so many of us – found a way to love herself and realised it’s all about how she felt.”
The film does explore more than aesthetics: each character struggles with self-confidence. Third-generation makeup magnate Avery LeClair (Michelle Williams) feels undeserving of her inherited success and self-conscious about her girlish voice. “In someone else’s hands, that character could have been cartoony, but not with her,” says Kohn. “When you cast someone like Michelle, she approached it the same way she approached, like, Manchester By The Sea,” jokes Silverstein. “She was sending us clips of different accents and she would go in on a voice that feels like someone you know who is really smart but has this voice that gets in her way.”
Meanwhile, on first impression, it seems like a backwards step for Emily Ratajkowski: being cast as the pretty, together woman who appears in Renee’s life at pivotal moments, reminding her that physically they are opposites. Ratajkowski has made a point of stepping away from the ‘hot friend’ roles, she says, but “I decided to do it in this film because the point of the movie was to break down stereotypes. What I liked about her was that you had a specific perception of her from the second she walked into the movie and it was immediately shot down.”
BEAUTIFUL GIRL
Even Renee’s love interest – sweet, sensitive Ethan (Rory Scovel) – is dealing with his own insecurities. “Ethan is based on me and my own feelings of struggling against what people think masculinity is, how you don’t feel like ‘one of those guys’,” says Silverstein. “That’s his Achilles’ heel. He doesn’t feel like he fits in at work and he’s not necessarily fitting in to the mould of a traditional dude, so he’s the other side of the coin, too.”
When Schumer read the script, Renee’s character resonated. “I have felt like all sides of her,” she says. “I’ve had moments of feeling invisible, and I’ve had moments where I feel really great about myself. And those moments where I have too much confidence – moments where I’m like, ‘Am I maybe amazing? Am I the most beautiful girl?’ Then there will be a reminder of, ‘Hey, chill out,’ where I get cut down to size.”
Kohn and Silverstein weren’t daunted by both writing and directing. “We wrote and directed our first ever film together at film school, so, in a way,
‘I LOVE MEN, BUT WOMEN ARE MY THING. IT’S EMPOWERING WHEN THEY DO A GREAT JOB’ AMY SCHUMER
it’s coming back to what we originally partnered to do,” says Kohn. “Directing was a larger undertaking in terms of time and energy and managing of people but, because we wrote the script, it was not a difficult transition. It was a lot of fun, and satisfying to see through the things we came up with. As a writer, you don’t normally get that.”
Silverstein describes their process as a micro-macro relationship that has been honed over the course of their long writing partnership. “Marc is really good with shaping the story arcs and making sure that the highs get high enough and that we hit all those beats,” Kohn adds, “whereas I concentrate on the specifics of scenes and characters.”
Casting Schumer was “everything”, says Silverstein. “We painted ourselves into a tiny corner when we wrote it because there are not many people who can play the part the way she played it. And we wrote it as a super-small movie. We were not thinking that we would get someone like her anyway, because it felt not on our radar.”
Collaboration was also encouraged and cast members worked on the script with them before shooting began. “Amy also pitched a lot of jokes before we started filming,” says Silverstein. Schumer saw it as a bonus having the writers also direct. “It’s better to have writers around,” she says. “In the moment of filming, they’d be saying, ‘Well, we saw it like this,’ and I’d be saying, ‘I saw it like this,’ and we would either do both or all work together.”
For Ratajkowski, there was another bonus to having this particular duo on board. “It was really refreshing because I’ve never worked with a female director before,” she says. “It just adds a safe zone and a comfort that definitely you can have with a male director, but
I think there’s an understanding with women who are working together on a project that is supposed to be capturing an honest experience of one woman. Our understanding of the project was very clear from the get-go.”