Director jumped into deep end of pool
LOS ANGELES Kay Cannon, a performer, screenwriter, producer and three-time Emmy nominee, had never directed anything before Blockers, an R-rated teen sex comedy.
She’d written and produced for 30 Rock and New Girl, written the scripts for the successful Pitch Perfect films and created the Netflix series Girlboss. But directing was not yet on her resume, and it came as a surprise when executives at Good Universe and Point Grey, the production companies behind the Neighbors films, hand-picked her to breathe some life into a stalled project about three teenage girls who decide to lose their virginity on prom night and the parents who try to stop them.
“I never had an issue being the head of a team, or a team captain or in charge or the boss,” Cannon, 43, said recently, but she still worried about her credentials. She hadn’t gone to film school, and wondered if she was even qualified enough to do it.
But she got over that and took on the challenge of directing a major studio comedy. She was hired, as she likes to say now, “off of potential.”
It helped of course that Universal Pictures chair Donna Langley and production president Peter Cramer knew Cannon already from the Pitch Perfect films.
“We knew that she had a strong point of view and we knew that she had some real experience in studio filmmaking,” Cramer said. “Kay was always an integral part of the filmmaking process beyond just being a writer. She wanted to be on set, she knew the actors, she knew how to talk to the actors, and she knew how to work with the studio ... At some point with directing you’ve got to just do it, you’ve got to jump into the deep end of the pool.”
And without Cannon, the film might never have been made. Cannon took the script, which had only been worked on by male writers and executives when she signed on, and infused it with a more modern, sex-positive and feminist spirit.
The teenage girls, she said, were at one point indistinguishable. Cannon turned them all into distinct characters, one of whom is even questioning her sexuality. Also the parents who go on this crazy mission to stop their daughters were originally all dads — now one is a mom.
The end result is a nuanced and modern look at growing up and parenting woven in a bawdy R-rated sex comedy with a fair amount of nudity and physical comedy.
The parents are played by Leslie Mann, Ike Barinholtz and John Cena, and the teenagers are Kathryn Newton, Gideon Adlon and Geraldine Viswanathan.
Reviews thus far have been strong (it’s currently at 91 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes) and the $21-million production had a buzz-stoking debut at the SXSW Film Festival.
In an industry where women directed only eight per cent of the top 100 grossing films of 2017, Universal, which also gave Elizabeth Banks her first feature directing job in Pitch Perfect 2, has long championed both female directors (Fifty Shades of Grey, Mamma Mia!) and female-led comedies from Bridesmaids to Trainwreck to Girls Trip.
“I love that Donna is in charge,” Cannon said. “There’s just something different. Representation matters and the fact that she is a woman and she’s at the helm and she’s Peter Cramer’s boss, I love that. She’s also ridiculously talented and tough and great at her job. It trickles down to everyone else.”