FINDING SOLACE IN THE UNDEAD
Director Williams, daughter of the late comic, embraces a tale of grief with her feature debut, ‘Lisa Frankenstein’
Zelda Williams never intended a teenage zombie rom-com to be her feature filmmaking debut. For one thing, the project, “Lisa Frankenstein,” was a big concept to sell, a high-camp period piece set in the fuchsia-and-teal ’80s. There was grief, violence and a floofyhaired love interest who was — not to put too fine a point on it — not only mute but dead.
For another thing, the 34-yearold Williams — the only daughter of Robin Williams, the Oscar-winning comic superstar — worried that making her first big step out with a comedy would inevitably draw the wrong kind of attention.
“It’s the one thing I thought people are going to be particularly mean to me about,” she said.
But the script for “Lisa Frankenstein” came courtesy of Diablo Cody, who found one-liners — and an Oscar — in adolescent trauma with “Juno,” and who wrote the feminist teen horror flick “Jennifer’s Body,” lately hailed as a cult classic.
Some of the themes in “Lisa Frankenstein” resonated with Williams’ life, as a person who experienced shock waves of anguish after her father’s sudden death in 2014. Plus, the film came wrapped in a pastiche of references from ’80s and ’90s movies she loved, like “Heathers,” “Weird Science,” “Beetlejuice” and “Death Becomes Her.” Williams was sold on it immediately, and of all the projects she was considering, it was the first to get the green light.
So she tucked away her trepidation, drew up her storyboards and shot list, and showed up on location in New Orleans, where she promptly got COVID-19 and had to spend the first week directing from inside a van. That she still carried this all off impressed her cast and colleagues, who noted her ambition, preparation and resolve.
“I did not feel like a mentor of any kind,” said Cody, 45, who’s also a producer of the movie. “And in fact, I kind of felt like I was following her into this world.”
Cody is so attuned to mood that she includes specific song cues in her screenplays. But Williams’ ideas and eye for details, like giving the lead character a mane of curly, red hair — for extra comic oomph — surprised her.
“There’s so much of what she created that I had never even envisioned when I originally wrote the script,” Cody said.
The reviews and box-office returns for “Lisa Frankenstein,” which stars Kathryn Newton (“Big Little Lies”) as Lisa and “Riverdale” heartthrob Cole Sprouse as her corpse buddy, have been middling, although critics bewitched by its gothy-teen-girl empowerment have reacted warmly. “Consistently laugh-out-loud hilarious,” said The A.V. Club.
Sprouse, 31, who ran in similar young Hollywood circles as Williams and counts her as a friend, said they were aiming for the background nostalgia of a must-see sleepover movie.
“We wanted it to give that kind of warm, fuzzy feeling,” he said, “even though we’re chopping people’s hands off.”
Over breakfast in January at a cafe in California, Williams — who wore a leather bomber jacket that had belonged to her father — reflected on her path to filmmaking. The movie is set in 1989, the year she was born. Its Easter eggs are all cinematic references, not memes. In a world that’s “quite addicted to meta humor,” she said,
“to get to make something so purposefully earnest was so nice.” She acknowledged that the film’s brand of “earnest camp” would not be for everyone, but she hoped at least “that the weirdos who need it, find it.”
Williams grew up in San Francisco, the middle child of three; neither of her brothers are in the entertainment business. (Her mother, Marsha Garces Williams, is a philanthropist and producer.) Williams was a self-described nerdy kid, head of the high school tech committee, a dutiful student if not an academically inspired one. “I was up every night, writing,” she said, “and that was my form of rebellion.”
Visiting her dad’s sets, she knew by age 12 that she wanted to be involved in the industry. Her parents said she had to finish school first. “And even then, I don’t think they really wanted me to be a part of it,” she said. “But I think they started realizing they couldn’t prevent it.” At 17, she moved to Los Angeles, worked restaurant jobs and lived with roommates, quickly accruing small acting parts.
After the pandemic, she surfaced as a director, with music videos and shorts to her name.
The script for “Lisa Frankenstein” came to her via a friend she was helping through a dark period. After she was publicly eloquent on the subject of her father’s death by suicide (it later emerged that he had a form of dementia), people often reached out to her for support, she said. Her friend happened to be Cody’s boyfriend, although he sent Williams the script without mentioning who wrote it.
Cody had the germ of the idea, about a teenager and a corpse, for a while, and was spurred to complete it during the pandemic. “I just thought about how we live in a culture that wants so badly for us to move on from traumatic events,” she said. “What if this young woman had an opportunity to literally embrace grief by loving this dead man?”
For Williams, the idea that audiences might see echoes of her experience mourning her father was tricky. “I think I won’t ever be able to escape people assuming everything is about him, and I don’t know if they would have had that same position if he was alive,” she said.
But she understands. “You’re in a fantasy world where death is not permanent,” she said with a small smile. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”
In practice and onscreen, though, a lot of that fell away, as the filmmakers addressed more visceral decisions: How gory should the movie be? Originally it spewed enough for a hard R rating; they edited it down to a PG-13. (“We did some really beautiful, creative painting out of the excess blood,” Williams said.)
For Williams, making a movie in which no one worries whether grieving is palatable — a movie in which the reaction to death is aggressively, comically unpalatable — was cathartic. But, she said, “for me, at this point in my life, after this long, all work is cathartic.”
“I actually look at anything that I’m enjoying as catharsis,” she continued, “because I think a lot of life can be the space between things you’re enjoying.”
It was the “scariest thing I could have done, but glad that’s out of my way now. Now I should just approach everything else I’m not afraid of and see how that goes.”