Bottoms is a high school movie stuffed with all the great high school movie tropes. There are nerds and jocks, slow clappings, grand gestures on the football field, graffitied lockers and a sad montage that unfolds to the sound of Avril Lavigne’s Complicated. But its leads are PJ and Josie, the “ugly, untalented gays” who set up an after-school fight club with the sole aim of having sex with the cheerleaders. Girls punch each other in the face, teachers read porn magazines in class, everyone pretends to be “empowered” – and, somehow, it still manages to be a feelgood delight. Thrillingly, it may be the least earnest film I have seen in years.
Its director, 28-year-old Emma Seligman, is in London, explaining how a comedy about amoral, horny teen lesbians gets made. Not easily, and not quickly, it turns out. She and her co-writer Rachel Sennott – who plays PJ and who also starred in Seligman’s debut, Shiva Baby – started working on the idea six years ago. It was rejected by “every studio bar one that was semi-interested”, until Orion Pictures finally gave it the go-ahead. “We were certainly aware that we were not making something that was incredibly palatable, but Orion just got it,” Seligman says. “I felt pretty encouraged to just go for it. If you signed on to do this movie – whether you were financing it, or you were one of the actors, or you were doing the sound edit – you knew what you were getting in to.”
