Jill Soloway:<\/strong> Yeah, the damaged stripper clich\u00e9, the villainous sex worker, is a trope that\u2019s everywhere. If you see a prostitute on television, it\u2019s usually \u201cCSI,\u201d and it\u2019s because someone is taking a DNA sample from her ear. (laughs) You can\u2019t have a movie or TV show [where you] say sex workers are people too, but you can say semen was found in her whatever. (laughs) It\u2019s odd that it would so incredibly revolutionary to allow the sex worker to exist in this movie and to get out alive and not rescued. \u201cPretty Woman\u201d has that trope in it \u2014 that \u201cCaptain Save-a-Ho\u201d thing. And if you read an article about sex workers in any magazine, like in Mademoiselle or Vogue, it always ends with, \u201cAnd then I stopped being a stripper, and now I\u2019m happy.\u201d Here, I definitely knew that McKenna was still going to be a stripper \u2014 she\u2019s going to get out of this movie alive, not having murdered any children, not have driven a kid on a play date and accidentally gotten into an accident, but she will not exist in this movie to hold society\u2019s shame or darkness, and to get punished or to punish because she came into the house. I think Rachel actually ends up being the person who toward the end of the movie becomes her own antagonist. McKenna is a villain in that scene to some people when she\u2019s dancing with the guys, but it\u2019s also what we always knew was going to happen. Rachel, on the other hand, becomes a villain to the women in her community. Rachel holds the darkest parts of the movie, not McKenna. So it wasn\u2019t super-intentional that it would end up that way, but what was intentional was that you would never be sure who to root for.<\/p>\n ShockYa: Surely, in the drafts that the script went through, you had to have had a lot of people expecting and probably even wanting it to be a more telegraphed, conventional tale of a husband\u2019s infidelity.<\/strong><\/p>\n JS:<\/strong> That was another thing that multiple people told me. When I was looking for producers it was taking a slightly more traditional, Hollywood route, and a few producers were saying, \u201cOh, the husband needs to have sex with her \u2014 this needs to ruin the marriage, raise the stakes. If this isn\u2019t ruining the marriage then the story isn\u2019t everything that it could be.\u201d And I was like, \u201cIt doesn\u2019t ruin the marriage! I specifically chose that the marriage that it did ruin was one that we kind of knew was on the rocks anyway.<\/p>\n ShockYa: Coming from television, which affords longer character arcs, was that feedback the biggest challenge in making the transition to feature film writing \u2014 having those conversations with producers nudging it in a more overly commercial direction?<\/strong><\/p>\n JS:<\/strong> I have recently stopped seeing any distinction between film and television. I mean, when we were at Sundance and everybody had two-hour movies we were all wondering, \u201cHow did Jane Campion get a six-hour movie?\u201d Oh, it\u2019s \u201cTop of the Lake\u201d being shown all together. And now I look at something like \u201cOrange is the New Black,\u201d and that can be seen as a 10-hour movie. People are binge-watching television in a way that I think suggests that they want to have long relationships with their characters. And filmmakers who aren\u2019t making big-budget, commercial, blockbuster, worldwide movies are struggling with this feeling of feeling bad that their movie doesn\u2019t do well in theaters, when the truth is that 95 percent of people in this country prefer to consume (entertainment) content, even movies, through their television: Put the kids to sleep, watch a movie. Asking people to walk into a movie theater is sometimes asking them to spend $100 and hours of their time, and on your schedule. So I actually feel like there\u2019s a bit of a revolution happening right now in terms of content, where I don\u2019t really see a big difference between what movie and TV people want; I feel like audiences want content that is resonant and real and funny and deep. The people who are financing either movies or television are always going to have commercial concerns. I was reading this book in the John Cassavetes box set when I was shooting where he said that it\u2019s your job as the artist to understand that the people who are spending money on your art are going to have commercial concerns. It\u2019s part of your job to convince them to spend the money and stand up for the art; you\u2019re the only person who\u2019s going to do that. And that\u2019s true with movies or TV. I don\u2019t think the indie film world can be dead if there are other things that are indie film-branded and successful, like South by Southwest or Alamo Drafthouse or alternative music. I feel like people are always interested in something that feels like it came from the heart of an artist and speaks to something real.<\/p>\n
![\"Jill](\"http:\/\/www.shockya.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/Jill-Soloway-Afternoon-Delight.jpg\" "\\"Jill")
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