The Wrong Girls: Dylan Meyer’s Razor-Sharp Stoner Buddy Comedy of Female Friendship

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Written and directed by Dylan Meyer, The Wrong Girls is a sharp, witty, independent comedy that follows two charismatic, but misguided women navigating life, friendship, and the consequences of their own spectacularly life choices.

The Wrong Girls follows Frankie (Stewart) and Molly (Shawkat), two financially struggling roommates, who get by on minimal income and frequent marijuana use. Their mundane routine is disrupted when they’re mistakenly identified, setting off a chaotic chain of events. The duo inadvertently gain telepathic abilities after ingesting an experimental drug, pitting them against dangerous rivals pursuing the same substance. The film promises a blend of absurdist humor, friendship dynamics, and the kind of low-stakes, high-energy comedy that defines the stoner comedy genre.

The Wrong Girls cast is notably impressive. In addition to leads Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat, the film features LaKeith Stanfield, Tony Hale, Zack Fox, Seth Rogen (as the voice of a cat named Dio), Kumail Nanjiani (as the voice of another cat, GG), Kate McKinnon, Geena Davis, and Cate Blanchett in a cameo role as a deep sea expert.

Dylan Meyer shares her insights on her take on the female stoner buddy movie.

Discuss the deceptive simplicity of the title.

It functions on multiple levels. They are literally the wrong girls to be in the scenario they’re in. There’s a certain conceit, like Beavis and Butthead Do America, where the main characters don’t fully understand the movie they’re in, just like Frankie and Molly for much of this movie.

They don’t know they’re in danger almost until the end of the second act. It takes them an unbelievable volume of time to catch up to the threat level.

They are also both the wrong girls in that there’s a mistaken identity scenario.

They are the wrong girls, logistically and philosophically, to be put in a very high stakes scenario where they are the least well-equipped organically to be in this situation.

And then, the wrong girls as a category of person, has really evolved for me over the course of making this movie where I now believe that a wrong girl is emblematic of people who can’t get from point A to point B without calamity.

I think that everybody has a little of this, but some people have more than others. It’s definitely a lifestyle I’m leading every minute of every day.

Dylan Meyer writer and director of The Wrong Girls

Dylan Meyer. Photo by Lindsey Byrnes

The Wrong Girls could easily be classified as just another stoner buddy film. Is that you see perceive it?

This was one of the first movies I ever wrote. It’s been 14 years from the first draft until now.

I had quite a limited amount of guile as a young person originally writing this movie. It was like pure autobiography coming out of me in certain ways. And I knew that there were no stoner buddy movies for girls.

I didn’t understand why, because I had been living that life so much with my best friend and roommate. I just wanted to organically express what it was like to be friends and live in our house. And born from that, were a lot of genre elements.

We also don’t make comedies for women that were high stakes, high concept, or visually ambitious. When we do get stoner content for girls? We have Broad City, which is TV, not film.

I wanted the scope of what is afforded to men’s stoner movies to be allowed for this movie, to not be relegated to diminutive territory, but rather to lean into stretching it into something ambitious, but doing it in a micro kind of way, because that’s the scope of these girls’ reality.

How is basing a movie on your life both a blessing and a curse?

I think it’s about not being particularly precious with yourself and the things you’re attached to.

It’s about being inspired by things from your own life without feeling beholden to the rules. I’ve never met any giant squids. I’ve not had telepathy. I’ve not had telekinesis. But there are plenty of things about my own relationship with my best friend Maggie. It’s about all my friends and all the women that have propped me up and carried me places over the years.

I think that being expansive in your influences versus being restrictive in the rules and parameters of them, only feeds you. It doesn’t need to starve you. You don’t need to get stuck there. You can go wherever you want.

How did the story evolve over the years?

Frankie is someone who’s constantly one plan away from the next plan.

I wanted the thing to feel like an avalanche of being a high person in the wrong scenario, and scrambling for new lifelines as the whole thing goes along. The movie has changed so much since my original drafts. There was the movie that I wrote before I really knew how to write a movie. I got better at writing movies, and the movie also got more expensive.

Then the reality of me directing the movie came into the picture and it became clear that it needed to get less expensive. It’s gone like this a few different times. There have been plot lines picked up and put down over the years.

The whole movie has an anarchic, chaotic spirit

It was about leaning into that and embracing that the girls are high in the wrong environment all the time. It was about the emotional stakes and the overwhelming confusion that comes from being high in inappropriate places and feeling like people are coming at you, and you don’t really know why.

There’s negativity and hostility in some way, and you can’t quite figure out where that came from. It’s the feeling of constantly being surprised by the place you are in. I needed a chaos that needed to be able to sprawl in that way versus being a more tightly-organized script.

In general, we’ve gotten so much slicker and more perfect about the way that we construct storytelling.

I look at Repo Man, which is a big influence on this movie for me, There’s just no rules going on in there. Things just happen, and you’re along for the ride. I think that there’s joy, novelty and surprise in those places that you can’t quite get from a more tightly-organized piece of material.

A lot of what’s good about this movie came from the parts that I wrote before I was really good at writing movies. Then I got better over the years and was able to buffer and polish, adjust and make the threads come together in a way that would be rewarding. But the emotional nucleus was always there.

The joy and the youthful enthusiasm is something I’m trying to make sure I still have as a writer in anything else I approach now. Don’t lose the messy kid part of yourself that is giving you vigorous ideas. Figure out how to make them work for you.

Given the outrageous extremities of these ideas, were there any ideas where you thought were too much?

The things that have fallen away from the movie naturally were right to do so. I think there used to be a plot line where there was another faction of threat.

There was an American military component a long time ago. That wasn’t really serving the general sense of what I was doing. So that died off in a very organic way. This is a maximalist movie and if you start self-censoring, you’re in trouble.

Once you’ve committed to certain ideas – we have telekinesis from the singular testicle of a giant squid – you have permission to indulge certain chaotic impulses. I think that there’s a very studio-brained impulse to try to maintain threat level or stakes in a certain way which we avoided.

But for me, the threat level and stakes were always about the friendship. Everything else was window dressing that they were falling into, or out of, or around. The real stakes that mattered to me to maintain was that reality more than anything else.

Photo courtesy of NEON

Describe the special friendship between Frankie and Molly.

The codependence is so deep on both sides. I think they’re both each other’s mothers in certain ways and not in others. I think that there is so much emotional stability that is locked into their relationship and how they make each other feel.

And also, the fact that neither one of them is really growing up, moving on or evolving. They’re co-signing a certain level of stagnation and making acceptable a prolonged adolescence basically by virtue of how codependent they are.

I made growing up such incremental progress because I also don’t believe in moralistic or tidy storytelling. These people are who they are. I think everything is about creating the shapes of your life that work for you and trying to design a life that works for you.

And for both of these people, that involves being together a lot and doing things together. You don’t get a sense of their families. They probably don’t really have any.

They are each other’s family in such a real way. The relationships that women have with other women often have these really deep, connective pieces of tissue. I certainly consider Maggie McLean, my best friend, my family, my soulmate on this earth in a very profound way.

It’s about the movie carving out enough individual space that everyone is allowed to be separate and together. But they are absolutely locked in a familial, very intense, codependent dynamic.

What were some of the difficulties in writing The Wrong Girls?

I think that anytime you’re dealing with magical elements, it can be tricky, especially if you feel compelled to add a bunch of rules or explanations for things. I opted out of that as much as I could.

It was one of the nice things about telling a story about people who are really high and not paying attention. Every time the exposition starts to happen, the girls leave that and have their own conversation. So you get the sense that there are rules, but you don’t have to know what they are, and they don’t have anything to do with you, really.

I think that trying to navigate tone is definitely something that comes up with this movie. I don’t think you can just have a bunch of silly random stuff happen and then not have anything supporting it.

Trying to keep these emotional stakes present, and at the same time, descend into what is effectively pure chaos at many junctures throughout the movie was a challenge.

I think a real point of intersection of this film is about how do you keep these bad guys scary and also funny? I think the push pull of that was one of the bigger challenges of doing the whole thing and having them speak in Danish. I felt strongly that they needed to be speaking in their native language.

How you intersect them, their goals, their exposition and what’s going on alongside all the stuff with the girls is what I really care about,