If there is one thing I want to say with Bad Girl it’s this: surrender and you might learn to love yourself. In essence, Bad Girl is about women, self-doubt and the insatiable need for external validation.

 

May desperately wants to be accepted by her peers but she thinks she has done something “bad”. Instead of tackling it head on and admitting fault she tries to negotiate, bribe and backstab her way out of the doghouse. The irony is that if she could come to peace with herself and be honest, her friends would be more likely to forgive and accept her. It’s in the letting go of the need to control that the she might get what she wants. The sad thing is, May hasn’t learnt this lesson and this film is her journey to rock bottom (where she might just have this realisation).

 

It took me a number of years to get to the final draft of this story. I had been really interested in how young women interact, often hurting each other and self-sabotaging. I suppose I was drawn to this because of my own experience, having had many intense and fractured friendships with women over the years, and while my experience of women is, for the most part, supportive and loving, I have found in youth friendship could be murky and uncertain. So, I wanted to see these characters on screen and I wanted to show the struggle of self-actualisation.

 

In order to tell this story, the screenwriter Michael Beck and I focused on the psychological state of May throughout her crisis. We wanted to have May’s inner world manifest itself in her outer world. So when May is in her car, driving to find out what “bad thing” she has done the night before, the car interior becomes a metaphor for her struggle. Weird things start to happen that she can’t explain; the car turns on May, just as May is turning on herself.

 

Bridie Valentine’s talent was obvious on set and the camera is a witness for her raw and honest performance. I wanted to as honestly as possible show May’s point of view. When unexplained things happen, the audience doesn’t know what’s real and what isn’t; just like May. The film rarely strays from May’s point of view because I want the audience to understand why May acts as she does and empathise with it. She is a young woman, with low self-esteem and low self-worth. The negative beliefs she has about herself come from somewhere. I am attempting to unravel the mystery of how women in general come to hold such beliefs and what having them does to personal relationships.

 

The glue that binds the film together is the score, by Shari & Branko and sound design by Ben Golotta. The score underpins the tense atmosphere of May’s world but speaks to the potential that lies within the lesson she is learning. There is darkness but there is also hope. The sound design elements are so important for the audience to understand what is happening to may. The car has a mind of its own, the radio and windscreen wipers turn on by themselves and these sounds are accentuated in the mix to scare the audience because it’s scaring May. The sound design is essentially another way we have told the story from May’s point of view.

 

I would hope that the audience recognises May’s conflict as a conflict of the times. Women have been pitted against each other, the sisterhood can be twisted into something uninviting and exclusory. In Bad Girl, I am focusing on this shadow aspect of the female psyche when placed under immense social pressure.

 

Hopefully, this will resonate with audiences and force the question: does it have to be this way?