Director Meredith Alloway Breaks Down Her ‘Forbidden Fruits’ Mood Board

Once upon a time, Meredith Alloway was interviewing celebs about their latest film projects for NYLON. Today, she’s the one being interviewed. “The education that I got from interviewing people was like film school,” Alloway tells NYLON. “There's so many things that people told me that were guiding lights for me.”

One of the most valuable pearls of wisdom came from Oscar Isaac, who encouraged the aspiring screenwriter to pursue her dream of moving to New York. “A year later I interviewed him again. He goes, ‘Did you make it?’ I said, ‘I'm here,’" she recounts. Next time they meet, she can tell Isaac she’s made it as a writer-director.

Based on Lily Houghton’s 2019 play Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die, Alloway’s debut feature Forbidden Fruits tells the story of mall employees and amateur witches Apple (played by Lili Reinhart), Cherry (Victoria Pedretti), and Fig (Alexandra Shipp), whose cult-like friendship is put to the test when new girl Pumpkin (Lola Tung) joins the group. It’s satirical camp comedy meets sheer horror, or as Alloway would say, “It's a Jolly Rancher with a razor blade hidden inside.” If Fruits reminds you of your favorite teen comedy (or slasher), that’s not a mistake; Alloway called upon more than a few inspirations when writing and directing the project, and we caught up with the director ahead of the film’s theatrical release on March 27 to talk about them all. Plus, the note she gave Lola Tung that she now wears around her neck, Emma Chamberlain’s feature debut, and more.

I was hoping you could take us through your inspirations for Forbidden Fruits. Let's start with books. What did you read while working on the film?

[Forbidden Fruits is] based on a play. Normally when I'm working on something, my avenue is books, podcasts. So it was interesting to go, "This is already a fully fledged text in a sense.” And then from there, it was [deciding] what [was] going to be additive to the play that Lily Houghton wrote, Of the woman came at the beginning of sin and through her we all die.

The stakes [of the play] are someone steals a baby pink thong. There's no murder, there's no this or that. But what was really interesting is Lily and I were coming off writing two other movies that had very similar themes when we met about Fruits. I had written a female-led Taxi Driver sort of film, and she had another project exploring lady killers. We both had read books about that when we met. I have to shout out to Tori Telfer, an incredible writer who wrote Lady Killers and Criminal Broads, two separate books that I'm obsessed with. There is a wealth of women out there who have committed crimes or killed people, but in very different ways than men. It's the Medea complex of it all. Women really believe this is the best thing to do for themselves, for the people around them or to survive.

I read a lot of biographies... I listened to dozens of audiobooks, particularly bios of directors, writers, filmmakers. One of the ones that really kept me going was Barbra Streisand's very long book. I have quotes on [my white board] and there's one from her book that says “Thought transcends matter.” I read Mike Nichols' bio, Sidney Lumet's book was really helpful to me. It was a really good lesson in if you're feeling stuck, go to the greats. What did they do? How did they get through periods of time when their movies lost financing, when they had no hope? It gave me some mantras that really helped me through the movie.

How about music?

When we were getting a pitch together, we had a playlist that we collaborated on. The movie does kind of exist out of time and space. It feels like an homage to the '90s, 2000's, but I wanted it to feel modern. I started with music that I grew up listening to. It was TLC, it was Hole, it was Gwen Stefani, and also just some one-hit wonders. “Torn” [by] Natalie Imbruglia. For me, it was like, “What are songs that encapsulated that era when I was going to the mall with my girlfriends growing up?”

My amazing music supervisor, Michaela Simmons, sent me [some songs] two years before we ended up shooting the movie. There's a woman, Meg Lee Chin. When I listened to her album, I was dancing around my kitchen. Atticus Ross has a band with his wife called 12 Rounds, and we got a song from them. It was this kind of '90s grunge, but meets modern pop. Haute & Freddy opened the movie. They're performers, their songs are rich, they're musical. Something that was important to me was, these [characters] aren't putting on sensuality or fierceness or whatever. They just are. I wanted the music to not feel false. I wanted it to feel guttural in the way that I think that they move through the world.

And the movies that you watched?

There was a lot of duality in the movie. I say over and over, the two movies that were the guiding light were American Psycho and Blood And Black Lace, which is a giallo film from the late 60's because I was struggling to find modern films that are feminine and eerie and glamorous. I really found the visual language of the giallo films, of Mario Baba films. They really spoke to me. I was like, "Oh, we want the world of these girls in the coven and the mall to feel beautiful and glamorous, but also uncanny." That's where I started.

There's films like Daisies, Virgin Suicides, movies that really showed women being messy. A Woman Under The Influence, Gina Rowland's performance in that is one of the best of all time. I was like, “I need to watch the glamour and the sort of buttoned up satire, but then also the unraveling.” There's still so many movies on my watch list that I didn't even get to that I can't wait for people to see the film and be like, "Oh, it reminds me of this." And I'll be like, "I never saw that movie, but now I need to go see it."

Was there any pop culture that you were inspired by?

The pop culture wasn't a planned thing. The characters came first and then it was like, "What would they reference?" There's a Hilary Duff collab shout out. It wasn't like, "Oh, Hilary Duff is coming back into pop culture.” It was more of an inward out where we're like, "Girls working at a store like this in the mall. What would be the '90s, 2000s nostalgic collab that they would be excited about?" No-brainer, Hilary Duff.

There's a whole plot about Fig loving Ed Sheeran. To us it was like, the more specific to these characters, the [easier] it is 20 years from now to insert the Ed Sheeran 20 years from now. We wanted to keep it so specific that it could be broad that people could insert their own. "What is a nostalgic collab I would be excited about? Is it Jessica Simpson?" It's like when Pumpkin comes down the stairs, she's been made over. Fig's like, "You're so Andy Sachs right now. Miranda Priestley would take you to Paris." That's the way we all speak. But hopefully my mom's generation would be like, "Oh, you're so Audrey Hepburn right now." We were like, “We don't want to be too of the now that we eliminate the timelessness of the movie.” That's the goal. I don't know if we achieved it, but that was the goal.

The tone of the film is very singular: it’s satire-y and can be bitingly funny, but it's also genuinely chilling at times. Was there anything that inspired the tone?

I read this chapter [in Mike Nichols’ biography] where he’s returning to theater and puts up this show at a repertory. It takes place in the barracks during a war. The guys are smoking and they're having a great time, and then this character shows up, sort of punctuates the rhythm of it all and you're like, "That was weird." Then it keeps going and this character keeps showing up. As I'm reading the book, the is author describing it as, people at a certain point were like, "Is something really bad going to happen? I feel like something really bad." Then a character gets injured and is bleeding on stage, and apparently someone passed out. I was like, "That's it." I want to plant the seeds of dread and then just keep moving past them in a way that hopefully by the time that something violent happens, you go, "I knew this was going to happen." I want people to be anxious and be like, "Something is going to give way. Something signals it's going to go poorly."

You mentioned the film is based on the play, but you said the worst thing that happens in the play is that somebody steals a thong. How did you settle on this is being a slasher, and how did you build upon the world that was already created?

When I sat down to get coffee with Lily I said, "Listen, Mean Girls but a slasher." And she immediately was like, "Love it. Let's do it." Obviously we kept talking about it, but I felt like we both felt in that moment that hyperbolizing some of the things that are happening, preserving the ethos of the characters and especially their relation to each other, that didn't change. [The characters] were named after flowers [in the play]. The end of the movie, we sort of hat tipped to that. Maybe if we make another film, the flowers would come back.

All of their dynamics [were] preserved. Being from Dallas, I love horror films that unite us because we get to experience something that maybe we haven't experienced watching a character go through it. It's almost like Nightmare On Elm Street. I hope none of us have been visited by Freddie Krueger, but I think that that movie has stood the test of time because we all know what it feels like to have a bad dream. It takes that universal feeling and hyperbolizes it. It allows us to connect under a bigger banner than our own specific shared experiences. I love slashers for that.

Hopefully people watch the movie and they go, "I know that breakups between friends can feel really scary and emotional and dark and beautiful, and I know what it feels like to want to belong to something." Maybe we don't do the things that these girls do in order to belong, but I think we've all done things that we go, "I think I joined a cult a little bit." Whatever it may be.

Speaking of, we can't talk about the movie without talking about your amazing cast. How did you know you found your fruits?

From the get go, I had no chill. I'm such a fan of all these girls. Truly, each time that we heard that we got a meeting with one of them, I was beside myself. I didn't grow up in and around this world, so it still feels crazy to me and I feel so crazy grateful. Lily Houghton was involved in the casting process, which is so great to have your partner in crime there with you experiencing those meetings together. Each of the girls brought their own energy to the characters and that energy meshing with what was on the page, it all clicked.

Lili Reinhart, she's so subtly funny and witty in everything she does. I was like, "She's got comedy chops." I just believed she would be the queen bee of that mall in Dallas. I was like, "You would be the girl that in high school worked at Abercrombie and Fitch." Lola [Tung] can pull off the sweetness. We've seen her do that in The Summer I Turned Pretty, but Lola is a Scorpio and an ambitious person. I wear this necklace that has a direction on it that I apparently gave to Lola that says, "One more time, a little cunt-y." Lola brought the Russian doll effect to Pumpkin, especially as the film goes on.

Victoria [Pedretti] is just so phenomenal in You and Haunting of Hill House and [I] was such a fan of hers. When she smiles, it lights up the screen. She's so emotive and so free and open in every role that she does, and I wanted that for Cherry. She takes up space, but also can be in next to Apple. But then when she's away from Apple [she] is the queen of her environment.

Then Alex Shipp is a witch. When we met her, she was like, "Oh, I do bone casting." I was like, "Of course you do." She's so whip-smart in the way that Fig is. It's like all of their energy locked in. They all have comedic timing. They all have the depths that I think that are needed to pull off the confessionals. I could go on and on about them.

You also have Emma Chamberlain making her feature film debut in such an important role to the film. How did you know that she was the right person for this role?

The moment someone brought up, "What about Emma Chamberlain?" I said, "Sold." It was a no-brainer. I always knew I wanted to cast someone that isn't known first and foremost as an actress. Pickle is an outsider. I want to already get ahead of the audience with that or to lean into the audience's preconceived notions. [Emma is] so funny. I keep hearkening back on that because satire is so difficult. I was like, "I need people that can commit to the bit." She's playing a character named Pickle and you have to treat it like life or death because it is. I really can't wait for people to see the turn that she takes. I want her to be in more scenes in a movie, but that was the character.

Yeah, she killed it. I feel like people are going to see this film and be very quick to label it as “campy.” Was that your intention?

My intention was more play. I just followed the giggle. That sounds so cheesy to say, but every step of the way down to the music editing of the score, I was like, "What makes me feel tickled?" I'll give you a perfect example. [Lily is] sitting across me writing. She starts laughing. I was like, "What are you laughing about?" She goes, "I wrote a line. We're never going to keep it." I go, "Well, now you have to tell me." She's like, "Do you have sand in your ass cracks? You're giving beach babe." And we died laughing. I was like, "This is insane. We have to keep it. " Camp allows you to do that. As long as it's motivated, like a character would actually say that, I then had to go, "Well, maybe the momfluencer has been to the beach. Maybe we need to prop it up with some logic."

But if that's camp, then so be it. I think that we're all craving play and not taking things so seriously. The whole point of movies and art is to enjoy ourselves and learn more about ourselves and have some fun.

Are you a big believer in the occult? What is the witchiest thing about you?

Of course, I'm a believer in the occult. I really practice manifesting in a way that I think is real. I have a little witch store called Enchantments in my neighborhood. I'm a frequent customer, and I was telling Alex [Shipp] about it. She goes, "Well, you know what you need to do. You need to get a cinnamon stick and put it in your wallet, and that will bring you money." I kept that cinnamon stick in there, forgot about it. Then when we're in post on the movie, the pouch breaks and I'm cleaning it out. The cinnamon stick was buried in the lining of it. I forgot it was there. I carried that around for a year.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.