‘Booger’ Director and Star On Feline Body Horror And Female Friendships
I, like many of us, consider myself a gremlin of sorts, a creature that loves to snack without plates, shove whole pickles in my mouth straight from the jar, and hoard beverages like it’s my job. Weird goblin girl behavior is very real and yet we barely see that on screen in a realistic way. Enter Mary Dauterman‘s stunning feature film debut, Booger, a film perfect for the weirdo cat ladies out there.
In the film:
New Yorker Anna has just suffered the sudden and unexpected death of her best friend and roommate, Izzy. She’s trying to handle this loss when Izzy’s cat, Booger, runs away. Anna goes on a desperate search to find him and in the process, she is bitten on the hand by the cat. She soon begins to take on feline characteristics, and her work life and relationship with her boyfriend start to go downhill.
We spoke with Dauterman and the film’s star Grace Glowicki about weird girl cinema, the turkey scene in Mr. Bean, and the destructive power of female friendships.
Dread Central: Mary, tell me about where Booger came from.
Mary Dauterman: Yeah, Booger started as this smaller idea of almost like An American Werewolf in London, but modern-day Brooklyn with a bodega cat.
But I was excited about it and was starting to think about turning this sketch into a full feature. And then COVID happened and I was in lockdown just with my boyfriend and my cats, and I was feeling definitely very isolated and missing all of my friends and community. My world became very small and then the film became extremely internal and more about grief than I ever thought it would. So that’s kind of how it developed from a very silly movie to a more of a grief story.
DC: So is Booger an actual cat that you own?
MD: Booger is my cat, Bobby. Booger was a big contender for Bobby’s name, but we ended up going with Bobby after Bobby Hill, which suits him.
DC: That’s incredible. Oh my God, very good. Well, I’m assuming it was pretty easy to work with your own cat, but was Bobby a diva?
MD: The idea was, well, one, I love Bobby so much and I think he looks beautiful on camera. And two, he has a good scary cat look, even though he’s not a scary cat. He’s got a good creepy, spooky cat vibe.
I wish there were more moments with this, but he’ll do this thing with his ears that look like dragon ears. He looks like the dragon in that kid’s movie. It’s menacing and adorable at the same time. But Bobby, I knew I had access to him because he lives at my house, and that I could get whatever I needed. I had all of these, not flashbacks, but the moments in the past with Izzy and Anna and the cat altogether that I was like, “OK, we can all get that whenever I need.”
It was also really coming from like, “Oh, these are videos I’ve taken of my own cat because this is how people act when they’re obsessed with their cat.” I can actually insert this stuff into the film and it’s pretty truthful of my obsession with Bobby that I gave to the character.
But working with Bobby was sometimes chill and sometimes very hard. He got a lot of Churu treats. We redid the cat bite moment, which is so important to the film, I think three different times. My DP lives down the block from me, and I was like, “The stuff in the edit isn’t working. Can you come film me getting my hand bit by my own cat again?” So we just kept trying and trying to get it right
So that we did a lot. And then we had a stunt cat for all the outdoor stuff in the different locations. Finding a match for Bobby was very fun and funny and exciting, getting cat headshots and being like, “Does it work?”
DC: Wow, what a job we have as filmmakers.
MD: Like what am I making people and myself do?
DC: But you mentioned the cell phone moments, which I love. How did you guys accomplish that? You guys captured those moments so naturally. It’s such a cool way to enrich what their friendship was and add more texture to it.
Grace Glowicki: What was that a pickup day, Mary? I can’t really remember. I think I just remember we just ran around with me and Mary and Sofia [Dobrushin].
MD: Yeah, we did. The way our schedule worked, we had a makeup test day, so Grace was getting wound testing and then we were taking all these pictures with Sofia and just bopping around and doing a lot. It was a really chaotic prep day. And then I did an edit with all the stuff we had from that time.
I’m trying to remember if I showed it to friends or not, but I think I showed it to some friends and they were like, “I love this. I want to see more of them. This is so fun to watch.” So then when we did a bigger pickup when Grace was in town. I was like, “Hey, Grace, Sofia, let’s just go to 18 bars and run around Bed-Stuy and get on the subway and look for public toilets.” And I was throwing different sweaters at them to try so it all looked like it was happening on different days.
DC: A bag of different sweaters and outfits you’re throwing at them on the subway.
MD: Yeah, pretty much.
DC: Wait, that’s amazing. It feels so natural with the friendship. Grace, I was curious, what was it like for you to form a friendship with Sofia that really is the core of the whole movie?
GG: Yeah, it was interesting because we didn’t actually have too much time as people to actually get to know each other. I was just trying to get into the headspace of the feeling of one of those female friendships you have with someone where you’ve been through college together, you’ve had all those kinds of nights together, the tears, all of that. I think what I love about their friendship, too, is the basis of their relationship is making each other laugh. They share a weird sense of humor, and that’s a big sort of touchstone of their intimacy.
So I tried to think about the relationships I have in my life that are based on trying to make each other giggle and teasing each other and stuff. But it was easy, too. Sofia is so lovely and funny, and she just kind of jumped right in and she’s pretty open. So it was, thank God, it was easy doing all of that with her.
DC: That’s awesome. OK, I mentioned Weird Girl cinema earlier, and Grace, it sounds like you love playing nasty, weird characters. What do you love about them and about getting opportunities to play female characters you may not have seen before?
GG: I guess I just feel like that’s where my interest is taking me. I’m interested in slightly rebellious comedy where it’s like the stakes are still pretty low all things considered, but doing things you shouldn’t do to get laughs. I think that’s sort of at the core of a big part of my attraction to these kinds of characters—they’re inappropriate in some way. And that kind of tantalizes me.
Then I love rejects, characters that feel they don’t quite fit in. There’s so much humanity in characters that don’t really feel a part of things, but wish they were. I just find that so touching and probably is at the core of who I am as a person ultimately, of just feeling a little weird and defective and wanting so badly to have friends and stuff, which I do! [Laughs] But yeah, I think at my core, there’s a longing for connection. So it probably comes from there.
DC: Mary, what’s your approach to making a weird girl? I mean, it sounds weird to label it that way, but you have a film about women who are gross and are allowed to pick their noses and be kind of little creatures in their homes. Booger gives a voice to the creature inside all of us women, all the gremlins that live in the fridge at 2:00 AM, eating your dead friend’s pad thai.
MD: Yeah, I think, well, one, I am just attracted to weird and strange and unsettling visuals and using horror or even production design to be part of the way I’m telegraphing emotion. I think it’s so much harder, at least for me, to write someone giving a monologue than to see them throwing up a hairball. And to me, that hits even harder. You’re like, “OK, she is literally underground. This is not a good day. This is not a good time of her life.”
DC: It’s not just a hairball. She’s hunched over a dive bar toilet, throwing up a hairball. It’s just so gross and yet I love it.
MD: I feel like we referred to Booger a couple of times as a toilet tour of Brooklyn. On the pickup day with the friendship, I was like, “I feel like we should get some more toilets” and Grace and Sofia were like, “Mary, no!” [Laughs]
DC: So what are some of your favorite films, Mary, that bring in the kind of weird visuals that have inspired you creatively?
MD: I’m definitely a big Cronenberg head, which probably makes sense. With Booger specifically, Grace and I were talking about The Fly a lot because it’s the trifecta of hilarious, disgusting, and emotional. I think it’s such a sad movie, but it’s so funny and you’re screaming and laughing at how disgusting it is the whole time. I also really loved, and I don’t know if it’s a comparison for Booger, but Raw I thought was just such a powerful movie about sisterhood. And I was like, “Yeah, this eating each other thing is, I resonate with.” Black Swan is also huge. When I first saw it, it made me so uncomfortable and upset. Then I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And now it’s one of my favorites.
There are also funny films! A core scene I think about all the time is Mr. Bean getting his head stuck in the cavity of a yurkey. It’s so funny. Can you imagine how wet it is in there?
DC: I think about that, too! How does your head fit in that little hole? Also, it’s so claustrophobic and wet and stinky!
GG: Let’s do it. [Laughs]
DC: I did not think I was going to start my day talking about putting heads in turkeys, but I love that. But, Mary, you mentioned something about sisterhood, and what I love about this movie is it’s about grieving a friendship. And I feel like not a lot of films talk about grief when you lose a best friend, which is so much harder. You talk about friend breakups being hard, but a friendship death is worse, I feel like than anything. I just wanted to hear more about wanting to make a movie about the importance of female friendship outside of romance.
MD: Yeah. Okay. When I was first really trying to get this started, this person who was very established in the industry was like, “Why is it a friend? Why isn’t it her boyfriend or her sister or family member? It doesn’t make sense for her to be acting this way” or something. And it really made me angry and say, “OK, this movie has to exist.” One, I’m sad for you if you haven’t had a friend that you feel this way about. And two, I guess that means there aren’t that many films like this if this doesn’t feel sellable. I think, at least for me, a lot of my female friendships are just so important. They’re family. They know me so well and know crazy things that family members wouldn’t know.
It’s just a completely different kind of relationship that is really special and really important. But to make a movie about how that feels was really important to me just because I was feeling like there’s maybe a lack. Also when I was writing this movie and getting into it, I was like, “What do I feel the most right now, just as a person in my thirties?” These are the relationships that are important to me. So it was very easy to slip into that and write it just because I’ve lived it.
DC: To have more films like this actually look at female friendship and love, I love that we’re switching a narrative a little bit. It’s not just about women being against each other.
MD: And also on the darker side, the codependency we have with our female friends, it gets crazy.
DC: It really does. Especially when you’re young and in a job you probably don’t love and you’re living in a city and you’re just like, we have each other in our little apartment. Speaking of, is that your someone’s apartment or how did you find that apartment?
MD: It’s actually our producer, Lexi’s uncle’s apartment, but redressed with my apartment. So the production design team came to my house and I told them to take whatever. And then I showed up at this apartment and was like, “OK, I live here now. This is my apartment in this house.”
DC: That’s incredible because it feels very lived in, so I love that you took your apartment and put it in a guy’s apartment.
MD: Yeah, it’s like a 60-year-old man’s apartment. But it’s a combination of my apartment and Pealy Weber, our production designer’s apartment. Pealy is so incredible at making spaces feel really lived in, and also just weird things like, “Oh, there’d be cereal here.”
DC: Is it pad Thai that she’s eating? I just love that touch especially.
GG: Well, the pad thai was easy. It really was the hairballs that were hard, which was human hair soaked in mouthwash, and covered in caramel sauce. That one was hard. And then eating the cat food was hard, which was beans. So the pad thai was a delight.
DC: Caramel and mouthwash on human hair is not a concoction that I personally would love to taste, but now you know what that particular taste is!
GG: And I actually have a pet peeve of hair in my mouth. I hate it. Hair and food are for me, the number one pet peeve. Then hair and mouth is obviously connected. So this movie helped me get over my fear because I was just bombarded with so much hair in my mouth.
DC: Going to say, you are just pulling your hair through your mouth. Wow. A lot of exposure therapy in Booger.
GG: Exactly, exactly!
Booger is available now on digital.
Categorized:Interviews
