‘Freakier Friday' Director Nisha Ganatra Might Have Cracked the Code on the Studio Comedy

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3 days ago

Over the course of her directing career, Nisha Ganatra has tackled nearly every stripe of comedy, from cute romances to wacky workplaces, mistaken identities to screwball send-ups. From films like 'Chutney Popcorn' and 'Late Night' to a truly staggering array of TV directing gigs ('Girls,' 'And Just Like That,' 'Dear White People,' 'Last Man on Earth,' 'Dollface,' 'Deli Boys,' and that's only a small sample), Ganatra knows funny.
Over the course of her last three films, however, Ganatra has hit upon something of a compelling niche, a kind of old-fashioned comedy about women trying to make their way through the world, often coming up against generational mishaps and misunderstandings, and emerging all the better for it.
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All of that and, yes, still funny.
When I pointed out this theme in 'Late Night,' 'The High Note,' and her latest release, this week's much-anticipated 'Freakier Friday,' the already effervescent filmmaker really sparked. 'I miss those old Mike Nichols movies where it's just smart women being smart and having ambitions, and not fighting over a guy, but just wanting something out of life,' the director told IndieWire. ''High Note,' 'Late Night,' 'Freakier Friday,' it's all that, all these women have their dreams and what they want and how they want the world to be, and how they want to remain each other's allies. But it's a struggle and they have to figure it out and they have to get there together.'
It's easy to see why Ganatra would gravitate toward 'Freakier Friday' then, which picks up more than twenty years after the Jamie Lee Curtis- and Lindsay Lohan-starring original, and is once again concerned with seeing women (now, four!) navigating their lives and supporting each other, all while also being body swapped.
Understandably, Ganatra was a huge fan of Mark Waters' 2003 original, 'Freaky Friday.' 'I loved it so much, and not just as someone who thought they were Lindsay Lohan and watched Lindsay Lohan and wanted to be Lindsay Lohan and maybe formed a band thinking they could be like Lindsay Lohan and then realized they could not be ever like Lindsay Lohan in a band,' she said with a laugh.
When producer Kristin Burr first gave Ganatra the script for 'Freakier Friday' in 2024 (after years of fans demanding a sequel), she added a little caveat. 'She said, 'OK, well, your first step is to go meet Jamie Lee Curtis and see if she thinks you're right,'' the director recalled. 'And I was like, 'Oh, my God. OK!' So I drive to Jamie Lee Curtis' house, which is just a surreal sentence to come out of my mouth. I meet her and I was so nervous, and she's such a movie star, she's so good at instantly making you feel like you're at home and she's your best friend.'
Another thing that might have eased those initial nerves? The verve with which Curtis talked about the material. Mostly, that first interaction didn't sound like an interview, but a space to swap ideas. 'She told me all the things she thought made the first one special and work, and why she wanted to do this one,' Ganatra said.
So what did Curtis love so much about the original? 'She loved the energy of being of the body swap, of course,' the director said. 'She had a very strange moment of telling me that she was not good at physical comedy. I did not believe her for a minute, because I was like, 'Didn't I see you on 'A Fish Called Wanda'? Haven't I seen you in 'True Lies'?' Cut to [filming the movie], 'Hey, Jamie, in this scene I thought you could crawl on the ground to hide from Chad [Michael Murray].' She's crawling on the ground. 'OK, in this scene you are gonna stop Manny from taking off by stepping in front of the car,' and she jumps on the hood of the car. She is 1,000% dedicated with her character, and I think that's what's so compelling. You can't take your eyes off of her because she's so unpredictable and so fearless that, as an audience, you're on the edge of your seat being like, 'What's she gonna do?''
The film arrives twenty-two years after the 'Freaky Friday' hit theaters in the summer of 2003, making a mint in the process (over $160 million worldwide) and apparently inspiring legions of devoted fans, including Curtis and Lohan. That fanbase? It surprised even Ganatra.
'Jamie willed this into existence, and from all the fans who willed it into existence by asking her,' she said. 'But I was surprised too. I knew millennials love-love-loved it, I knew Gen X loved, but I didn't think Gen Z knew the movie as well as they do. Gen Z is the generation that is being most misrepresented and sort of treated poorly in pop culture right now, so it was really important to me to get it right for Gen Z, not just because you'd never want Gen Z coming at you, but also because Gen Z has been so maligned.'
And, yes, 'Freakier Friday' includes not one, but two Gen Z stars in Julia Butters and Sophia Hammons. This time around, Curtis' Tess Coleman is now a grandmother, and while she adores 'co-parenting' daughter Anna's (Lohan) precocious teenager Harper (Butters), Anna is struggling to find her own footing as a parent. When she falls in love with handsome new dad Eric at Harper's school (Manny Jacinto), things are looking up, but, what's that? Eric has a daughter too? And she (Hammons) and Harper hate each other? Body-swapping and life lessons, ahoy!
If both Tess and Anna get (lovingly) dinged for their respective ages and all the generational stuff that comes between them, so too do the girls. Our first introduction to Harper? A sign on her bedroom that demands 'NO TRIGGERING.' How, I asked Ganatra, do you find the line between 'we're going to make fun of you too' but 'we also want you to to laugh'?
'It's always such a hard thing to explain it tonally, how do you ride that line between what's OK and what seems mean?,' she said. 'None of the humor can or should seem mean-spirited, especially in a movie like this. But for Gen Z, it was about acknowledging how smart they are and how they do really care. I do think Gen Z is gonna save us in many ways, because they truly care about trying to fix all the problems.'
Ganatra applies that same sense of care to her work. Consider how tough it it is to actually make a body swap comedy work, the many perspectives that need to be considered, the points of view that need to be telegraphed, the insane performance that goes into playing somebody who is also playing somebody self. That's not easy.
'I think sometimes people are like, 'Oh, studio body swap comedy, blah, whatever,' but when you watch them, you realize it's pretty sophisticated what these actors are doing,' she said. 'They're not only playing their character, but they're also playing another character inside of their character. And if you don't believe that, the whole movie stops working instantly, right? That moment when they switch, if you don't buy that, your movie's done. It wasn't directing four actors, it was directing eight characters. So, how do I get that essence and this essence and make the most comedy joy from the experience of being in each other's lives?'
For Ganatra, such considerations are part and parcel of being a good comedy director, something she does not take for granted (or for silly).
'I'm super-biased in that I think comedy people can do anything, I think comedy people can do drama, but I don't think drama people can necessarily do comedy,' the director said. 'At some point, it comes down to your taste and what you think is funny and what you don't. I think it's a matter of creating an environment where everyone feels free to pitch everything and you shoot everything. I've been wrong so many times, so you shoot everything as if you're right, and then you shoot everything as if you're wrong, and then you have the best to choose from.'
Ganatra pointed specifically to another important woman in her life: her long-time editor Eleanor Infante. 'She doesn't hesitate to say, 'Hey, that doesn't work' or 'That's not funny' or 'No, we're not doing that.' When I was at NYU, I got the privilege of sitting in the editing room with Thelma Schoonmacher and Martin Scorsese, and I watched how he has to fight for every single shot that he gets. You're like, 'What's happening? Who is this woman telling Martin Scorsese that his shot his garbage?' And then you realize why the movie comes out the way it does. I'm really lucky I have an amazing editor who will tell me the truth.'
Still, maybe making good comedy comes down to something deceptively simple: truly looking for what's funny. 'I think we had a lot of fun because we were all trying to make each other laugh,' Ganatra said. 'Every scene, everyone was trying to top each other with more and more fun and more and more joy. We just had a great environment, a really supportive environment where everyone let us do our most bananas ideas.'
While the film is packed with both original ideas and callbacks to the original (a Pink Slip concert was a must-include for the film's producers from the start, while a final scene involving Chad Michael Murray's character was a product of the actor being available for an extra day and Ganatra really wanting to make the most of it), lots of on-the-fly ideas borne of affection for the original also make the cut. Comedy works best if you're trying something new, and you can really only do that if everyone is down to, well, clown.
The filmmaker pointed to an uproarious scene in the film in which Curtis and Lohan show up at Murray's character's record store. As Lohan (as Harper as Anna) tries to rekindle the flame with Murray's Jake, Curtis (as Lily as Tess) attempts to offer advice while also hiding her face behind a slew of different records.
'I was like, 'OK, Jamie, I think you should get around the record store by covering yourself up in each place,' and she was like, 'OK, which records am I using?,'' she recalled. 'I was like, 'Well, here are the six I have cleared, and I think Sade should be when you're telling her to be quiet, and this person should be for this. And she's the one who was like, 'Oh, Britney [Spears] should be the one while I'm yelling at her and giving her advice,' which then inspired our editor to put in a Britney song, and then we just had so much fun with it. I can't believe I didn't think of that one. That was just a lucky Jamie moment on set.'
She'd like more of them. As she readies for the release of the film, Ganatra was clearly still riding a wave of giddiness, one that she hopes to parlay into doing, well, more of this.
'It made me happy, so I just hope I get to keep doing it,' she said. 'A lot of women don't get to direct studio films and that is something I don't take for granted. So I'm just hopeful that this dream doesn't end and I get to keep making movies, because that's something I think we all want to do, express ourselves. I'm hopeful that this does well and we all get a chance to do it again.'
A Walt Disney Pictures release, 'Freakier Friday' is in theaters on Friday, August 8.
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