The arithmetic of The Wrong Girls is the kind that should be taught before anyone is allowed to say the word “passion project”: fourteen years from conception to camera, then twenty-nine days of photography. Fourteen years of what, exactly? Dylan Meyer, making her feature debut after a screenwriting career (An American Pickle, Moxie), describes the cycle without decoration: we had the money, we lost the money, we had the money, we lost the money. Her producer and best friend Maggie McLean remembers being broke at twenty-four in a back house, talking the movie into existence, and then spending a decade on the phone saying keep going. At the lowest point they were scouting New Jersey street corners, prepared to fake Los Angeles one restricted camera angle at a time, for a film whose entire reason to exist is Los Angeles. That is what a long raise actually looks like from inside: not a montage, but years of almost.
The delay that gave the film back its crew
Here is the part worth stealing. One incarnation of the project collapsed when Alia Shawkat became unavailable, and Meyer, who wept through an entire park over it, is frank that there was never another Molly for her. When that version’s financing fell apart anyway, the delay did something financing documents never account for: it returned her people. Shawkat came back. So did her chef op, Todd Banhazl, and the costume designer Heidi Bivens, and other longtime collaborators who had been booked the first time around. Every producer knows the cost of a collapsed close; almost nobody budgets for the possibility that the next window assembles a better unit than the one you lost. It is not a strategy, bien sûr, and I am not proposing you lose your financing on purpose. But it argues for something concrete: keep the relationships warm through the dead years, because the team that shoots the film may only exist because the earlier film did not.
The vehicle that carried the project through was structural, not sentimental. Meyer and McLean co-founded Nevermind Pictures with Kristen Stewart, and McLean states the company’s charter as plainly as a term sheet: carve our own lane, make the movies we want. Meyer gives the philosophy a number, and it is the most quotable line item of the year: her dreams are under fifteen million dollars, so that creativity and freedom remain affordable. When the market will not finance your strange thing, you build the machine that can, at a scale where nobody else’s fear gets a vote.
Twenty-nine days, ninety-five percent local, right after the fires
The shoot itself is a case study in matching aesthetic to schedule. Twenty-nine days is a sprint for an ensemble comedy, and Meyer’s lo-fi register was chosen partly because it absorbs the sprint: when there was no time to set something up properly, the rough result belonged to the film’s texture rather than fighting it. Her stated model is Repo Man and the janky, filmic warmth of Robby Müller’s photography, and she has a thesis to go with it, that comedies stopped being allowed to be shot on film a decade ago and the form has declined with the sheen. You may argue with the thesis; you cannot argue with the tactic. A director who picks a look her budget can actually deliver has removed the most common source of schedule collapse before day one.
The circumstances gave the production a weight nobody wanted. The Wrong Girls was among the first films back into production in Los Angeles after the January 2025 wildfires, with a crew ninety-five percent local, including people who had lost their homes weeks earlier. Meyer’s account of the wrap party, crew member after crew member thanking her for shooting in town, is the industry’s whole runaway-production argument delivered in one image. Her line deserves the widest circulation it can get: the most talented people in the world are sitting here waiting for someone to tell them go.
The craft followed the same handmade logic. Katie Hickman, the production designer, dressed the leads’ house with objects hauled from Meyer’s and McLean’s actual homes, at least half the living room by their own estimate. Bivens built the wardrobe from real vintage, recreated duplicates for coverage, cut shirts from old punk-show flyers, and manufactured trash-bag dresses that were, in Meyer’s dry phrase, more fun in theory than in practice for her performers. On set, the compressed schedule pushed the comedy toward the script rather than improvisation, and Meyer is unusually precise about her lead’s method: Stewart works holistically, not as a joke machine, so the improvisational room was physical, built on her real chemistry with Shawkat. Even the closing dance number is deliberately unchoreographed. Everything ragged is load-bearing.
The honest ledger
The numbers are modest and the film’s team would be the first to say so. Neon opened it to just over $406,000 from 520 theaters; the critics split it down the middle, 56 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, 59 on Metacritic. Peu importe, says the other column: the Letterboxd average runs warmer, and Meyer called her audience before the fact, saying the film is not for everybody, but the people it’s for, it’s really, really for. A fourteen-year, under-fifteen-million operation built on a company the filmmakers own does not need an opening weekend to justify itself the way a studio platform release does; it needs to find its people at a cost the structure can survive, and to keep the unit together for the next one. On the evidence, both are underway.
The transferable lessons, in order: when the raise runs long, build a company instead of waiting for permission; keep your collaborators close enough that a delay can return them; choose an aesthetic your schedule can actually shoot; and hire the town you are filming, because the goodwill is real and so is the bench. Fourteen years to prepare, twenty-nine days to shoot, and half the furniture came from their own living rooms.
To the line producers and UPMs in the room: after the fires and the flight of production from Los Angeles, what did crewing up locally actually look like for you this year, and did the bench feel as deep as Meyer found it? The comments are open.
Where my own notes ran thin, IndieWire’s conversation with Dylan Meyer and Maggie McLean and the interview Meyer gave The Credits filled the gaps.