Think of it as Chekhov’s joint, just waiting there on a table to be smoked. It’s the kind of thing that has been appearing lately as actors Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat and writer-director Dylan Meyer promote their new stoner comedy “The Wrong Girls.” (There has, perhaps not surprisingly, also been a lot of eating.)
The trio are gathered around a conference table in the offices of an event space in the Frogtownneighborhood of Los Angeles, having just completed a photo shoot. There is that joint, sitting in an ashtray, placed there by someone, just in case.
To be clear, none of them are stoned right now.
“I’m not ashamed,” says Stewart, 36, of smoking weed. “I want be able to finish my sentences and then I’ll smoke after.”
“That’s how I feel,” agrees Meyer, 38. “Sometimes you can really lose a thread.”
All three of them recall previous experiences with smoking pot in professional settings. “I got too high,” recalls Shawkat, 37, of a visit to the podcast “Getting Doug with High” in 2013. “And it was not great.”
In theaters Friday, “The Wrong Girls” is about two young women in Los Angeles who love to smoke weed and eat. Frankie (Stewart), who has never righted herself after dropping out of Stanford, is anxious that her best friend and roommate Molly (Shawkat), an aspiring chef, is pulling away from their deep friendship and toward her relationship with Josh (Zack Fox).
Frankie and Molly spend most of their time getting high and hanging out until a case of mistaken identity and a briefcase full of a mysterious drug sets them on the run from a Danish pharmaceutical company, the U.S. government and maybe some very powerful squids. And they seem to have developed telekinetic powers and are now communicating with their cats.
Though cannabis is legal in California for both medical and adult recreational use, there can still be an air of rebellion in talking about it so openly. Meyer notes that, in the process of getting her movie made, she learned that weed comedies don’t travel well overseas, becoming something of an issue when it comes to international sales.
“A lot of people don’t get along with weed and so that’s why it still has a bit of a subversive feeling,” Meyer says. “And first of all, it’s not federally legal. There’s still huge chunks of the country and the rest of the world — it’s not legal most other places. So it’s this weird disconnect being in California and having the relationship to it that we have, which is very casual, and then realizing that in other places — “
“It’s so not casual,” Shawkat chimes in, helpfully.
The movie is the debut as writer-director for Meyer, who is marriedto Stewart. The couple produced the film through their company Nevermind Pictures, which they founded with Meyer’s best friend Maggie McLean, also a producer on the project.
“The Wrong Girls” has a tactile and handmade feel to it, inspired by the punk-inflected lo-fi sci-fi of the 1984 cult classic “Repo Man.” Other sources of inspiration were the female friendships of ’90s comedies “Dick” and “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion,” the stoned logic of “The Big Lebowski” and “Smiley Face,” the general spirit of misadventure in “Wayne’s World” and “Beavis and Butthead Do America” and the chaotic satire of Věra Chytilová’s radical 1966 Czech film “Daisies.”
“I think my taste in general lives at the nexus of a highbrow, lowbrow intersection,” Meyer says. “And I think that all of those influences came together to hopefully make something that feels like that now.”
Not that they were constantly making conscious references (they call it “pulling refs”) while working on their own film. The movie was made with a spirit of creativity and fun and now that they are promoting it, there is a challenge in maintaining that same mentality.
“I’m stoked actually to be doing all these silly eating shows and, like, smoke weed here, smoke weed there, instead of super-didactic interviews about why this movie’s so important,” says Stewart. “It’s like, dude, it either captures your curiosity and imagination and you want to go see it or it doesn’t. It’s not about what we’re trying to posit into culture, even though it does attempt to posit a very particular thing.”
There is a purposeful anti-authoritarian streak running through the film that makes it feel, even as purely fun as it is, like more than just a woozy lark.
“Actually now that we’re here sitting down with the L.A. Times, this would be the one environment that it would be kind of right to do that,” Stewart adds.
As the topic turns to the film’s exploration of female friendship, Stewart interjects, “That it. I’m going to smoke some weed — that got too serious.” She reaches for the joint and lights up, continuing to take the occasional drag throughout the rest of our conversation.
The script is rooted in Meyer’s own real-life friendship with McLean (minus the international pharmaceutical conspiracy). McLean’s now-husband — the inspiration for the boyfriend character and actually named Josh — did the title design and other art for the movie.
Meyer describes the story of Frankie and Molly as “a romance, full stop.” Her film rejects the idea that one has to give up the close intimacies of friendship once you transition into a coupled-up phase of life.
“It’s kind of sad to be like: When we get older, we all have to isolate and not be as close,” says Stewart. “You can find shapes and models that aren’t represented by the sort of classic idea of success that we all are raised by. I love this movie as a coming-of-age story for 36-year-old women who are just trying to be like, ‘But I actually don’t want to change.’”
“And I think we associate that kind of immaturity and stagnation with men a lot more than we do with women,” Meyer adds. “But I know a lot of immature stagnant women and I have been an immature stagnant woman. And I believe they’re out there. I think that there are more of them than we’ve been led to believe.”
“And that they’ve been gaslit into thinking that they’re stagnant when they actually just know who they are,” says Stewart.
In actuality, Meyer was more Frankie and McLean was more Molly, though she says once Stewart and Shawkat were cast, the characters came to life more on their own. And for Stewart, playing a character based on someone she has such a personal relationship with was less complicated than might be expected.
“There were aspects of Frankie’s character that I know are in Dylan, but I was not trying to capture an essence,” says Stewart, an Oscar nominee for her portrayal of Diana, Princess of Wales in “Spencer.”
“I was never looking to her thinking that this was autobiography or anything,” she says. “I also really did want to come at it with my own neuroses because Frankie does have a kind of ahead-of-herself, afraid but then overly-confident overcompensation in reaction to that. And I’m like, I get that. And I don’t think Dylan really has that. Honestly, my overlaps interested me more than any overlaps with her.”
The movie can sometimes feel purposefully sloppy but somehow it’s never slapdash. Even the strangest of things happen for a reason, like when a life-size Celine Dion cutout goes missing and later reappears. A cast of unpredictable characters played by the likes of LaKeith Stanfield, Kate McKinnon and Geena Davis all cycle through. “The Wrong Girls” comes to have its own wayward sense of internal logic, navigating off a slightly woozy compass.
“As dumb and playful and crazy as it is, it has amazing structure,” says Shawkat of the story, which lured her both as a comedy and as something more sophisticated. “And that’s actually really hard to do and connect the tissue of all of it and have emotional stakes.”
Though Stewart is perhaps more publicly known as a dog person, frequently photographed walking the mixed-breed rescue she has had for some 13 years (“I don’t want to get weird in the L.A. Times but she’s my everything — she’s my soulmate”) she also has a cat named Cozy she is very close with.
And “The Wrong Girls” is very much a cat person’s movie. When Frankie and Molly begin to communicate with their cats, the felines are voiced by Seth Rogen and Kumail Nanjiani. Meyer recalls that when she lived with McLean there was a seemingly endless cycle of cats that would stay with them for varying periods of time.
For the record, Meyer considers herself both a cat and a dog person — “I’m just an animal dude overall,” she says — but felt cats worked better for the story.
“They also feel like little aliens,” says Stewart. “I don’t know if we’re understanding really that they are interdimensional creatures. I’m telling you, they’re darting their eyes around the room and then they kind of know how you’re feeling. I’m like, ‘You guys are truly psychedelic.’ I don’t think that we’re living in the same dimension.”
“Also dog telekinesis would be really frantic,” says Shawkat, who has no pets. “It would just be like, ‘You’re home! You’re home!’”
“I think cats are like works of art that inspire you to be truer to yourself,” Meyer says. “They’re a good foil for the ‘wrong girls’ because cats are such not wrong girls. They’ve got it together.”
The movie has invented its own intuitive archetype, so that now they all find themselves saying, “That’s so ‘wrong girls’” in certain situations. Annoyances and inconveniences of varying degrees, often of one’s own doing, such as getting to the airport with the wrong documents or forgetting to take out the trash for a long time, all fall under this handy new rubric.
“Enjoying whatever happens and being able to pick up the pieces,” says Stewart of what makes a wrong girl. “And pick them up with a kind of chill nature, like you know it’s going to work out. It might take six steps versus two but you’re going to get it done.”
“I think it’s somebody who struggles to get from point A to point B in the same normal way that another person might do it,” adds Meyer. “And maybe has more joy and more adventure in that journey.”
Whatever it is, they’ve embraced it. Maybe the wrong girls have been the ones with the right attitude all along.
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