Bujalski has been referred to by some as “the godfather of mumblecore,” a subgenre referring to the naturalistic style of dialogue in his films, but it’s a title he hasn’t always embraced. “[Mumblecore] was a tag that got applied more than a decade ago now to some kind of low budget, chatty, character-focused movies,” he says. “At the time it felt like you pour your heart and soul into something and then people want to reduce it to a funny word, but in retrospect it’s something that I feel more warmth about to the extent that there was a creative and supportive and productive community, so I’m plenty happy to be associated with that.” “The best I can do to summarize it is it’s a movie about a very determined, incurable optimist having her optimism battered over the course of a day,” says Bujalski. “It’s the story of what she goes through, what she gets out of that, and what it means when the best of intentions blow up in your face. All Lisa ever wants to do is take care of people and be good to people and to an almost pathological degree, and it gets her in trouble. The movie is that journey, and I think maybe the movie is also posing the question then, ‘What is the value of good intentions? Is it still worth something even if they don’t work out the way you wanted?’” The naturalistic feel of Support the Girls doesn’t come from the improvised dialogue associated with mumblecore, however; it’s the fact that Lisa and her girls are far from perfect, and the customers and the overbearing owner of Double Whammies aren’t entirely bad. “For me as a writer and as a human, I’m not that interested in heroes and villains,” Bujalski explains. “It’s not terribly appealing to me to knock over a straw man or to put somebody on a pedestal. I’m always just trying to meet people where they are… I can’t write a character I can’t, on some level, like… It’s also the reality of a lot of our lives; I think a lot of us are sympathetic while being faintly ridiculous.” Read the Den of Geek SDCC 2018 Special Edition Magazine Here! Much has been made of Hall’s performance in Support the Girls, Lisa being a challenging role to enact in a film the premise of which Bujalksi admits may have been a tough sell for some. “I’m sure there were plenty of actors who saw the log line that said, ‘Here we are in a Hooters-esque sports bar,’… who didn’t read past that, but the ones who were game enough to give it a read and maybe could sense a little of what we were going for, we couldn’t have been luckier to pull together the group that we did. For me, top to bottom, it’s quite an extraordinary cast. And of course Regina as the lynchpin, she holds everything together.” Michael Ahr is a news writer and podcaster here at Den of Geek; you can check out his work here or follow him on Twitter. The full audio of the above interview is available on The Den of Geek Podcast (at 24:09).
