Interview: With ‘Girls Like Girls,’ Hayley Kiyoko Goes From Pop Princess to Filmmaking Queen
How many films were spawned from a song? Sure, you have musicians’ biopics and some sly twists like Purple People Eater or Monster Mash, but how many can you say were directed by an artist a full decade after their zeitgeisty song dropped? Hayley Kiyoko’s Girls Like Girls, named after her 2015 anthem with the same title, has entered the ring.
Released just days before Obergefell v. Hodges was decided, Kiyoko’s lesbian pop song made waves among queer fans and Tumblr users at large. The song is hypnotic and energizing with a catchy, defiant chorus to boot. Eight years later, Kiyoko adapted the song into a novel and said of it, “I can’t leave this earth until I expand this story.” Three years on, she’s adapted it once more.
Girls Like Girls, in its cinematic form, is a dreamy coming-of-age story set in the mid-2000s about Coley (Maya da Costa), a shy and emotionally exposed teen girl whose recent loss of her mother has left her adrift and stuck with her father (Zach Braff) who she never got to know. While adjusting to her new life, she develops a crush on Sonya (Myra Molloy), a popular girl in town who quickly befriends her. As their friendship teeters on becoming something more, their turbulent teenage emotions and crushing social expectations threaten to derail what could be.
On the eve of its opening weekend, Kiyoko sat down with me to discuss the film, its path to production, and what it means to produce queer art in an increasingly right-wing atmosphere.
August Hammel: I was just reading other interviews with you around the film and the book, and you – in Interview – said that you couldn’t rest on this earth until you expanded the story. What is it about Girls Like Girls specifically that you kept coming back, and why couldn’t you rest?
Hayley Kiyoko: I kept thinking about how I had never had the opportunity to be able to buy a ticket to a theater and see a story that honestly and authentically told exactly what I had experienced and visually represented how I looked in cinema. That was always my driving force of, “Why does that not exist? And how do I make that exist?”
AH: Your song and music video [for “Girls Like Girls”] came out 11 years ago now. You were 24 when it came out.
HK: Oh!
AH: I am sorry to say. I’m 23 now!
HK: Woof. That’s like a lifetime ago.
AH: No, but it’s taken a decade to get here, and you’ve changed as an artist and as a person, I’m sure. You’ve gotten engaged, everything happens in a decade. How did those changes as an artist and as a person inform the making of the movie?
HK: It informs everything. When you mature and work on yourself to grow, you start building more compassion and empathy for your younger self and the things that you crave and the things that you wish you had and needed at that time, especially for me, knowing I was a lesbian for so long and having that experience being so silent and not being able to share that with people. I think also my relationship with Sonya, the character, has evolved. Sonya ripped my heart open in high school. So to be able to direct this film with more compassion and empathy for a Sonia made the film so much better. Weirdly, I truly hate how long it’s taken for this film to get made, but on the other side of the coin, I’m so grateful for the journey because I think, had I directed it in my 20s, it would have been a very different film.
AH: Well, you wrote a song about the green lighting process of this and how long it took.
HK: You went deep! I literally wrote a song called “Green Light” then manifested and got the green light.
AH: And now we’re here! It’s Pride Month. This is a big lesbian film that’s being released on many screens during Pride. Did you have a conversation about that with either Focus [Features] or [producer] Marc Platt? Did you have any say in that?
HK: I mean, I walked through those doors about a year ago, and I said, “My dream is that this film gets released during the summer and during Pride, but I understand if that’s not possible, because a summer release is very competitive.” Toy Story 5 is coming out! Steven Spielberg’s movie is coming out! So the possibility of this film even getting a summer release was small in my mind. The fact that Focus Features and Marc Platt were able to find a way to make this happen for the community and to support us in such a massive way as allies has been an absolute dream.
AH: To talk about the production, once you had the script ready – you wrote it with two co-writers at the story level [Chloe Okuno] and then at the script level [Stefanie Scott] – how did you know that [Maya da Costa and Myra Molloy] were the right ones? And how did you work about developing a bond with them individually and as a unit?
HK: Maya was the very first audition tape that I had seen and we had 4,000 submissions. When I watched her tape, I saw a lot of myself in her. She was so naturally awkward and uncomfortable in her own skin in the best way, she was 18 at the time. Myra had auditioned for Coley and I brought her back for Sonya. We did this chemistry read and a bunch of different pairings, and I remember they were doing the parking lot scene towards the end of the movie, and I forgot that I was watching the chemistry read, and I genuinely felt like I was watching the movie. That was the moment where I was like, “Oh my gosh, I think these are the ones.”
AH: It must be a special thing, tracking a project over 10 years and then finally–
HK: Yeah, I remember developing the film and the project and being like, “Gosh, I wonder who Coley is.” And you know what’s crazy, is that Maya was 9 or 10 years old when the music video came out. So it’s crazy, I was thinking about how there was probably this young person in the world living their life, having no idea that they were about to be the lead in my film.
AH: Maya, her character Coley, is such an exposed nerve of a character. She doesn’t really have a poker face.
HK: Yes. That’s a great way to put it.
AH: How did you go about developing Coley’s character, first at the novel stage, and then when adapting your adaptation?
HK: It was never like, “You do this when this happens, you do this when that happens.” It was always down to the emotional experience. This is how I felt when this happened. As a young person, I was very emotional. I was very, highly emotional. I was constantly navigating my experience silently and wasn’t able to share it with people. I had a lot of anxiety about that. So, we would really work together to talk about what that experience felt like for me, what that experience felt like for her. We would do a scene until I felt it in my core like, “Oh yeah, that’s exactly how it felt when that happened.” Because a lot of the scenes from the film, I lived through [like] the jean jacket scene, when she goes to get the jacket from Sonya. I was able to give her insight like, “This is what happened and this is how I felt.” At this point, we were able to have a really beautiful dialogue. Same with Myra. Sonya is a really a complex character to take on because she is doing things with her words and her actions that hurt people, but I don’t believe that Sonya is necessarily a bad person. It was really a challenge to navigate that fine line. So it felt multi-dimensional.
AH: You get at that sort of universal feeling that I feel like most queer people feel at some point where it’s that panging desire, it’s all caught in like glances and brushes.
HK: Yearning and panging. Yes.
AH: A lot of those moments are soundtracked to songs that you wrote for the movie. Did you write the soundtrack concurrently to filming? When did you know that you would also be developing a new catalog of songs for the film?
HK: When we locked picture, I tried to get certain songs for the film and we didn’t have the resources or budget to do so. Basically, out of necessity, I ended up going through some old ideas I had when I was 16. I ended up completing them and writing them for the film, so those are two of the songs. Then the third song, Falling Through, we wrote off of a sample of my voice when I was 16. The “you, you” is actually my voice from 2006. It was really special because it wasn’t intentional, but it ended up being the right approach to narrate this journey with the girls and be like the siren song for them.
AH: Speaking of 2006, the film is set around the mid-aughts, which is when you grew up. Was that the sole intention behind setting it in the period? Or what was your process defining that this would be a period piece?
HK: Just through my honest experience. When I fell in love with my Sonya and developed that crush, that was the time period. It felt super authentic to keep it that way.
AH: Was there a moment making the movie that defined the experience for you either as a filmmaker or – because you’re a multi-hyphenate, you’ve been involved with films before, you’ve been an actor, now you’re behind the camera – was there a moment where you just had to pause and realize this is actually happening and not just something that has been gestating for 10 years.
HK: It was the very first day and they asked me if I wanted to call action. And I was like, “I forgot about that part!” It was a scene when the two girls are sitting on Sonya’s couch. I remember seeing the crew, the costumes, the hair and makeup and everything coming to life. Literally full body chills. I was like, “I cannot believe we’re finally shooting this film. And I pray that we complete the shoot,” because so many projects – you’d start a movie and maybe you don’t finish. There are so many unknowns in cinema. But that was a moment where I was like, “I’m so glad I didn’t give up during all of the hardships and all of the no’s and all the sacrifices that went into being committed to telling the story.”
AH: It’s coming out at a weird time. If you take a step back from when the music video was released, we’ve taken leaps and bounds in queer representation, Asian representation, representation in general, but we’re in the middle of an incredibly right wing administration and this kind of encroaching right wing sensibility into the country. How do you feel bringing this into the world at a tumultuous time for the queer community and POC communities in general?
HK: It feels pretty radical. This film is called Girls Like Girls, and it means the worlds that we’re able to have a theatrical release in this political climate because I think the more we’re able to send a signal to the youth and generations at large that their existence matters, that their stories matter, that there are allies out there that support and love them for who they are. It changes the conversation because I think we all feel so isolated and alone. We’re all flabbergasted by the hate in this world. Having a film about queer joy and being able to celebrate this community and show allyship within this movement is immensely powerful.
AH: I asked you earlier how the last 10 years changed you as a person, as an artist, going into the movie. How has this movie changed you as an artist and as a person coming out? Where do you see yourself going next?
HK: I feel like I’ve truly found what I love to do, which is directing and filmmaking and storytelling. I feel a sense of calm and confidence in myself. There were so many moments where I was like, “I know I can do this, but I’ve never done it before. And I don’t know how to convince the world that our stories matter and that the community will show up.” Even though I had to go full steam ahead, there was always a birdie in my brain scared and nervous about if I was doing the right thing, if I was putting my energy into the right path. I feel very confident and proud of this film. It’s a film that I wish I had growing up. That that’s what art is all about, is taking up space that we wish we had before and to utilize our trauma and our experiences to allow others to maybe experience a little less trauma.
AH: What do you hope that people who see the film – who maybe don’t live in a city like San Francisco that I’m lucky enough to be in – who aren’t in these kinds of liberal cities and these metropolitan areas, what do you hope they take away from the film?
HK: I hope they’re reminded that their existence and love matters and that there are millions and millions of people in this world that love them for who they are. I hope that it instills confidence in themselves to live their most authentic truths. As humans, we start as who we are, and then we’re consistently being edited. We’re editing ourselves to fit into boxes that don’t belong to us. And eventually, we always go back to where we began. I hope that this film helps people take a shorter journey back to who they truly are, because we always end up back to the beginning.
AH: I could not leave this room without telling you that my partner had a password for a very important site, about 10 years ago, that was “Lesbian Jesus” with many exclamation points and characters.
HK: Oh my God, what? That’s amazing!
AH: And of course, their hint for it was your name.
HK: I just love that. No one’s told me that before. That’s a great password.
Girls Like Girls opens in theaters everywhere June 19 from Focus Features.
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