For decades, the “stoner comedy” has been a heavily male-dominated subgenre, often leaning on the same predictable tropes. With “The Wrong Girls” (premiering August 14 from NEON), writer-director Dylan Meyer subverts the formula entirely.

Starring Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat as two codependent best friends living “paycheck to paycheck and bong rip to bong rip,” the film is a chaotic, brash, and snarky ride. Tackling the very real, unpolished anxieties of women in their 30s and 40s—heartbreak, death, financial doom, and finding joy at the end of the world—Meyer’s directorial debut represents a refreshing shift in how we approach female-led humor.

Meyer wrote the script solo more than a decade ago as one of her very first projects. After spending more than ten years building an impressive screenwriting portfolio—including work with HBO, Bad Robot, and Point Grey, as well as writing Amy Poehler’s “Moxie”—the stars finally aligned for Meyer to step into the director’s chair and bring her exact, specific “thumbprint” to the screen.

In addition to directing “The Wrong Girls,” Meyer co-founded the production company Nevermind Pictures with Kristen Stewart and producer Maggie McLean. The company reflects the same DIY spirit that runs through the film: creating opportunities, supporting distinctive filmmakers, and making projects that feel a little “freaky” and left of center.

In this conversation, Meyer discusses the origins of “The Wrong Girls,” her longtime friendship with McLean that inspired the film, the importance of female friendship, working with Geena Davis and Kate McKinnon, building the film’s two distinct visual worlds, and her hope that audiences feel encouraged to live life on their own terms.

Absolutely — I smoothed the transcript for readability, removed the “yeahs” and other verbal clutter, tightened repetition, and kept the speaker’s voice and meaning intact.

Could you start by talking about your production company before we get into the film? I read a little bit about you all coming together with Maggie and Kristen. Can you talk about what got you started with the production company and whether you have a mission for the projects that you develop?

Maggie’s been my best friend since I was about 22 years old. We’ve been friends for 15 years. We lived together for five years, and I wrote “The Wrong Girls” about Maggie and me living together.

When we lived together, we had a series of odd jobs—bartending, working as a casting director’s assistant, working as a PA on commercials, all kinds of things. Our careers were really going in different directions, and we didn’t even understand that they had an overlap.

When Maggie moved in with me, I don’t think she knew that she wanted to be a producer exactly. But after continuing to succeed in commercials, she became a really young, really good producer. I was a working writer, and I knew that I needed Maggie to produce whatever I worked on. So when I made my short film, Maggie produced it, and that was sort of the beginning of us working together in that way.

Once Kristen and I were together, she didn’t have a producer she loved, and I was like, “You know, Maggie is just an unbelievable asset in a way that is rare and special.” We knew that we needed Maggie to produce both of our movies, but we were having to share her with commercials and other projects.

“The Wrong Girls” had funding and lost funding so many times. There was no easy way to get her out of doing commercials without beginning something that was more stable and consistent. So Nevermind Pictures was really born from, “We need Maggie to make our movies.”

From there, it was like, “Well, we could do this all together.” We bring these unique skill sets. We have two writer-directors, an actor, and a physical producer. Most people who run talent-led production companies don’t have a background in physical production; they come from development. So it was actually really unique.

It was in the spirit of the company overall, which is a DIY spirit. It doesn’t wait for people to say yes to you, but rather uses your own scrappy, unique skill sets to build something together. It sort of organically formed that way, where we realized that we could help other people bring their projects along in addition to what we do.

For me, being a filmmaker and a writer-director is always the A column.

Maggie’s, in a way, the real producer amongst all of us. We’re the taste and some of the curation and some of the crafting, but when it comes to putting the screws to it, Maggie goes and gets it done.

Our mission statement is that we don’t try to make Hollywood studio films. We don’t want a really inflated, sort of sub-$15-million company overall. It’s about getting stuff that’s a little freaky and a little left of center in a joyful way, whatever that looks like. It’s about creating a pipeline to making things we haven’t seen before and supporting filmmakers we believe in with the assets that we happen to have to share.

You touched on this with your production company, but can you talk about the inspiration for this film? I know Maggie was a big inspiration. Talk about working on the script, getting it to the screen, and why it was so important for you to bring this story to the screen.

Maggie is the number-one inspiration. I definitely wrote it about our little “Dumb and Dumber” life together. But I think all of the girls who have propped me up over the years are an inspiration.

Female friendship as a survival mechanism and an essential ingredient to mental health—that’s all inspiration.

It’s for all my wrong girls. And when I say “wrong girls,” I just mean women who maybe aren’t adhering to certain conventional standards that have historically applied to women: tidiness, capability, and these things that I think women get saddled with more than men do.

I really wanted there to be a love letter to these messy women and a sense of unity that felt like something I hadn’t seen in a movie before. I didn’t feel like people made messy comedies about women and their friends in the same way that they make them about men and their friendships.

I really wanted to make a romantic movie about friendship. I really think that Maggie is my soulmate on this Earth just as much as Kristen is. I am only getting from one place to another because of the support of my community and the women in my life. These are relationships that deserve to be canonized. I think they’ve been underexamined a little bit in cinema.

I love that you brought Geena Davis into the film because she has “Thelma and Louise.” I know she’s dedicated her life to helping bring stories to the screen that aren’t represented enough. Can you talk about how you got connected with her and brought her into this film?

This is kind of a crazy story, and it’s a little long, so I’m going to try to shorten it.

My mom died when I was very little, when I was about six and a half. I spent probably the year following her death watching “A League of Their Own.” Geena’s voice reminded me of my mom. She kind of looks like her a little bit, and I just projected a lot of mom stuff onto Geena Davis very early in life.

Over the years, I developed something that was jokingly referred to as the “celebrity mom wish list,” which was different celebrities I fantasized about being my mom. Geena was the frontrunner on this list forever. There was really no competition. It was a list of one. There were a couple of others, but mostly everyone in my life knew that I had this weird “I wish Geena Davis was my mom” thing.

Then someone I knew cast her in their film, and they were like, “Are you going to come meet Geena? She’s here. Now’s your chance.”

And I was like, “I’m never supposed to meet Geena. I have this creepy mom thing about her. I’ll cry. I’ll do something weird. It’s just not supposed to happen.”

I was really bullied into going down there, and I had this really vulnerable experience with her where I was lied to and told that she already knew about the mom thing—but I don’t think that was true. Then I heard this very weird monologue that I immediately felt self-conscious about, and she was like, “So, you want me to adopt you?”

And I was like, “Yes. Adopt me.”

And she kind of did. That was over 15 years ago. She would take me to lunch sometimes, read all my scripts, and text me on holidays. Even though she had her own biological children, she was just sort of a mom character for me over a long period of time.

I don’t know why she said yes to this. I will never know. But she’s just really great. And I think it’s part of her DNA, her mission statement about uplifting other women. It’s not the most surprising thing in the world, but we just really connected even then.

I think she must have read “The Wrong Girls “back then as well, because she was a fan of its many iterations and incarnations. When I was making this movie, I was like, “Do you mind? Do you want to come down and be a part of it?”

It felt like such a closing of the loop of this incredible—again, my community of women has been really strong in my life, and she’s a part of that. So I did know her already, but I do feel that she’s a symbol of feminism and female empowerment, and it felt exactly right to have her be a part of this movie.

And then Kate McKinnon—I’m just curious, how do you shoot scenes with her without laughing like crazy? How do you get things done with her? Because I wouldn’t be able to do it.

I’m going to put “once directed Kate McKinnon” on my tombstone. That was just a once-in-a-lifetime, lightning-in-a-bottle thing for me. I hope it’s not once in a lifetime, but it felt unique.

If you were to watch all of the footage from the scenes that we shot with her, everyone is laughing the whole time. I nearly ruined so many takes because it was so hard not to laugh.

We just made a gag reel, and I reconnected with many of the different things that we didn’t use in the movie. It’s impossible. She’s so generative in terms of ideas and things to add. Getting to have her in the movie was the gift of a lifetime. I barely had to do anything to make her scenes hilarious.

I also targeted her as a cat person. I think I was saying this to someone else—I targeted a lot of cat people to come be a part of this movie because I thought that might grease the wheels of, “Do you want to come be a part of this?”

There’s probably 15 minutes of her saying different versions of “fuck my ass” in that lab, and we were all just weeping with laughter. I can’t believe Kristen and Alia were able to keep a straight face while it was going on. I was just covering my mouth so that I couldn’t hear the audio.

And the other thing about that bit is that, before we started, she was like, “You’re going to have to manage the tone because, left unchained, I can really get out of control.”

And that was the most tempting offer I’ve ever received. I just thought, “What happens if that happens?” I think I managed the tone enough to make the movie still function, but I really thought it would be a missed opportunity not to allow Kate McKinnon to deliver on the fastballs she’s capable of.

So, let her go.

I want to talk about some of your behind-the-scenes people. First of all, telepathy—it was funny, I was having a hard time saying that before. I don’t know why. But I know you did a lot with voices and sound, and I want to get to some specific people. Can you talk about the process of ADR and working with your voice actors for the cats?

It was actually really interesting, and it was a lot of trial and error, as you might imagine.

One of the gifts of that element is that you could keep rewriting jokes, workshopping them, and recording them at different times. We did initial recording sessions with Kristen, Alia, Seth (Rogen), and Kumail (Ali Nanjiani) before we started shooting so that we would have things for everyone to react to in the scenes and so they wouldn’t be lost.

Some of those recordings had been done so early—from a table read that we’d had years before. So then we re-recorded some of those things on set, live, so that we could have different versions.

There was real trial and error with these things called earwigs. Do you want the telepathy in your ear, or is that distracting? Is it locking you into one performance? The first week of shooting was a lot of figuring out how the telepathy element was going to work.

Then we found a groove. There is a real limit to how far you can stretch the matching of the performance to the audio. We realized, especially in the edit, that you can’t plop anything down on there. It really does have to work with the physicality, or it ruins the whole element.

Then, while we were editing, I would often ask the girls, or Seth and Kumail, for voice notes to try out as temp audio on certain jokes that we were workshopping or dialogue we were adjusting, and we’d try it with those.

Then we re-recorded after the edit was finished one last time to match some of the audio to picture, and we would try out some new jokes to see if we could improve things or create more dynamic arcs for the cats.

It was a real gift to be able to continue improving upon those things. It was a challenge, but it was also so fun, and all of them are so funny. Getting to go over and over those things was really helpful.

And then I want to talk about working with your production designer, Katie Hickman. That apartment, man—I just, there had to be so much thought in all the little pieces, the bongs and the things thrown around. How did that collaboration work with Katie on the production design?

Katie’s a genius. She’s smart and cool. I knew her from “Love Lies Bleeding;” she designed that.

At one point, she made a book for this, but a lot of the stuff in that apartment is either personal belongings of mine or things I gave Katie. I gave her extensive pictures of Maggie and my old apartment and the things we had in there.

I’m trying to evolve to a less-tchotchke-oriented moment of my own life now, but I think I’m somebody who has a lot of little anti-treasures and things that have piled up. So I had a lot of that stuff.

Then we would just go back and forth sharing different references. There’s a range—on one side, something that’s more cutesy than I would want the girls to be, and on the other side, something that’s too adult. So finding the middle was important.

It was really important to me that their own furniture and their own stuff had a sense of humor—that they were in on the joke of themselves a little bit. These are not people who are completely unaware of the comedy of their lifestyle. They know that they’re a bit unique.

I think their own sense of humor really plays out in a lot of the stuff that’s in their apartment.

When we talked about this movie, Katie and I, and also Todd (Banhazl), my DP, always thought of it as a movie of two universes. There was the universe of the girls and the universe of the normal world. We were trying to make a distinction between those two environments.

The girls’ world felt cluttered, comfy, colorful, psychedelic, tactile, and textural, versus the cold sterility of Tony Hale’s house in the Valley—completely devoid of stuff, with white, hard surfaces.

The difference between right angles and more organic materials all came up. So the places that are of the girls—their house, the Superstar’s Buffet, the punk show they play—were all part of that.

The punk show was actually shot in an old punk space where I grew up going to punk shows. It had been closed for years, but they reopened it for us. It was still kind of just as we left it, which was amazing. That space was something I said to Katie, “This is where we need to go.”

She was able to take those elements and amplify them into a more magical and cinematic space.

It’s always the two universes. It’s like girl world and then normal world.

I love how you use L.A. I was actually just in L.A. earlier, in July, and I haven’t been there in years. It was cool to see how it was kind of a love letter to the city as well. And this is probably a separate interview, but all the things you guys are doing with movie theaters and historic locations—I just think that’s so cool. I don’t know if you want to comment on that, or I can go to the next question.

Maggie, Kristen, and I are all townies. So I wanted to celebrate the townie version of the city that isn’t the “I Love L.A.” version, which is the transplant version of the city that we usually see.

Not that there aren’t celebrations of townies. “The Big Lebowski” is the ultimate townie Los Angeles movie for me, and I really saw myself in that part of it, obviously.

So it was all about revealing that there’s another side to this place that is not ambitious and has no hustle and isn’t chasing anything. There are a lot of different people who live here doing a lot of different things, and there are a lot of different ways to live your life. A lot of them have nothing to do with the entertainment industry at all.

I really wanted to show that there were whole communities of suburban sprawl that just didn’t have anything to do with that. I wanted to celebrate those things.

A question I always ask, just because I get the best answers, is: What do you hope people see in your film?

I hope that they have fun watching the movie, but I hope that it inspires them to live life on their own terms, whatever those are.

It’s a movie about fighting for your right to party and to be yourself.

And it’s kind of an anti-capitalist movie in its way. It’s very much about what success looks like and how that could be many, many different things. It’s about finding what that looks like for you and not adhering to some prescribed idea of success.

This is a movie about two codependent people who, yes, move out of their home at the end, but then start a business together and are very, very entwined. That’s the way they want to live their life.

I just hope that when you watch it, you’re encouraged to be yourself and commit to yourself, whatever that looks like for you.

I’m really excited about The Challenger. I covered the documentary on Sally Ride, “Sally” that was at Sundance last year, and I just think having a series is really exciting. I don’t know if you could talk about that yet. I believe it’s coming out later this year, but if you can—

I’m involved in that only in a pretty limited capacity. That’s really a Maggie show on that one.

But I will say, I just watched that Sally Ride documentary a couple of days ago because this is starting to be—we’re about to begin that process. So that’s coming up shortly.

But Sally moves me. That’s all I can really say about that. I think we’ve never done a TV show before. Kristen’s never been in a TV show before, and we’re all curious what that experience is going to be.

Some stories take longer than others and are more suited to that medium. And this one’s going to be epic because Sally was epic.

I heard the documentary, and I was so moved by her and the fact of her. I’m so excited. I think Kristen’s going to be an incredible Sally. I think that’s going to be great.

But I’m not personally crafting it that much.

Was there anything else you wanted to touch on? We’ll focus on “The Wrong Girls,” but if you have any other things you want to promote.

We’re executive producers on a Barbara Hammer documentary (“Barbara Forever”) that’s going to come out.

It feels kind of in the same spirit. We’re really proud to be a part of that. We’re all huge Barbara Hammer fans.

So that’ll be coming out. I think we’re doing stuff at the Hammer Museum, oddly.

And then we have a bunch of other projects that are sort of percolating around. We just produced something called “Flesh of the Gods” that Kristen’s in and that Panos Cosmatos directed. That’ll be really cool, too.

And then I have my next projects, but I’m sort of hesitant to give them a voice in this moment because they’re still just a twinkle in my eye.