We spoke to Heder about how her real life inspired these heartfelt characters, and how inside every single one of us lurks the capacity to be truly terrible.

Is there real-life inspiration behind Tallulah?

"The inspiration came because I was a nanny and I was working at all these high-end hotels: I had this really odd encounter with a very messed up mother character. The script came from that judgmental place. I was looking at this woman and thinking: I could do a better job of raising this child. Of course, by the time I shot the movie, 10 years later, I had a 16-month-old and I was six months pregnant. So I had a lot more compassion for my villain character."

By the end, even after how horrible she was, I found myself feeling so sorry for her.

"Yeah, I’m interested in always subverting expectations that we have of characters, because that’s a lot of life. Human beings never feel villainous. They all feel justified. Even horrible actions — it’s coming from somewhere in them that feels righteous. I’m particularly interested in characters, especially women, who are not self-aware — who are maybe even a bit delusional — about who they are or what they want."

Lu is a tough character to stomach in this film — is she also built from someone IRL?

"She was modelled a bit on a friend of mine who I grew up with, and [who] ended up living out of her van for many years. [My friend] eschewed all of these societal norms: She didn’t have a bank account. She didn’t have a phone. She was just living completely off the grid. I found her in New York and I was just so freaked out that she was living in her van as a young woman, so I said you have to come stay with me. And she stayed with me for two weeks and kind of turned my life upside down during that time. On one hand, I was totally in awe and envious of her because she didn’t give two fucks. She had a dollar in her sock. She would walk up to any truck on the street and say what do you have back there and can I have a box of it, and they would give it to her. She just had this charm and charisma. That was her way of floating through life.

"I think over the course of the time that she stayed with me I started to see that this enviable quality of living moment to moment was also quite selfish and dangerous, and there was this much darker side to that. Someone who lives a consequence-free existence can’t truly make connections with other people, and have relationships, and have love in their life, because it’s a narcissistic way to live, in a sense. In society, we have to have consequences in our head because that’s the reason we behave and are kind to each other. I liked that duality."