Zoë Kravitz refused to censor the title of her directorial debut Pussy Island
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Somewhere nestled between P-Valley and The Lost City of D sits the remote Pussy Island, Zoë Kravitz's directorial debut. But unlike those other titles, no one's taking the vowels out of Kravitz's project — not on her watch.
The singer/actress/style icon/cheekbones from which the world just hangs defended her choice to keep the "-ussy" in her Island with The Wall Street Journal.
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"The title came from that world. The title is the seed of the story," Kravitz says. "It represents this time where it would be acceptable for a group of men to call a place that, and the illusion that we're out of that time now."
Co-written with E.T. Feigenbaum (a writer on Kravitz's cruelly cancelled High Fidelity), Pussy Island was inspired by stories Kravitz had heard about powerful men inviting women to remote islands for hedonistic debauchery and how she would spin that reality into one she would want to see.
The Batman star had started writing the script before the #MeToo movement gained momentum but was "born out of" the same "anger and frustration around the lack of conversation about the treatment of women, specifically in industries that have a lot of money in them, like Hollywood, the tech world, all of that," Kravitz tells WSJ.
The movie stars Naomi Ackie as Frida, a Los Angeles cocktail waitress, and Channing Tatum (whom Kravitz is now dating) as Slater King, the tech bro whom invites her to his private island for myriad one-percenter sexcapades.
"I didn't know Zoë before I met her for the film," Tatum, who's also a co-producer on Pussy Island, said to WSJ. "When we first met the movie was pretty different than its form now, but the themes were the same. All the iterations it has gone through were all pretty punk rock, to be honest."
Pussy Island is currently filming and is expected to be released in 2023. Though Kravitz has been learning on the job and "trying to not constantly be in a state of panic," at least one person is confident in her directorial debut: her KIMI director Steven Soderbergh.
"Of the people that I could name who I think have a real shot at coming out of the gate making something really distinctive and strong," Soderbergh told WSJ, "she's at the top of that list."
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