Director Katarina Zhu on Besties, Bunnies, and Bad Breakups

Bunnylovr, Katarina Zhu’s debut directorial feature, is a fresh take on the classic mumblecore tale of a directionless 20-something in New York. Zhu stars as Rebecca, a recent grad stuck in a dead-end PA job, supplementing her income by camming. Her post-college, post-breakup slump is disrupted by two mysterious figures: a stunning and rare bunny gifted by a persistent client, and her estranged father, who Rebecca encounters by chance on the street in Chinatown.

“I love Tiny Furniture and Frances Ha, but I’ve never fully seen myself in those films,” Zhu confessed when we sat down to chat after her Sundance Film Festival premiere. “I wanted to create my version, centering young Asian American women, without making it just about being Asian American.”

Bunnylovr is a tantalizing mix of sexy, disturbing, and moving. Zhu is unafraid of her own vain and deeply human impulses, and the result is a painfully relatable portrayal of the highs and lows of young womanhood. There’s even a montage of Rebecca cleaning her room so she can take selfies with her new bunny while listening to “detonate,” by Charli xcx. “I just texted Charli,” quipped Zhu’s friend and co-star Rachel Sennott at the premiere. Below, Zhu gives us her takes on breakups, Babygirl, and bunny-handling, and gets into the challenges of working double-duty on her very first film.

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JULIETTE JEFFERS: I was at the premiere, which was lovely. I’m sure everyone has been asking you this, but you directed the movie and also acted in it. What was it like balancing those two jobs?

KATARINA ZHU: Yeah, it was definitely a big undertaking, a big challenge, but I think it was made so much easier because I had such an incredible support system around me in my producers and my DP. And honestly, the entire cast and crew created an environment that allowed me to be able to switch between director and actor with such fluidity. Also, so much prep. I think those two things made the job pretty fluid.

JEFFERS: That’s good. I was really struck by the friendship between your character and Rachel [Sennot’s] character. Obviously, it’s a movie about these romantic relationships with men, but the friendship is pretty central. It reminded me a lot of Frances Ha, sort of.

ZHU: Totally. I feel like this was my version of—I love the Tiny Furniture and the Frances Ha of the world, but I’ve never seen myself completely in those films, so I wanted to to do my version of that and center it on young, Asian American women, but not make a movie that’s just about being Asian American.

JEFFERS: Totally. It’s so interesting how, when you’re in those stages of life where you’re feeling very lost, you don’t realize that that’s going to be a big part of the story you’re eventually going to tell.

ZHU: Completely.

JEFFERS: How did that come about for you?

ZHU: Well, I always say that nothing makes you level up like a breakup.

JEFFERS: So true.

ZHU: Whenever my friends are like, “I don’t know, I feel like I shouldn’t be with this person, things are feeling weird.” I’m immediately like, “Break up.” That’s the best thing that will ever happen to you. But obviously everything needs to happen in its own time, and there’s no pushing yourself to do something if you’re not ready. But those moments where you feel more wayward and lost become the most transformative and formative moments. I was inspired by one of my own breakups, one that pushed me into this place of such discomfort that I had no choice but to change. And I think that’s sort of what happens with Rebecca in the film—she gets a little banged up along the way, but she’s better for it by the end.

JEFFERS: Definitely. It’s a story of resilience.

ZHU: Exactly.

JEFFERS: In your 20s, most people end up kind of cycling through a lot of whack relationships, but the friendships end up being the grander romances.

ZHU: Absolutely. Sex and the City had it right. I mean, particularly my female friendships are the most enduring and nourishing and most sustainable, too. Those are the ones that last.

JEFFERS: I actually saw the movie with my friend who’s Chinese, and she started crying at one point, so I asked what made her cry. She said, “Culturally, we’re really emotionally repressed. We don’t really say I love you. We don’t talk about our feelings a lot.” Was that something that you were trying to capture in depicting that relationship between father and daughter?

ZHU: For sure. There’s such a cultural difference, and also a generational difference, between Rebecca and her dad, and I really wanted it to feel like a nuanced, authentic portrayal of the Chinese-American experience. I didn’t want anyone to be hit over the head with the fact that it’s like, this is happening in Chinatown, and it’s centered around a Chinese-American character, but I wanted all of that to be so embedded and woven into the fabric of the story that it just felt like any other film.

JEFFERS: It felt very authentic. You approached so many aspects of this movie with so much subtlety. There’s a subtlety to the violence, a subtlety to the eroticism. In the Q&A, you mentioned that there was an earlier version [of the film] that was much more violent. What made you pull back on that?

ZHU: Well, I actually got some really wonderful advice from a producer who read it early on. He was talking about how he likes to work with filmmakers who are considerate of the audience. And he was like, “If you take it there, you’re going to alienate a lot of people. What is the story you’re trying to tell? What is the prevailing feeling that you’re trying to leave the audience with?” And after sitting with it and thinking about it more, I was like, “Well, no, that’s actually not it.” He made a point about filmmakers who take care of their audience. As an audience member, I like to feel taken care of. So that’s definitely something that I considered a lot when going back in and reeling things in a little bit.

JEFFERS: You still were able to go to some really disturbing places.

ZHU: Thank you.

JEFFERS: I mean, I was disturbed. Yeah. We should obviously talk about the bunny.

ZHU: Yes, of course. The titular character.

JEFFERS: First of all, it’s the most beautiful bunny I’ve ever seen in my life.

ZHU: I wanted that very specific breed of bunny, which is a Dwarf Hotot bunny.

JEFFERS: Oh my god.

ZHU: There was a YouTube page called Blue Clover Rabbitry or something. I really just always loved bunnies. They’re the perfect little cute puff ball of a thing. What is there not to love? And I remember following this YouTube channel and they would just post their new litter of baby bunnies all the time. I don’t know if they bred that specific rabbit, but I think it suggested a video of a Dwarf Hotot. They’re just so beautiful and so compact. Their ears are sort of different, then they sort of go back in a way that regular bunny ears. I was looking all over for this specific type of bunny and I found this registry of rabbit breeders for this specific breed. I remember going down the list and emailing all of these different people. And then one woman who answered, she actually had experience using her bunnies in film, TV, photos, and stuff like that. We had to work with this animal agency.

JEFFERS: What was it like working with an animal?

ZHU: You have to relinquish all control when you’re working with kids or animals because they each have their own agendas and there’s no controlling them. There’s no controlling an animal. It’s going to do what it wants. Even a trained animal, if it doesn’t like the environment, is not going to do what it’s trained to do, so there was a bit of a learning curve. But ultimately, at the end I was like, “Wait, do I need a pet bunny? I feel like I need a bunny.” It was providing me emotional support. They’re so skittish, always looking for a hiding place. So I think I had to go to this place of real calm and slow down my heartbeat because I was holding it against my chest and it gives off this really calm sort of energy.

JEFFERS: I think you actually see that in your performance, honestly.

ZHU: Thank you. That’s amazing.

JEFFERS: So you had one bunny for the whole movie?

ZHU: We had two bunnies that we would switch out.

JEFFERS: That makes sense. When you were introducing the movie, you talked about shame a lot. Shame felt like such a big theme in the film. You created such a space for examining the most mundane parts of being a woman. How did that begin in the writing process?

ZHU: Well, thank you for saying that and appreciating it because I feel like it was really important to me to include those things. Making this film became an exercise in giving myself permission to bear parts of myself that I thought were gross or vain or selfish or evil. There are these elements of the film that were slightly sexualized, but I wanted to juxtapose that with the grotesque realities of being a person, of being a woman.

JEFFERS: Of having a body.

ZHU: Literally just having a body. To me, the most interesting things are the most mundane, day-to-day, slice of life things.

JEFFERS: Having an intrusive thought about your dad while masturbating is incredibly normal.

ZHU: Exactly. Why have we never seen that before?

JEFFERS: Did you see Babygirl?

ZHU: Well, it’s funny. When I saw it, I obviously thought of that last scene. I loved Babygirl.

JEFFERS: It was so good.

ZHU: For you to have even invoked Babygirl is the biggest compliment to me. I mean, not that you’re saying they’re the same or whatever, but just that there were even any parallels is really cool.

JEFFERS: Is this your first time at Sundance?

ZHU: It’s my first Sundance.

JEFFERS: Me too.

ZHU: Oh my god. Amazing.How are you finding it?

JEFFERS: I’m having a good time. I’m exhausted.

ZHU: We’re rallying. The adrenaline is taking us through.