{"id":367285,"date":"2026-03-31T09:05:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-31T09:05:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/367285\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T09:05:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T09:05:09","slug":"diablo-cody-explores-female-rage-late-stage-capitalism-and-cult-legacies-in-forbidden-fruits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/367285\/","title":{"rendered":"Diablo Cody Explores Female Rage, Late-Stage Capitalism, and Cult Legacies in “Forbidden Fruits”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Diablo Cody has spent her career writing women who are too loud, too angry, too horny, too funny, and often far more honest than pop culture has often known what to do with. From\u00a0Lisa Frankenstein<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0Tully<\/a> to Jennifer\u2019s Body and Juno, her work has examined the messy power dynamics of girlhood and desire long before the culture caught up. With Forbidden Fruits, a razor-edged horror-comedy set inside a mall and fueled by toxic female friendship, Cody finds herself working in a moment finally primed for what she\u2019s been saying all along. <\/p>\n

In conversation with The Credits<\/a>, she reflects on being \u201cahead of her time,\u201d the healing after Jennifer\u2019s Body\u2019s critical reversal, the enduring pull of queer subtext, and why the mall remains both a temple and a hell for young women.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Many of your films center on women. What drew you to this particular script? <\/p>\n

This felt like a no-brainer to me. Even before I heard the pitch, I was informed of what the basic concept was going to be, and I was like, \u2018A coven in a mall! Toxic female friendships!\u2019 I already had a feeling that it might be up my alley. And then, when I heard Meredith and Lily\u2019s pitch, I was immediately enthusiastic and just thought, \u201cI see the vision.\u201d And this is the kind of thing that I like to attach my name to. I like to be involved in projects like this. And it\u2019s also \u2014 for many years, it was a struggle to get projects like this made and seen. And now I feel like we\u2019re in a different zeitgeist, and so, it\u2019s very rewarding to know that there is a place in culture for a movie like Forbidden Fruits, because I don\u2019t know if that was the case 20 years ago.<\/p>\n

It does feel like a lot of your movies, like Jennifer\u2019s Body, were ahead of their time. Whereas now, people are calling them a cult classic.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s been really, honestly, astonishing. I was not expecting that to happen. That movie was such a painful memory for me for so long because it was just savaged by critics when it came out. It flopped. I mean, everything that could have gone wrong with Jennifer\u2019s Body did until, you know, it was discovered by this new generation of viewers, and so that\u2019s been very healing.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I wanted to talk about the queer subtext in a lot of your films, including Forbidden Fruits. Is that something that, within your creative process, you go into thinking, \u2018I want this to be part of the film.\u2019 Or does it just happen naturally?<\/p>\n

It just kind of finds its way in. I would say, with the exception of the Jennifer\u2019s Body sequel that I\u2019m working on right now. I really made a conscious choice to have a lot of queer characters in that movie to salute our audience. But typically, no, it\u2019s really just an organic thing. I mean, the writing process for me \u2026 I find that those themes tend to just kind of weave their way in. It\u2019s almost like a mystical process for me. So there\u2019s very little that happens that\u2019s calculated.<\/p>\n

I saw that Forbidden Fruits was filmed in the same mall as Mean Girls. <\/p>\n

I know\u2014that was serendipitous. It\u2019s so cool. I mean, even the, you know, the fountain for Mean Girls is gone now, but we rebuilt the fountain for Forbidden Fruits. So, yeah, there was definitely the spirit of Mean Girls among us.<\/p>\n

\"\"Lola Tung is Pumpkin in \u201cForbidden Fruits.\u201d Courtesy IFC.<\/p>\n

Can you talk about what the mall setting means for the film\u2019s overall theme and how these girls are essentially trapped in their own reality?<\/p>\n

I mean, the movie is about late-stage capitalism in a lot of ways, and the ways that \u2014 I think now more than ever, people connect through their possessions, which is strange, I guess I can blame social media for that one. And Gen Z, I think, is more fixated on aesthetics than any prior generation \u2014 at least in my observation, I\u2019m sure somebody could prove me wrong. But yeah, the mall feels like an appropriate place for all this to go down, and also, just like the very intimate, heightened, charged setting of a dressing room. I love that they have those confessional moments in the mirror. I grew up going to the mall, and I feel like some of my most vulnerable self-hating moments went down in the back of mall stores. And so it\u2019s kind of a temple and a hell for young women.<\/p>\n

\"\"Lili Reinhart and Meredith Hollway (Director) behind the scenes of Forbidden Fruits. Photo: Sabrina Lantos<\/p>\n

There were a lot of different themes in this film: female rage, toxic female friendships, late-stage capitalism \u2014 like you mentioned \u2014 what were the initial conversations like on the production end of what the end result message was going to be?<\/p>\n

Well, I think, you know, this movie was based on a beautiful play that was written by Lily Houghton, and she had a very clear vision for what this movie needed to be both tonally and thematically. The question was whether they could pull it off. Because this is a very tricky tightrope to walk. When you have comedy elements, when you have horror elements, and you\u2019re talking about feminism. But they pulled it off. But in terms of what we wanted it to be about, I mean, that\u2019s the fun thing about making a movie like this\u2014that\u2019s a little bit offbeat. You\u2019re not going, \u2018Okay, this is what it\u2019s about. It\u2019s about this guy who needs to get home to his son.\u2019 It\u2019s about a lot of things. So, yeah, it\u2019s a little bit messy, but it was also such a beautiful challenge.<\/p>\n

One thing I thought was interesting was that you guys have Gabrielle Union in the film, but the audience never actually sees her. What was the thought process behind that decision?<\/p>\n

Well, the character of Sharon has always been an enigma from the very first draft of the movie. It\u2019s an interesting decision for sure. Sharon is \u2014 I think the metaphor is pretty clear \u2014 like a god-like figure, the manager. So I think having her be unseen is definitely like a choice.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m always interested to know what does and doesn\u2019t make it into the final cut. Was there anything from your perspective that you felt strongly about including that didn\u2019t make the final cut?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think there\u2019s anything that didn\u2019t make it into the cut that I wanted, which is surprising, because usually I have a laundry list that I\u2019m angry about. Usually, I carry a lot of bitterness with me, but not in this case. For me, I wanted to make sure that all the micro moments between the girls stayed intact, because there are moments in this movie that may not push the story forward, but they push the relationships forward, and sometimes those are the moments that are hardest to protect. Because when you\u2019re making cuts, it\u2019s like, \u2018Ok, would the movie still make sense without this scene?\u2019 Yes, it would. But it would be a little less special.<\/p>\n

\"\"Alexandra Shipp, Lili Reinhart, and Emma Chamberlain in \u201cForbidden Fruits.\u201d Courtesy IFC.<\/p>\n

Do you have a specific example?<\/p>\n

A lot of the interactions between Cherry and Apple, I love. I love the relationship between them; it is so poisonous, and it is also, like, sexually charged. There are a lot of those moments between them where Apple is kind of degrading Cherry, and I\u2019m glad that we have them all.<\/p>\n

A lot of your fans admire that you tend to stray from the mainstream and pursue projects that interest you. Is that something you\u2019ve always strived for?<\/p>\n

I wish I could say that\u2019s been deliberate, but it\u2019s really just kind of wound up that way because I have tried to take on more mainstream projects, because financially that would make sense. So I\u2019m certainly not like, \u2018I refuse to sell out, I\u2019m only going to make these weird ass movies.\u2019 I have tried to sell out unsuccessfully. I couldn\u2019t tell you how many movies\u2026 I think about eight movies I\u2019ve written that have been produced. This doesn\u2019t count stuff I\u2019ve produced by other writers. But all the movies I\u2019ve personally written that have gotten made have been on spec, meaning nobody hired me to do it; it was my own idea, and I was excited about it, and I did it because I was excited to write it. Whereas, none of the stuff I have ever been hired to write \u2014 and there has been a lot \u2014 has gotten produced. Which is nothing to be proud of. It means that I\u2019m clearly failing at the assignment. But I do find that curious. <\/p>\n

Is there a dream project you\u2019ve always wanted to make?<\/p>\n

I would love to write a full-on, balls-to-the-wall comedy, where it\u2019s like, how hard can I make people laugh? I would really like to do that, and I think that I have the ability to do it, and I am kind of working on that right now.<\/p>\n

Check out the full video interview here:<\/p>\n

Forbidden Fruits is in theaters now.<\/p>\n

Featured image: AUSTIN, TEXAS \u2013 MARCH 16: Diablo Cody attends the premiere of \u2018Forbidden Fruits\u2019 during the 2026 SXSW Conference and Festival at The Paramount Theatre on March 16, 2026 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Marcus Ingram\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Diablo Cody has spent her career writing women who are too loud, too angry, too horny, too funny,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":367286,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,167897,177010,85,6453,46,20877],"class_list":["post-367285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-forbidden-fruits","tag-ifc-films","tag-il","tag-interviews","tag-israel","tag-producer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367285\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/367286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}