‘I Used to Be Funny’ Director Ally Pankiw Wanted to Capture the ‘Weird’ and Joyful ‘Nightmare’ of Being a Young Woman
Samantha Bergeson
It’s not a joke: Ally Pankiw spent 10 years making “I Used to Be Funny” into the dog whistle of a dark comedy for millennial women.
As Pankiw told IndieWire, the film is a “nightmare of what it is to be a young woman in the world,” with Rachel Sennott playing Sam Cowell, an aspiring stand-up comedian grappling with PTSD after an assault. Sam is haunted by the memories of working as an au pair for teen girl Brooke (Olga Petsa), who recently disappeared. The film premiered at the 2023 SXSW Festival.
Writer/director Pankiw’s debut feature, which already landed her among IndieWire’s female filmmakers to watch list, has topped IndieWire’s must-see films of the summer in part due to the “no-brainer” casting of buzzy star Sennott in the lead role.
“Rachel is such an exceptional talent because she makes everything feel like it’s her, [and] like it’s effortless,” Pankiw told IndieWire. “But it’s a very sneaky acting skill that is actually very difficult, and she makes it look so easy. I think [the character of] Sam was quite similar to a Rachel type. I wrote the character just based on a lot of the women I know and some aspects of myself. But [Sennott] showed me a new side of the character. I sometimes imagined Sam in my head with a harder edge, but Rachel just has this inherent sweetness that started coming through, and I was like, thank god that she’s bringing this element to this character because I think it was really important for a balance. I was just like, ‘How could this character have existed without that?’ She really helped guide the heavier parts of the film.”
Pankiw first wrote the initial “I Used to Be Funny” script in 2013 and found a producer by 2018 that led to “Canadian model” financing, aka national federal funding. “Although we’re very lucky as Canadians that that funding exists, it’s a very complicated system to navigate,” Pankiw said. “It has a lot of restrictions because it’s bureaucratic. It took a really long time to put the whole package together, and then we were supposed to shoot in 2020. And like most filmmakers probably, I took COVID personally when my film went down.”
Yet the production delay led to Sennott being cast in the lead role.
“It probably was a good thing for us because we wouldn’t have got her in 2020. I wouldn’t have known of ‘Shiva Baby’ yet,” Pankiw said of Sennott’s breakout indie role. “We just got so fucking lucky her when we did. I’ve been a fan of her stand-up, and then I saw ‘Shiva Baby,’ and then we sent her the script, and she loved it, and we had a really beautiful, three-hour long Zoom where we were like laughing and getting emotional about all of these topics.”
Those topics included the “shared language” of millennial womanhood. Even Pankiw admitted that the plot of “I Used to Be Funny” will most likely only resonate with a select audience who share a dark comedy taste and also understand certain experiences.
“I mean, it’s a weird logline,” Pankiw said. “It started very much from a thematic place and wanting to explore recovery and show a more authentic version of what healing and recovery look like than I was seeing in pop culture. It started with, ‘How does something like trauma or PTSD affect intergenerational female relationships?’ And that’s a very personal theme in my life. I thought of an au pair or a nanny being that older cool girl, almost that big sister archetype that is such a formative female presence when you’re growing up. And I think a lot of young girls’ lives and looking up to that type of person for guidance and being both in awe of them, but also disappointed by them simultaneously. All of these responsibilities we put on each other as young women felt very familiar to me.”
Pankiw added of the conversational tone of the film, “I really tried to write it in a way that I talk about heavier things with my friends and with my peers and with other young women. It’s not pure devastation. It’s like, ‘This is just the banality of the shit that we have to go through as a young woman.’ When you really start to add it all up, all the different ways that violence and assault and trauma can touch everyone, most people have had a run-in with it in their lives, whether it’s one degree or two degrees of separation. It affects everything. To treat those instances [of] violence against women as these isolated things that just happened to one person, it’s so not real. I just wanted to speak to how me and my friends actually talk about that, and how we navigate that, and how we’ve developed a sense of gallows humor about it. What other choice do you have?”
Pankiw decidedly did not want to echo the rape-revenge stories or MeToo comeuppance tales heralded as of late onscreen.
“I was just sick of seeing like ‘healing equals vengeance’ or ‘healing equals revenge’ or ‘healing equals justice,’ even. It’s like, it’s just not the case,” Pankiw said. “Healing is a slow repairing of life and relationships. I was just craving something that felt a little bit more true to life. And so I tried to write it from that place.”
“I Used to Be Funny” had an “unheard of” short shoot across just 18 production days with 20 different locations or “something crazy” like that. Pankiw said that at their budget level, the film should have been written as “one of those indies that all takes place in a cabin with three cast members.” There were even moments that Pankiw admitted were “creatively heartbreaking” when compromising on set.
She continued, “We were very ambitious, and maybe it’s stupid, but you have to be a bit stupid when you try to make stuff.”
Prior to her first feature, Pankiw is best known for her “Black Mirror” AI episode, “Joan Is Awful.” Pankiw called “Black Mirror” creator Charlie Brooker a “beautiful genius and collaborator” who allowed her to craft the episode as her “own little mini film.”
She also recently directed the viral Loewe short film “Decades of Confusion,” starring “Happiest Season” alums Aubrey Plaza and Dan Levy.
While Pankiw has two other features in the works, both of which are “very gay” (Pankiw is a queer filmmaker who has been out for 16 years), she is dedicated to continuing to capture complicated relationships between women onscreen.
“It is actually funny that ‘I Used to Be Funny’ is my first film because it’s not like a queer story. I’m obviously a queer filmmaker, and maybe that inherently makes it queer. But it’s not about that,” Pankiw said. “I think what’s really important in my work, and also the work that I watch as an audience member, is capturing the nightmare of what it is to be a young woman in the world, but how that also brings a very specific joy within that shared experience. The nightmare and the joy of being a young woman is such a singular experience, and anything that’s grabbing onto that contrast or that juxtaposition and highlighting it is the place that I really like to play in.”
As with the comedy in “I Used to Be Funny,” the film’s production was all about timing.
“We shot end of 2021. We did post in 2022. We missed festival submissions in 2022. So we did SXSW in 2023. And then the unprecedented writers’ strikes happened in 2023,” Pankiw said. “So now we’re finally coming out in theaters in 2024. It’s been a very long road for this film.”
But worth it indeed: The tone of the feature and the language Pankiw used for its script is becoming “increasingly threatening to demographics that had a lot of power,” namely older white men, especially in the comedy space.
“‘I Used to Be Funny’ explores this older male character being very threatened by the secret language shared amongst women and feeling on the outside of that, while realizing that this young woman is funnier and more interesting than him,” Pankiw said of Sennott’s lead role. “I think that’s a very disorienting experience that’s happening culturally for dudes that used to be able to say anything and used to be the funniest person in the room, or at least have that perception of themselves [being that]. I think that’s starting to change culturally.”
A Levelfilm release, “I Used to Be Funny” hits New York theaters on Friday, June 7; LA theaters on Friday, June 14; and will be available on digital Tuesday, June 18.
