Birds of Prey is the girl-gang movie Harley Quinn deserves

The writer, director and stars of Margot Robbie’s passion project talk to Clarisse Loughrey about the ‘unapologetic spirit’ that has created a film bursting with poppiness, zaniness and gruesome violence

Robbie leads the cast of 'Birds of Prey', the eighth film in the DC Extended universe (Warner Bros Pictures)

Harley Quinn is a terrible role model,” jokes director Cathy Yan. She pauses. She mulls over the idea. “Although, in some ways, she’s a great role model because she just is who she is.” The wildcard of DC’s cinematic universe is an acid vat of contradictions: she’s a party girl, a criminal, and a maniac with a PhD and a fixation on clowns. She lives inside her own head, but is sociable by nature. She likes to kick back in cat onesies, but could break a man’s shins in an instant. In her own words: “No one is like me.”

In Birds of Prey, she finally gets the film she deserves. With Margot Robbie reprising the role she played in 2016’s disastrous Suicide Squad, Harley escapes from under the shadow of her big-screen debut (although she’ll appear in its reboot, directed by James Gunn). “We wanted to show a different version of femininity and feminism,” Yan says. “These women are flawed, they make poor decisions.” In a post-Wonder Woman world, it feels right for comic book movies to look beyond pure aspirational womanhood – to loosen up and relinquish the burden of having to serve as ambassadors for an entire gender.

In that sense, it’s quietly radical. With a reported budget of £57.1m ($75m), it’s a passion project for Robbie, who pitched the film, oversaw its development, and produced it under her own LuckyChap Entertainment banner. It was the actor who pushed for the studio to hand the reins over to Yan, who had just come off her debut film Dead Pigs. And it was the actor who stood by the film’s unexpected tone: unflinchingly violent in places, with as many F-bombs as Tarantino but none of the broodiness of Joker. It’s funny and unpredictable, too, with Harley serving as its narrator. It may have taken years but Warner Bros, the studio behind the film, came to trust Robbie’s vision. “She definitely puts her money where her mouth is,” says Yan.

“I think there was a sort of rebellious and unapologetic spirit that I was really grateful for,” says Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who plays the assassin Huntress – a member of the titular Birds of Prey. “Nobody ever came in and said, ‘Oh, maybe we shouldn’t do this because somebody might not like it.’ It was just like: ‘What do we like? What feels good, what feels crazy, what feels cathartic?’ I don’t think I’ve ever had an experience quite like that on a movie this scale.”

Winstead’s Huntress not only crosses paths with Harley, but with a whole squad of tough-as-nails women – Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett-Bell), Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco), and Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez). Crucially, there’s no Joker in sight. Gotham’s most infamous couple are no more, meaning Harley now has to find her own way in the world. And she could definitely do with a few friends.

Robbie first came up with the idea of a girl gang movie back in 2015, while making Suicide Squad. Soon after, she met with screenwriter Christina Hodson, best known for single-handedly saving the Transformers franchise with 2018’s heartwarming Bumblebee. The pair hit it off straight away. “I was so won over by her and her passion for the character,” Hodson says. While Warner Bros toyed with a number of Harley spin-offs, including David Ayer’s Gotham City Sirens, Robbie stayed laser-focused on Birds of Prey. But this was before 2017’s Wonder Woman and 2016’s Deadpool changed the superhero game. Back then, a female-led, female-directed, R-rated comic book film would have been treated as the stuff of myth and legend.

But, as Hodson explains, it can be surprisingly freeing to set off into unknown territory. She hung out with Robbie and they watched films, while pouring through the source comics until they knew the characters inside out. Birds of Prey is the rare tentpole film which actually commits to LGBT+ representation onscreen (instead of the usual “blink-and-you’ll-miss-it” pandering): Renee Montoya shares scenes with her ex-girlfriend, played by Ali Wong. Renee is gay in the comics, which Hodson was committed to honouring. “It’s just kind of naturally and inherently there,” Hodson says. “And it wasn’t something anyone ever tried to quash.”

Robbie fought for the film to be made and has seen the process through to the end (Warner Bros Pictures)

The screenwriter was just as keen to do justice to Huntress, aka Helena Bertinelli, whom she describes as “one of the coolest women in the DC universe”. Although her backstory has changed over the years, Birds of Prey introduces her to cinema audiences as the daughter of a powerful mafia don who, as a young girl, witnesses the massacre of her extended family. Like The Bride in Kill Bill, she writes her list of names – then dedicates her life to crossing off each one. “She’s got such edge and depth,” says Hodson. “In some ways, she’s a female Batman.”

Yet Helena is far from a one-note badass. As Winstead explains, Helena’s PTSD has shaped her personality “in a way that is actually endearing and funny and sweet at times, amidst this outer shell of hardness and rage”. She adds: “As the film goes on, she starts showing her weirdness in a way that actually gets a positive reaction from these other women.” Her trauma has made her who she is, good and bad parts included. Thanks to the Birds of Prey, she realises there’s nothing to run from.

As Hodson tinkered away on the script, Robbie stood by to offer guidance and support. She never backed down or wavered. After three years had gone by, Warner Bros finally gained the confidence to greenlight the project. The next step was to find a director. At the beginning of 2018, Yan’s Dead Pigs premiered at Sundance to rave reviews (it also won the Special Jury Prize at the festival). The film follows a colourful cast of Shanghai citizens, whose paths all converge when a mass of porcine corpses are sent floating down the river and towards the city itself. Robbie was an instant fan. A few months later, Yan got the job. Although studios have been partial to snapping up directors with flashy debuts and handing them the keys to a franchise, those directors have almost exclusively been white men. Yan, who is Chinese-American, stands on the edge of a new frontier.

“It’s very humbling,” she says. “But I think what really helped was having Margot, having [producer] Sue Kroll, having other women advocate for me. And I think I was also just a lucky recipient of good timing – that finally, the industry was open to this sort of thing.” She also, in Robbie’s eyes, had the perfect pitch. Yan knew how to see Gotham through Harley’s eyes. “It’s colourful and vibrant and everyone’s having fun, but at the same time the system’s pretty broken,” the director explains. In other words, it’s full of contradictions – just like Harley. Yan was inspired by the films of Baz Luhrmann, specifically Romeo + Juliet (“There’s something very familiar about it, but he scrambles all your references”). Without an iPhone in sight, she carefully drew references from across the decades. The film’s villain, Black Mask (Ewan McGregor), owns the kind of club that A Clockwork Orange’s Alex DeLarge would go to unwind. It’s a kaleidoscopic nightmare, peppered with chalky white statues of disembodied hands. Harley herself looks part-Spice Girl, part-Disco Queen, and part-influencer at Coachella.

“There is a real kind of poppiness and zaniness to the Harley world, but we also wanted some danger in there,” says Hodson. A good part of that lives inside McGregor’s turn as a rich brat determined to control Gotham’s underworld. He’ll switch from lounge lizard to autocratic terror at the drop of a hat. One scene, in which Black Mask turns on one of his club’s female patrons, takes a sinister turn – unlike anything ever seen before in a comic book film. “I cried on set that day, it was so intense,” Hodson says. “But Ewan was so lovely and gentlemanly. Every time Cathy would yell cut, he would rush over and say: ‘Are you OK? I’m so sorry!’ Because I think it felt so horrible doing that to someone.” For a film filled with gruesome violence, “that felt like the most vicious thing”.

The film needed a supportive, collaborative environment to pull off that delicate sense of tone. For Winstead, working on a set surrounded by so many women alone felt like a revelation. “There’s no need to defend your position as a woman, which is often the case when you’re working around mostly men – even if they’re lovely men which, thankfully, in my experience, they have been,” she says. “There’s still a sort of disconnect, like another language you have to speak in order to translate the female experience. Like, no, I think the character should dress this way or behave this way.” On Birds of Prey, “there was no disconnect or discourse. We’re all in this together and we’re doing what we all want to do.”

Birds of Prey feels like a smaller turning point nestled within a larger one: many of this year’s biggest tentpole films – Black Widow, Mulan, Wonder Woman 1984 and The Eternals – are directed by women. While it’s hard to tell how permanent the shift in Hollywood will be, it’s equally hard to imagine that, even five years ago, a film like Birds of Prey would have seen the light of day. “Margot was out there fighting for this movie to get made five years ago and nobody listened to her until the tide started to change,” says Winstead. “There are so many women who’ve been waiting in the wings ready for their moment. And now it’s finally happening.”

Birds of Prey is in cinemas on 7 February