Todd Williamson
Audio By Carbonatix
When director Meredith Alloway made her SXSW debut in 2019 with the short film Deep Tissue, she sat in the Paramount Theatre for the awards ceremony watching her friend collect an award. She thought to herself, “I’ll never be able to do that. This theatre is too big!”
Seven years later, the filmmaker is living out her “wildest dreams” as she returns to the Paramount Theatre with her feature-length debut, Forbidden Fruits.
The movie, starring Lili Reinhart and Lola Tung, follows the employees of a Free Eden store, who lead a secret witch coven in the basement of a mall. Their cult is threatened when a new employee, Pumpkin, challenges their sisterhood, leading to a showdown against their own dark nature.
The world premiere of Forbidden Fruits is a culmination of years of dedication and a lifelong journey that started in Dallas. Alloway grew up in a family of movie lovers and aspired to be a filmmaker, but she couldn’t see how people from Texas could get a footing in the industry.
“It wasn’t New York. It wasn’t LA. [Texas] is not around people making movies. It makes you learn that you have to keep going, and you have to push through and be your own self-motivator,” Alloway says. “You’re not walking out your door and speaking to friends who you grew up with, whose parents are directors. You feel like an island and that taught me to persevere and trust that I love movies so much that it’ll get me through.”
Todd Williamson
Freedom To Be a Woman
Adapted from Lily Houghton’s play Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die, Alloway was inspired by the screenplay, which centered solely on women and the “messiness of female relationships.”
“I got freedom from the script,” Alloway said. “I felt freedom to admit my own shortcomings as a woman or the way I’ve treated women or the great things I’ve done for women. I was given the freedom to be messy and also be feminine. Growing up, when I felt the most feminine, I felt the most powerful. We live in a world that tones that down. I felt free to be feminine and exist in that energy.”
As a director, Alloway was given the license to “nurture her feminine power” and wanted to foster this energy and celebrate it with the cast and crew.
The star-studded cast is led by Riverdale star Lili Reinhart, who plays Apple, the leader of the secret witch cult.
The actress remarked that she loved a “script about women which didn’t revolve around men” and relished the opportunity to step into a world that was so well-crafted, thought-out and conceived by Alloway and Houghton.
“There was no stone left unturned with this movie, and that’s definitely not always the case,” Reinhart said. “Someone like Meredith, for a first-time feature director, in a very respectful, badass, powerful way, would put her foot down in what she needed, what she wanted and what she wanted in terms of her cast and crew. Expectations were set and they were met. You turned up, and you delivered because it was a woman-led set and a woman-led cast. We were lucky to be under her guidance.”
The opportunity to work on a female-led set presented the cast with a unique chance to explore themselves as actors in different ways. Alexandra Shipp said that it also gave them a much-welcomed chance to “play.”
“We play make-believe for a living, but there’s so much more to it and it becomes so much more than us just showing up and saying lines.” Shipp said. “It was enticing to wear a corset and do some crazy stuff. There was just so much play. I was at a point in my life, personally, where I wanted the next job I took to just play. I don’t want to be crying, I just wanted to play and have a good ass time.”
Bringing It Back Home
Lily Houghton’s play was originally set in New York, but Alloway wanted to set the movie in her hometown of Dallas, as the city has such a unique “weird and cool” energy.
“I’ve lived outside of the city for 14 years so I look at it in a new way,” she said. “Dallas can be very materialistic and also artistic. There are incredible theaters and music in Dallas, and I grew up there. There aren’t a lot of stories set in Dallas. Does every movie have to be set in LA or New York? Can we please make something in Texas that’s not also about Texas, it just happens to be set there.”
The cast looked at Dallas for inspiration to get into character as they mirrored the way that Alloway would pronounce certain words. They also watched the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders documentary for fashion inspiration and had a collaborative experience with the costume department to bring the Dallas setting to life.
“Fashion informs so much of the character,” Reinhart said. “Costume is how you present yourself, it’s how you carry yourself and it’s posture. All of the girls are so specific in this film. It was fun to be like, ‘OK, we work in a store in the mall in Dallas, what would they be wearing? The setting informs the costume and the costume informs you as an actor.”
Lola Tung added: “Meredith being from Dallas was really helpful. None of us are from Texas, and she had a very specific niche and experience [being born-and-raised there]. There was also a specific mall experience, as it was set in a Dallas mall and the experience she shared with us was helpful.”
