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Think of it as Chekhov’s joint, just waiting there on a table to be smoked. It’s the kind of thing that has been appearing lately as actors Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat and writer-director Dylan Meyer promote their new stoner comedy “The Wrong Girls.” (There has, perhaps not surprisingly, also been a lot of eating.)
The trio are gathered around a conference table in the offices of an event space in the Frogtown neighborhood of Los Angeles, having just completed a photo shoot. There is that joint, sitting in an ashtray, placed there by someone, just in case.
To be clear, none of them are stoned right now.
“I’m not ashamed,” says Stewart, 36, of smoking weed. “I want be able to finish my sentences and then I’ll smoke after.”
“That’s how I feel,” agrees Meyer, 38. “Sometimes you can really lose a thread.”
All three of them recall previous experiences with smoking pot in professional settings. “I got too high,” recalls Shawkat, 37, of a visit to the podcast “Getting Doug with High” in 2013. “And it was not great.”
In theaters Friday, “The Wrong Girls” is about two young women in Los Angeles who love to smoke weed and eat. Frankie (Stewart), who has never righted herself after dropping out of Stanford, is anxious that her best friend and roommate Molly (Shawkat), an aspiring chef, is pulling away from their deep friendship and toward her relationship with Josh (Zack Fox).
Frankie and Molly spend most of their time getting high and hanging out until a case of mistaken identity and a briefcase full of a mysterious drug sets them on the run from a Danish pharmaceutical company, the U.S. government and maybe some very powerful squids. And they seem to have developed telekinetic powers and are now communicating with their cats.
Though cannabis is legal in California for both medical and adult recreational use, there can still be an air of rebellion in talking about it so openly. Meyer notes that, in the process of getting her movie made, she learned that weed comedies don’t travel well overseas, becoming something of an issue when it comes to international sales.
“A lot of people don’t get along with weed and so that’s why it still has a bit of a subversive feeling,” Meyer says. “And first of all, it’s not federally legal. There’s still huge chunks of the country and the rest of the world — it’s not legal most other places. So it’s this weird disconnect being in California and having the relationship to it that we have, which is very casual, and then realizing that in other places — “
“It’s so not casual,” Shawkat chimes in, helpfully.
The movie is the debut as writer-director for Meyer, who is married to Stewart. The couple produced the film through their company Nevermind Pictures, which they founded with Meyer’s best friend Maggie McLean, also a producer on the project.
“The Wrong Girls” has a tactile and handmade feel to it, inspired by the punk-inflected lo-fi sci-fi of the 1984 cult classic “Repo Man.” Other sources of inspiration were the female friendships of ’90s comedies “Dick” and “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion,” the stoned logic of “The Big Lebowski” and “Smiley Face,” the general spirit of misadventure in “Wayne’s World” and “Beavis and Butthead Do America” and the chaotic satire of Věra Chytilová’s radical 1966 Czech film “Daisies.”