Margot Robbie on Pitching 'Birds of Prey' _ Making a Fake Twitter for 'Bombshell'

I started putting together a pitch for Birds of Prey when we were still shooting Suicide Squad. And I had been thinking for quite some time how there was just a real gap in the market for a female ensemble action film. And I love action films and I think there's a misconception perhaps subconsciously for people that, well, action films are for dudes, girls don't really like them, which is just not true. I love them, I know heaps of other women who love them, but at the end of the day a good story, a good cast, good characters, universal despite gender. So I couldn't understand why there weren't more. I loved movies like Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu, Charlie's Angels growing up. So I knew I wanted to find that and help put that on a screen somewhere. While I was researching Harley, of course I was devouring the comics, became kind of obsessed with them at some point. I stopped even reading just Harley comics because I just was really enjoying the comics. So that sort of rabbit hole led me to the Birds of Prey comics. It seemed like a good platform for a female ensemble. First and foremost, I wanted to do an R-rated film. I think audiences just really responding to being surprised. I think this movie does that, Birds of Prey is surprising and it's fun and it's told from Harley's point of view. So you've got a very unreliable narrator giving terrible advice and an inaccurate account of events quite often. Very fun I think for people to get a slice of Harley's point of view and Harley's world and the DNA of the film kind of reflects Harley's personality. I've really enjoyed watching the women in particular walk out a bit and they just all seem a little more pumped up than usual. Like, come at me world. It's fun, I think you get that feeling of like, oh wow, I can do ----. I was sent this script and it was the second time I've read a script written by Charles Randolph, so I had high expectations and somehow the script exceeded those high expectations. It felt well explored. It's a huge issue and I think obviously a totally different issue, but in the way that he did in the big short, he really went to every nook and cranny of it and it felt really deeply mined and I learned a lot even on the first page of the script when originally it started with the definition of sexual harassment and what makes it illegal or not illegal in a workplace and I didn't know even that and I thought I was fairly well versed on the issue, but I knew that before I finished reading the script that I wanted to be a part of it. For the first time I was really looking at messaging as my first way in as opposed to the character. So Kayla, she's an amalgamation of many women's stories and like with most characters I like to play, I didn't understand her to begin with. There's always that process with any character where you're trying to figure them out and figure out why they do and say the things they do and say and is that a result of an upbringing or circumstance or influences from yeah family members or whatever and in Kayla's case she grew up in a conservative family who religiously watches Fox, the ins and outs of the politics and what Fox News means to certain families in America and that was really interesting. I looked into all the shows that are mentioned in the script and of course the ones that Kayla would have deemed the top notch shows at Fox and then honestly the most helpful bit of research I did was I started a fake Twitter account so that I could follow young millennial conservative girls' accounts and the things they say and their point of view on any issue and that was really fascinating and it was really helpful just to kind of see their play-by-play, their opinions coming out and how they put them forward in the world and I think her complete trust in that system and environment is what ultimately puts her in danger and so there are some pretty uncomfortable scenes that the audience will experience between Kayla and John Lithgow's character Roger Ailes and then you also explore kind of this fractured sisterhood I suppose between Charlize's character, Nicole's character and my character who are just completely isolated and it's very much a byproduct of Rogers manipulating in that system to keep women isolated and pinned against each other but I felt like we really wanted to explore the gray areas, the uncomfortable areas which was interesting and then I got to play against Kate McKinnon for a lot of the movie too. The world is a bad place, people are lazy morons, minorities are criminals, sex is sick but interesting. I love the relationship that our characters have, I secretly want a spin-off movie where Kayla and Jess go on a road trip or something with their opposing political views and their blossoming romance, I really think it'd be fun.