Emily The Criminal’s Aubrey Plaza on making a film in 21 days, playing ‘relatable’ characters, and ‘doing something different’

Parks and Recreation star Aubrey Plaza plays a woman who turns to crime to pay the bills – and realises she’s good at it, and enjoys it – in new movie Emily The Criminal.

Here are five things worth knowing about the film:

Plaza, who rose to fame doing comedy roles, says she when she read the script she loved Emily “immediately” because the character was something new to her.

“It’s hard in Hollywood, in the industry, because people see you do one thing, and then they just want you to do it over and over again,” she told the Sky News Backstage podcast.

“So it’s always hard to show people all sides of yourself.

“So I’m always looking to do something different, I never want to do the same thing.”

Read more: Aubrey Plaza hopes ‘that we go back’ to Parks And Recreation and says film is ‘horror movie in your mind’

Writer and director John Patton Ford wrote the film as “wish fulfilment”

“I worked a lot of the same jobs that she has in the movie, I worked these catering jobs and I had a ton of student debt and I wanted to behave the way that she behaves in the movie,” he told Backstage.

“I didn’t behave that way, but I think I wrote it like that because it was like wish fulfilment – those are the things I wanted to say, those are the things I wanted to do, and I thought ‘well, if I felt like that, a lot of other people may also feel like that, so I’m going to create this character, so we can all live vicariously through her’ – that was the idea.”

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The whole movie was shot in just 21 days

“It was a sprint, the whole thing, and there was no time to stop and reflect on what we had done,” Patton Ford said.

“It was like you’d finish the scene, and then you would run and shoot the next scene, then run and shoot the next scene and then go home and collapse and sleep for like four hours and get up and do it again – for weeks and weeks and weeks.

“So there was no time to stop and think… it was just non-stop.”

Plaza thinks the time constraints helped them to hone their instincts

She said: “I think the energy kind of infuses into the movie.

“Like the production really mirrors the movie in a lot of ways, it had the same kind of energy.”

The film’s themes – of normal people turning to crime because they can’t cover their bills – seems only to be getting more pertinent as the cost of living crisis hits

“I wish I had answers, I wish I could make a movie about solutions to these problems, that would be cool,” Patton Ford added.

“I’m not smart enough to do that, the best I can do is just ask a question, you know?

“But yeah, it’s frustrating, and it’s real and that’s been my experience – cost of living gets higher and higher and wages do not increase at the rate of inflation, that’s really the maths and if that’s the reality, then how do people win?”

Plaza says as well as being relatable, it’s also just a great film.

“I don’t choose movies for any kind of political reason or to try to have some kind of political message or social commentary, but I think I’m just naturally drawn to movies that are really relatable and that do say something because I think those are the kind of characters that you just care about the issues because you relate to them,” she explained to Backstage.

“So it kind of makes the movie better in that way, it’s like a bonus that it has this other kind of commentary.

“But I mostly just want to make really great films, entertaining films, and if they have a message like that, that’s all the better.”

Emily The Criminal is available to rent and own now.