How Zelda Williams Found Humor in Trauma With ‘Lisa Frankenstein’

Zelda Williams has wonderful memories of being on film sets as a kid, watching her father, Robin Williams, shoot movies like Hook and Bicentennial Man. But that doesn’t mean she inherited his bombastic sense of humor. “I’m a bit darker,” says Williams, 34. “I’m the person who laughed during Hereditary.”

Williams is putting those dark impulses on full display in her feature directorial debut, Lisa Frankenstein, in theaters Feb. 9. Written by Diablo Cody, the film is an Eighties retelling of the Mary Shelley classic (think less chemistry experiments, more Echo and the Bunnymen). It follows a high school outcast (Kathryn Newton) in the Chicago suburbs who recently witnessed her mom get killed by an ax murderer. When she’s not pissing off her evil new stepmom (an awesomely villainous Carla Gugino), she accidentally brings a hot Victorian corpse (Cole Sprouse) back from the dead. Normal stuff.

Speaking to Williams on a Zoom call in late December, it’s immediately clear that she has an encyclopedic knowledge of horror films and Eighties movies, dropping sentences like, “I’m much more of a Romero zombie girl,” and “We do have some ‘Almodóvar Red’ in the high school [scenes].” Several of these movies influenced her zom-com: Day of the Dead, Death Becomes Her, Edward Scissorhands, and others.

“I miss movies that felt more like Beetlejuice, where it had an enormous amount of unhinged, unobstructed creative and colorful wildness to it,” Williams says. “Now, people expect them to be so polished and speedily edited. I went, ‘OK, what if we put that aside and tried to make a genuinely Eighties movie?’ Not a modern retelling of the Eighties, but the actual pacing and color and camera angles of the movies that I loved. And weirdly, no one stopped me.”

“She definitely committed to that vision,” says Cody, who also wrote the horror comedy Jennifer’s Body and the Oscar-winning Juno. “It really takes me back to that era. I said, ‘I’ve never seen more fiber-optic decorations anywhere, including during my actual Eighties childhood, but I’m here for it.’”

Cody, 45, had always wanted to write a “dead-boyfriend movie,” and the pandemic provided her the opportunity. “That was my way of staying sane,” she says. “It’s no accident that the subject of death and grief was weighing heavily on my mind at the time.”

For Cody, Lisa Frankenstein is the female response to the 1985 John Hughes film Weird Science (Lisa is the name of the dream woman Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith create on a computer). “I grew up watching those build-a-bitch movies,” she says. “I always thought, ‘Where’s the version where a girl is creating the ideal male?’”

Williams was given the script by Cody’s boyfriend, who had seen Williams’ 2018 short film Shrimp, about dominatrices in an L.A. dungeon, and thought they’d be a good match. “We checked in on each other during the pandemic,” she says. “This industry isn’t usually all that great about checking in on people or mental health. And he basically prefaced it by saying his girlfriend had written a script and that she was feeling a little self-conscious about it, like it was too weird and no one was going to want to make it.”

Only, he didn’t tell Williams who she was. “Completely buried the lede, didn’t tell me his girlfriend was Diablo,” Williams says. (Hearing this, Cody laughs: “I’m glad she opened it.”)

Williams read the script and was immediately floored. “That was genuinely such a jarring thing to read, especially while we were in the middle of what we were all going through,” she says. “I got back to him and was like, ‘Please connect us.’ I tried to do whatever song and dance they needed, because I really fell in love with this.” 

“The minute I met her, I dumped a huge glass of water in her lap,” says Cody. “I think that established our personalities, though, right at the top: I really am a fucking screwball and she’s got it under control. But her understanding of the material was so apparent to me right away. I had no idea that she was so perfectly suited to a project like this. I didn’t even know this was her genre.”

The world doesn’t know it’s her genre yet, either. Despite being raised in the world of comedy, Williams finds it scarier than horror. “It’s certainly something that I see people be far more critical of, and that really terrified me,” she says. “There are people who would get angry about me saying this out loud, but it’s why I think comedy is the hardest thing you can do in entertainment by a long shot. It takes an enormous amount of both confidence and empathy to even make your loved ones laugh, let alone strangers. I was shaped a lot by seeing both how difficult that is and how rewarding it can be.”

WILLIAMS GREW UP in San Francisco and began acting in minor roles as a child, making her film debut in 1995’s Nine Months as a ballet dancer. She appeared with her dad in the 2004 David Duchovny film House of D, and even, ironically, auditioned for the role of Juno’s friend in Cody’s 2007 film. But Robin’s death in 2014 halted her acting career.

“I started transitioning toward wanting to direct and wanting to leave behind acting around when Dad died,” she says. “Being behind the camera became a much less self-conscious place than being in front of it. For some people, I reminded them of him and it made them sad. Or I was just never going to live up to him and it made them angry, or they didn’t believe I should be there. In either case, none of those things are about me. They shouldn’t concern me. But I’m human, and it was really tough.”

Williams coped with her father’s death by pouring herself into screenwriting. I ask her about a 2016 interview with Chelsea Handler, where she admitted she wrote 12 scripts while grieving. “Now looking back, it wasn’t unhealthy or healthy, it was obsessive,” she says. “At the time, I was quite afraid of being outside, of being around strangers. A lot of stuff had gone really sideways for my family and for myself, and I had become quite introverted and reserved. Writing was an outlet. It genuinely felt like it was the only thing anyone couldn’t take away from me, because every other version of creation required someone else’s permission. Writing doesn’t.”

Williams says that she now leads a “pretty peaceful life” in Los Angeles, and has a healthy balance of writing and directing. She debated going to school for directing, but changed her mind after sitting in on classes and realizing she was already familiar with the material. “Because of the incredible world I grew up in, I kind of already knew,” she says. “That’s not to say there’s not a whole bunch of advanced stuff I probably can still learn.”

“I know there’s all this ‘nepo baby’ discourse, but the thing people fail to realize about nepo babies as directors, and having worked with a few of them, [is] they grew up on sets,” Cody tells me. “They have a comfort and a competency there that is very beneficial to filmmaking, so it’s not a negative. That’s what I love about watching Zelda work. She’s not doing it to chase clout or to capitalize on anything. She’s doing it because she’s a true filmmaker.”

Williams shadowed directors on set, including her mentor Scott Derrickson (Sinister, Doctor Strange). “My father’s death was very significant to me,” Derrickson says, over a phone call in early January. “I still think about him every day, and there was a bonding that happened early on as we talked to each other about that.”

Williams spent three days in Vancouver on the set of TNT’s Snowpiercer — which Derrickson executive produced — observing him work for 10-12 hours each day. He’d never allowed anyone to shadow him before, but Williams was the exception.

“Here’s the thing about Zelda,” he says. “The acumen of that human being on any given subject is never not surprising. Every time a subject comes up, the breadth of knowledge that she has about it is bizarre. She’s just a sponge of information. There’s a grandiose quality to Zelda. I’ve known very few people in my life who have a combination of that kind of intelligence, knowledge, and a real love for life and a zeal for creative work. And again, this is a person who suffered an incredible loss in her life, has really had to deal with the public in a way that I think no person should ever have to. And it hasn’t soured her.”

In addition to Shrimp, Williams directed music videos (including JoJo’s “Save My Soul” in 2016) and worked on several indie projects that fell through during the pandemic. Lisa Frankenstein was the one that stuck. “The plan was not to have it be my first,” she says. “But I’m very, very grateful that it was.”

WILLIAMS PAYS HOMAGE to her father in the film, when Sprouse (known as The Creature) wears rainbow suspenders. She says she’s watched some of his films since his death, but it’s not something she necessarily seeks out. “Other people watch home movies,” she says. “In my case, it’s seeking out an unreal version of him, and sometimes I can handle that and sometimes I can’t. But at this point, at 34 years old, I don’t really judge myself for it anymore.”

Although Cody never met the late actor in person, she says Williams’ resemblance to him is strong. “It is difficult to not be reminded of him when you speak to her,” Cody says. “I know she’s talked about how she feels like a roadside memorial, which I think is such a beautiful metaphor. She understands that people bring their affection for him to their encounters with her.” 

It’s also fitting, Cody adds, that Williams’ directorial debut is about a girl who is struggling to give herself permission to mourn a parent. “It wasn’t really until she was attached to this [movie] that I realized it was interesting for her to be working on this project about grief, and about how you’re allowed to grieve, given what she had gone through in the public eye.”

Although he’s unable to physically speak, The Creature’s arrival drastically upends Lisa’s life, and her walk on the wild side evolves from healthy coping mechanism to hilariously alarming (we won’t give away any spoilers, but there’s some murder, and a few surgical procedures made with a broken tanning bed). It’s the perfect fusion of comedy and horror that proves Williams’ career is only just beginning. “‘Horror sci-fi nerd’ is a moniker that really belongs to her,” Derrickson says. “Nobody else in the world would make this movie but Zelda.”

“I think my sense of humor was shaped by a lot of trauma,” Williams says. “I find a lot of humor in darkness and I want to make things lighter for other people. Aspects of that definitely carry over into this movie. We spend so much time trying to make the way we navigate anything more palatable for others, especially women. Lisa gets to do the opposite in this.”

Zelda Williams has wonderful memories of being on film sets as a kid, watching her father, Robin Williams, shoot movies like Hook and Bicentennial Man. But that doesn’t mean she inherited his bombastic sense of humor. “I’m a bit darker,” says Williams, 34. “I’m the person who laughed during Hereditary.”

Williams is putting those dark impulses on full display in her feature directorial debut, Lisa Frankenstein, in theaters Feb. 9. Written by Diablo Cody, the film is an Eighties retelling of the Mary Shelley classic (think less chemistry experiments, more Echo and the Bunnymen). It follows a high school outcast (Kathryn Newton) in the Chicago suburbs who recently witnessed her mom get killed by an ax murderer. When she’s not pissing off her evil new stepmom (an awesomely villainous Carla Gugino), she accidentally brings a hot Victorian corpse (Cole Sprouse) back from the dead. Normal stuff.

Speaking to Williams on a Zoom call in late December, it’s immediately clear that she has an encyclopedic knowledge of horror films and Eighties movies, dropping sentences like, “I’m much more of a Romero zombie girl,” and “We do have some ‘Almodóvar Red’ in the high school [scenes].” Several of these movies influenced her zom-com: Day of the Dead, Death Becomes Her, Edward Scissorhands, and others.

“I miss movies that felt more like Beetlejuice, where it had an enormous amount of unhinged, unobstructed creative and colorful wildness to it,” Williams says. “Now, people expect them to be so polished and speedily edited. I went, ‘OK, what if we put that aside and tried to make a genuinely Eighties movie?’ Not a modern retelling of the Eighties, but the actual pacing and color and camera angles of the movies that I loved. And weirdly, no one stopped me.”

“She definitely committed to that vision,” says Cody, who also wrote the horror comedy Jennifer’s Body and the Oscar-winning Juno. “It really takes me back to that era. I said, ‘I’ve never seen more fiber-optic decorations anywhere, including during my actual Eighties childhood, but I’m here for it.’”

Cody, 45, had always wanted to write a “dead-boyfriend movie,” and the pandemic provided her the opportunity. “That was my way of staying sane,” she says. “It’s no accident that the subject of death and grief was weighing heavily on my mind at the time.”

For Cody, Lisa Frankenstein is the female response to the 1985 John Hughes film Weird Science (Lisa is the name of the dream woman Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith create on a computer). “I grew up watching those build-a-bitch movies,” she says. “I always thought, ‘Where’s the version where a girl is creating the ideal male?’”

Williams was given the script by Cody’s boyfriend, who had seen Williams’ 2018 short film Shrimp, about dominatrices in an L.A. dungeon, and thought they’d be a good match. “We checked in on each other during the pandemic,” she says. “This industry isn’t usually all that great about checking in on people or mental health. And he basically prefaced it by saying his girlfriend had written a script and that she was feeling a little self-conscious about it, like it was too weird and no one was going to want to make it.”

Only, he didn’t tell Williams who she was. “Completely buried the lede, didn’t tell me his girlfriend was Diablo,” Williams says. (Hearing this, Cody laughs: “I’m glad she opened it.”)

Williams read the script and was immediately floored. “That was genuinely such a jarring thing to read, especially while we were in the middle of what we were all going through,” she says. “I got back to him and was like, ‘Please connect us.’ I tried to do whatever song and dance they needed, because I really fell in love with this.” 

“The minute I met her, I dumped a huge glass of water in her lap,” says Cody. “I think that established our personalities, though, right at the top: I really am a fucking screwball and she’s got it under control. But her understanding of the material was so apparent to me right away. I had no idea that she was so perfectly suited to a project like this. I didn’t even know this was her genre.”

The world doesn’t know it’s her genre yet, either. Despite being raised in the world of comedy, Williams finds it scarier than horror. “It’s certainly something that I see people be far more critical of, and that really terrified me,” she says. “There are people who would get angry about me saying this out loud, but it’s why I think comedy is the hardest thing you can do in entertainment by a long shot. It takes an enormous amount of both confidence and empathy to even make your loved ones laugh, let alone strangers. I was shaped a lot by seeing both how difficult that is and how rewarding it can be.”

WILLIAMS GREW UP in San Francisco and began acting in minor roles as a child, making her film debut in 1995’s Nine Months as a ballet dancer. She appeared with her dad in the 2004 David Duchovny film House of D, and even, ironically, auditioned for the role of Juno’s friend in Cody’s 2007 film. But Robin’s death in 2014 halted her acting career.

“I started transitioning toward wanting to direct and wanting to leave behind acting around when Dad died,” she says. “Being behind the camera became a much less self-conscious place than being in front of it. For some people, I reminded them of him and it made them sad. Or I was just never going to live up to him and it made them angry, or they didn’t believe I should be there. In either case, none of those things are about me. They shouldn’t concern me. But I’m human, and it was really tough.”

Williams coped with her father’s death by pouring herself into screenwriting. I ask her about a 2016 interview with Chelsea Handler, where she admitted she wrote 12 scripts while grieving. “Now looking back, it wasn’t unhealthy or healthy, it was obsessive,” she says. “At the time, I was quite afraid of being outside, of being around strangers. A lot of stuff had gone really sideways for my family and for myself, and I had become quite introverted and reserved. Writing was an outlet. It genuinely felt like it was the only thing anyone couldn’t take away from me, because every other version of creation required someone else’s permission. Writing doesn’t.”

Williams says that she now leads a “pretty peaceful life” in Los Angeles, and has a healthy balance of writing and directing. She debated going to school for directing, but changed her mind after sitting in on classes and realizing she was already familiar with the material. “Because of the incredible world I grew up in, I kind of already knew,” she says. “That’s not to say there’s not a whole bunch of advanced stuff I probably can still learn.”

“I know there’s all this ‘nepo baby’ discourse, but the thing people fail to realize about nepo babies as directors, and having worked with a few of them, [is] they grew up on sets,” Cody tells me. “They have a comfort and a competency there that is very beneficial to filmmaking, so it’s not a negative. That’s what I love about watching Zelda work. She’s not doing it to chase clout or to capitalize on anything. She’s doing it because she’s a true filmmaker.”

Williams shadowed directors on set, including her mentor Scott Derrickson (Sinister, Doctor Strange). “My father’s death was very significant to me,” Derrickson says, over a phone call in early January. “I still think about him every day, and there was a bonding that happened early on as we talked to each other about that.”

Williams spent three days in Vancouver on the set of TNT’s Snowpiercer — which Derrickson executive produced — observing him work for 10-12 hours each day. He’d never allowed anyone to shadow him before, but Williams was the exception.

“Here’s the thing about Zelda,” he says. “The acumen of that human being on any given subject is never not surprising. Every time a subject comes up, the breadth of knowledge that she has about it is bizarre. She’s just a sponge of information. There’s a grandiose quality to Zelda. I’ve known very few people in my life who have a combination of that kind of intelligence, knowledge, and a real love for life and a zeal for creative work. And again, this is a person who suffered an incredible loss in her life, has really had to deal with the public in a way that I think no person should ever have to. And it hasn’t soured her.”

In addition to Shrimp, Williams directed music videos (including JoJo’s “Save My Soul” in 2016) and worked on several indie projects that fell through during the pandemic. Lisa Frankenstein was the one that stuck. “The plan was not to have it be my first,” she says. “But I’m very, very grateful that it was.”

WILLIAMS PAYS HOMAGE to her father in the film, when Sprouse (known as The Creature) wears rainbow suspenders. She says she’s watched some of his films since his death, but it’s not something she necessarily seeks out. “Other people watch home movies,” she says. “In my case, it’s seeking out an unreal version of him, and sometimes I can handle that and sometimes I can’t. But at this point, at 34 years old, I don’t really judge myself for it anymore.”

Although Cody never met the late actor in person, she says Williams’ resemblance to him is strong. “It is difficult to not be reminded of him when you speak to her,” Cody says. “I know she’s talked about how she feels like a roadside memorial, which I think is such a beautiful metaphor. She understands that people bring their affection for him to their encounters with her.” 

It’s also fitting, Cody adds, that Williams’ directorial debut is about a girl who is struggling to give herself permission to mourn a parent. “It wasn’t really until she was attached to this [movie] that I realized it was interesting for her to be working on this project about grief, and about how you’re allowed to grieve, given what she had gone through in the public eye.”

Although he’s unable to physically speak, The Creature’s arrival drastically upends Lisa’s life, and her walk on the wild side evolves from healthy coping mechanism to hilariously alarming (we won’t give away any spoilers, but there’s some murder, and a few surgical procedures made with a broken tanning bed). It’s the perfect fusion of comedy and horror that proves Williams’ career is only just beginning. “‘Horror sci-fi nerd’ is a moniker that really belongs to her,” Derrickson says. “Nobody else in the world would make this movie but Zelda.”

“I think my sense of humor was shaped by a lot of trauma,” Williams says. “I find a lot of humor in darkness and I want to make things lighter for other people. Aspects of that definitely carry over into this movie. We spend so much time trying to make the way we navigate anything more palatable for others, especially women. Lisa gets to do the opposite in this.”