Zoë Kravitz chose the name of her new movie ‘Pussy Island’ to be confrontational. The film marks the actor’s directorial debut on the grounds of a Yucatán hacienda — “a land of bacchanalia and vice”, writes Hunter Harris for WSJ Magazine.

Kravitz covers the Fall 2022 Fashion issue, lensed by Campbell Addy [IG] with styling by Gabriella Karefa-Johnson.

Kravitz began writing the script for ‘Pusssy Island’ with E.T. Feigenbaum five years ago — on the front end of an emerging #MeToo movement. The film “was born out of a lot of anger and frustration around the lack of conversation about the treatment of women, specifically in industries that have a lot of money in them, like Hollywood, the tech world, all of that,” she says. “The title came from that world. The title is the seed of the story.”

In the same way that even President Joe Biden is calling his latest piece of legislation a BFD, Kravitz refuses to back down on the name of the movie. If former US president Donald Trump used the word ‘bullshit’ and ‘shithole’ in his everyday Oval Office coversation, why must the rest of us worry about being censored? Peter Baker wrote about Trump’s crude language for the New York Times: The Profanity President: Trump’s Four Letter Vocabulary.

Powerful men are known for their crude and demeaning language and often equally crude references to women. The former US president probably inspired the very name of ‘Pussy Island’, with his infamous video speaking of women “Grab ‘em by the pussy.”

How low will powerful men go, Zoë Kravitz asks? The barrel probably has no bottom. In the case of Donald Trump, the Bible-toting, right-wing evangelical community [as opposed to the moderate and progressive evangelical community] speaks with a unified and clear voice, suggesting that “God works in mysterious ways.”

There really is a noble purpose behind Trump’s treatment of women — we just can’t watch it in action because we don’t possess as humans the divine insights required. Bottom line, “Trust God”, he knows what he is doing.

The irony is that in the 2010 book ‘America’s Four Gods’ it’s the vast majority of American women who believe that God is male. In the privacy of their own answers, the majority of men believe God is genderless.

Having taken the survey myself, along with over 200,000 other people, besides about 2000 in-person interviews with real people by Baylor Uniersity — a Christian institution in Texas — the facts are stunning.

God #1 is driving Trumpian politics and right-wing authoritarianism in America. ‘America’s Four Gods’ is the AOC bible.

In the movie, a Los Angeles cocktail waitress (Naomi Ackie) accepts an invitation to be whisked away to a tech mogul’s (Channing Tatum) private island. Danger looms in the debauchery. To sell the movie to MGM, Kravitz directed a sizzle reel with original and found footage to capture the tone she wanted: dark, funny, sexy, frightening. “I didn’t know Zoë before I met her for the film,” says Tatum, whose company, Free Association, is co-producing the project. “When we first met the movie was pretty different than its form now, but the themes were the same. All the iterations it has gone through were all pretty punk rock, to be honest.”

Note that Kravitz and Tatum are currently a couple.

The new director sought advice from Steven Soderbergh, who directed her in 2022’s ‘Kimi’. Numerous other friends read the script including actor-writer-director-musician Donald Glover who said “It feels really dangerous for a woman to make this story about power.”

Kravitz believes that it’s a scarry time to be an articulate person with an opinion. After the 2022 Oscars, she posted a pair of red-carpet photos of her dresses from the evening: “Here’s a picture of my dress at the show where we are apparently assaulting people on stage now,” read the first caption. When a commenter asked if she supported Smith defending Jada Pinkett Smith after Rock’s joke about her shaved head. Kravitz responded with a simple “nope.”

Internet wrath called for her head, anger so fierce that Kravitz deleted the images. “It’s a scary time to have an opinion or to say the wrong thing or to make controversial art or statements or thoughts or anything,” she says. “It’s mostly scary because art is about conversation. That should, in my opinion, always be the point. The internet is the opposite of conversation. The internet is people putting things out and not taking anything in.”

Operating within this mind-control right-wing and left-wing universe — with protect Black men, whatever they do, thrown in for good measure from the left-wing — Zoë Kravitz walks into the truth-serum, #MeToo light with ‘Pussy Island’.

We’ll be watching and supporting her in the good fight. ~ Anne