After Miley Cyrus tweeted that phrase last December to show her support, Free the Nipple
went from just another indie flick to an Internet phenomenon with
support from Rihanna and Cara Delevingne. In case your Wi-Fi has been
down over the past year, Free the Nipple is a movement that rejects the
censorship of women’s bodies in America and it’s also a film starring
Lola Kirke and Lina Esco that hits theaters tomorrow. Esco, who also
cowrote and directed the film, told Style.com, “You can show beheadings
on Twitter or really, really pornographic photos of women because you
don’t show the areola. The nipple has become the symbol of the
oppression of women.” She called it the “Trojan horse that has allowed
the real conversation”—about gender inequality—“to come up. There should
be a flag with just the nipple,” she added jokingly.
Free the Nipple was kicked off Facebook and deleted multiple times
from Instagram, and Esco says she currently has three warrants out for
her arrest. The film that started it all opens Friday at IFC. So why do you think #FreeTheNipple became such a social media phenomenon?
I think because of the title itself. I knew this back in 2010, I
fucking knew it when I bought the domain, it’s so funny! It’s so
intriguing—it’s Free the Nipple. When we started using the hashtag on
Twitter and Miley tagged us—Miley’s name next to a title like that is
going to create a boom. Miley’s ideologies of not having anyone censor
her and my ideologies are totally aligned; we’ve been friends. Other
people joined, too, like Lena Dunham, Liv Tyler, Russell Simmons, Dree
Hemingway. Cara [Delevingne] has been supportive. She’s constantly
retweeting and tagging. Anyone whose support you’ve been surprised by so far?
Oh, yeah! Some NYPD cop [from the 117th Precinct] that has, like,
50,000 followers is following us on Instagram. MC Hammer. Vanilla Ice.
A lot of people in fashion are supporters. What’s the relationship between fashion and #FreeTheNipple?
I’m an artist and there’s nothing worse as a filmmaker than to be
censored. I’m sure designers feel the same way. In European magazines
you see boobs everywhere and that’s art, that’s beauty. They actually
photograph women the way these women should be portrayed, not
oversexualizing women like in other magazines for men. They’re not
posing sexy, they’re being really fucking cool and editorial, whatever
you wanna call it on the catwalk. New York magazine said Balmain was apparently a tribute to
Free the Nipple because a majority of the models were wearing
see-through tops. Why not wear see-through shirts? Boobs are beautiful. It’s interesting, when Miley wears pasties, it doesn’t feel sexual.
If you own it, you don’t feel any shame. If you just don’t give a
fuck, then it’s just like wearing a T-shirt but you happen to be wearing
pasties. If you have that confidence, it’s a much different image. Can you tell me about the song Miley wrote for the film?
One of my favorite songs ever is Melanie Safka’s “Look What They’ve
Done to My Song, Ma.” It’s the song that was playing nonstop during the
conception of this whole movie, and it says a lot to me as a filmmaker,
as an artist. This summer [Miley and I] were hanging out and I showed
her the film and I had that song as the end credit and I was like, “Why
don’t you cover it?” She was like, “I’d love to.” Miley literally nailed
it in two takes. Then I was dealing with all these legalities. She
didn’t want money, but the labels did. I was like, “This is too
complicated,” and she was like, “No, we’re getting the song in the movie!”
I was in a movie called LOL in 2010, we were shooting in
Detroit—that’s where I met Miley—and I told the director, Lisa Azuelos,
that I had an idea about making a movie called Free the Nipple.
So you knew from the start it would be called Free the Nipple?
Yeah. We were all talking about it, I knew there was a movie about
topless-ness. And she was like, “Whenever you’re done with the movie,
I’m gonna finance it.” I thought she was joking. I met up with Hunter
Richards, my friend who’s a screenwriter in L.A., and sat down and
hibernated for months writing this and not leaving the house, learning
more about people like Phoenix Feeley, who got arrested on the New
Jersey beach because she was topless and went to jail for nine days with
a nine-day hunger strike. Moira Johnston is another advocate for going
topless in New York City.
There are so many laws against women’s bodies but barely any against
men’s bodies. In the early 1900s, thousands of men were arrested for
going topless because they didn’t want to wear the one-piece suit. It
wasn’t until 1936 that four men from Coney Island fought the law, and it
passed, and obviously it helped that the judge was a man. So now men
have that right because they fought for it. Why do you think it’s different for women?
I think there’s big money behind hiding the areola. There’s a huge
market in sexualizing the female body. Like, why are you here to make
money off my cleavage, but the moment I do what I want with it you’re
going to condemn me?
So this is your directorial debut. Can you tell me a little about how you shot the film?
The first half of the film is censored and the second half isn’t. It
wasn’t an artistic choice, it ended up working cinematically, but we
were doing the opening scene on Wall Street and there’s always a cop on
site. The cop basically said you need to ask your girls to cover up and
wear pasties, and I was like, “Are you kidding me?”
I did this meeting with the entire team, and I was like, “Some of you
guys are going to be with me and some aren’t, but I am going to steal
the next 14 exterior topless scenes. I’m going to run-a-gun and
guerrilla-style steal them.” A lot of them were scared, some had green
cards and thought if they got arrested, they’d get deported. Pretty much
everything you see topless was stolen—we did them all in one take
pretty much.
