Director Lorene Scafaria on the true story and empathy of ‘Hustlers’

Strippers drugging their wealthy clients, maxing out those clients’ credit cards, laundering the stolen cash, and then relying on the scandal of it all to keep anyone who got hurt from going to the police: It’s an impressive scam, and an even better story. 

Enter Lorene Scafaria, a writer-director with guts to spare. Hustlers, her cinematic telling of this true tale, earned and sparked Oscars speculation during its opening last weekend — creating a cultural moment almost as explosive as the events that inspired it.

The source material is Jessica Pressler’s 2015 article “The Hustlers at Scores,” an early chapter in the internet’s ongoing fascination with scam culture. The story practically begged for an adaptation, and shortly after it was published, Gloria Sanchez Productions optioned the dazzling account and began accepting pitches from filmmakers ready to take it to the big screen. 

“It felt like a world that we had seen in every TV show and movie ever, but so few had been told from the dancers’ point of view.”

“As soon as I was sent the article, I read it and thought this was a story I had to tell,” Scafaria recalls for Mashable. “It felt like a world that we had seen in every TV show and movie ever, but so few had been told from the dancers’ point of view.”

Scafaria saw strip club culture as one of friendship and business, stuck in a destructive system designed to test loyalties of all kinds.

The film spotlights the complex relationship of partners in crime Destiny (Constance Wu) and Ramona (Jennifer Lopez), and the devastation that hit them in 2008 when Wall Streeters fell hard and took big money from the club scene down with them.

It’s a perceptive and nuanced narrative, the kind rarely applied to female relationships in Hollywood — let alone a relationship between two strippers.

“I think writing is always an exercise in empathy,” Scafaria says of her approach. “I thought that this group of people who are commonly misunderstood, strippers. I felt like I would love to tell a story that normalizes their jobs and shows what it’s like to do that for a living. There’s certainly pros and cons to it, but it’s a job like anything else.”

Pressler’s article captures the same general themes, but with a greater sense of estrangement between the story’s two main characters. Casting Wu and Lopez, both currently among Hollywood’s most beloved performers, Scafaria invested serious time and energy into creating a friendship that she felt audiences could invest in.

“When you read between the lines [of Pressler’s article], you realize that these women had this really profound friendship and built this quote ‘business’ together, but here they are being interviewed separately,” Scafaria remarks.

“I couldn’t help but think there was a deeper story there. It just touched upon so many things. I wanted to talk about control, our values, the American Dream, money. It felt like a really organic way to get into this world and see it from a different side of the story.”

That different side is a spectacular one, overflowing with genuine emotion that doesn’t stop at the two leading characters, but goes on to encompass the story’s victims and other players as well.

“I felt like I grew up with these guys and these girls,” Scafaria says. “I’m from New Jersey and I worked in a boiler room when I was 16 and 17, just answering calls and doing secretarial work. I was around all these guys on Wall Street selling bad stocks to old people in the late ’90s. It was scary. I felt a responsibility to the authenticity of that, to get something right about the feeling of that.”

“I wasn’t trying to change people’s minds about what’s right or wrong.”

To maintain accuracy, Scafaria interviewed strip club employees of all kinds, former and current, and consulted with Pressler regularly — even incorporating a character inspired by Pressler (Julia Stiles) into the script as a kind of weather vane for the story’s complex events.

“Obviously, I took a lot from the article and took a lot from what Jessica had uncovered, but I think it was a surprise to her when I said, ‘I’ve written you into this,'” Scafaria recalls.

“Of course, the character isn’t based on her real life or any specific details, but she is a big part of it. Like you see in the film, when [Pressler] wrote the article, she interviewed the women and the men and the cops, and they were all part of it.”

Empathizing with each character in Hustlers is essential to getting the point of Scafaria’s film. It’s more than a female empowerment movie, more than a scam movie, and more than an excuse to give us that incredible Usher cameo — though it is also those things.

Hustlers is, simply put, a lot to take in because the story that inspired it was just as overwhelming.

“I wasn’t trying to change people’s minds about what’s right or wrong,” Scafaria insists. “I just thought if I could stay truthful to what happened and possibly pull back the curtain on those things a little bit more and tell a story with empathy for everybody — the women and the men who are up against this broken values system — then I saw this really human, personal story.”

During production, Scafaria’s job, to empathize with her characters to the point of knowing them, sent her through countless rewrites, even as she faced numerous other obstacles — including a battle for the director’s chair.

“There was such a long period of time in which I was working on the script and fighting to get the directing job and fighting to get the movie made and then it fell apart and then it came back together,” she recalls. “Then, I was still rewriting it just to make sure that I was making the movie I wanted to make and the movie that should be made. That process was a long process for me.”

It was a three-year-long experience that assuredly made Scafaria better appreciate the world she had crafted. Looking back, Scafaria says she wishes she had more time to speak with the people her film sought to understand.

“I felt a huge responsibility to them and I only wish I had the luxury of meeting them ahead of time,” Scafaria comments, adding that she wasn’t able to speak to Roselyn Keo and Samantha Barbash, the real women who inspired Wu and Lopez’s characters, until about halfway through production. 

Keo has used the film to promote her book The Sophisticated Hustler, while Barbash has said she felt “betrayed” by her depiction, . Barbash isn’t alone. Numerous others have spoken out against Hustlers since its release, saying Scafaria’s film propagates harmful stereotypes. 

For her part, Scafaria has since of any royalties she receives from Hustlers to improve working conditions and erasing the stigma surrounding strippers.

“I tried to tell the story with empathy and to see all sides of it, so I can only hope that that resonates with them and that they see that,” Scafaria says. “You know, I was just trying to tell this true story and not necessarily paint anyone as a hero or a villain.”

Hustlers is now showing in theaters.