‘Juno’ Screenwriter Diablo Cody ‘Horrified’ by ‘Anti-Choice’ Interpretation of Teen Pregnancy Film

(INSET: Ellen Page in "Juno") Diablo Cody accepts the award for Best Book of a Musical for
Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Tony Awards Productions, Fox Searchlight

Diablo Cody, the award-winning writer of the coming-of-age story Juno, is “horrified” that her only hit film has been interpreted as pro-life.

Cody was thrust into fame and fortune in 2007 after her little indie film script for a story about a teenage girl who decides to have her baby instead of an abortion became a surprise hit at the box office.

But since that time, Cody has become upset that the film has been “perceived” as a pro-life statement, and she wants Hollywood to know that she is firmly in favor of abortion on demand.

In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Cody takes pains to establish her pro-abortion bona fides and declares her movie is not pro-life — though she doesn’t really make any effort to point out why it isn’t.

Cody told the Reporter that she was a s surprised as anyone when her script became a hit movie. She felt all she was doing is writing a “spec script” as an exercise to show potential Hollywood employers that she could write something.

“I thought I was writing a sample; I was trying to get my foot in the door in Hollywood. It didn’t occur to me that the script was going to be produced,” she said. “I certainly wasn’t thinking about it as this impactful opus that I’d be discussing 17 years later, that’s for sure.”

But now she is “horrified” that her nice little film is being upheld as a pro-life statement.

“I can understand why people would misunderstand the movie. Looking back at it, I can see how it could be perceived as anti-choice. And that horrifies me,” she exclaimed.

Cody also added that she is disgusted that an administrator at her childhood Catholic high school thought her film was wonderful. “I got a letter from some administrator at my Catholic high school thanking me for writing a movie that was in line with the school’s values,” she lamented. “And I was like: ‘What have I done?’ My objective as an artist is to be a traitor to that culture, not to uplift it.”

The writer, who has yet to replicate the level of acclaim she earned from Juno, also pointed out that since writing that film, she has had her own abortion and she is 100 percent pro-abortion, despite being “bombarded with gory, misleading anti-abortion propaganda at school.”

Cody also stressed that she hopes people understand her current position refuting her own a major achievement. “I do think it’s important that I continue to clarify my feelings about it because the last thing I would ever want is for someone to interpret the movie as anti-choice. That is a huge paranoia of mine,” she said.

She did not, though, explain how Juno is not a pro-life film.

The writer also tried to take a little bit of credit for “transgenderism” since the star of the film, actress Ellen Page, has since claimed to be a man named “Elliot.”

Cody desperately conflated Page with her character, to try and give her 15-year-old film some transgender cred, saying, “I think it’s cool to reconsider Juno through a queer lens, knowing now that the lead actor is a trans man. Obviously, at the time, I didn’t know that. So I can’t take any credit for a radical reimagining of teen pregnancy. But I do think it’s a cool conversation. And I’m happy for us to have that representation, even retroactively.”

Juno has nothing whatever to do with transgenderism. But Cody is more than happy for people to impute non-existent transgenderism into her movie even as she is “horrified” that people would imagine that the film has a pro-life message even though her lead character actually chooses life over abortion in the film.

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