IT'S NOT hard to see how Diablo Cody has risen so rapidly to become Hollywood's Great Write Hope. It's chiefly down to the critical and commercial whirl that surrounded her first screenplay, Juno, a savvy, sardonic comedy about a pregnant 16-year-old who becomes a "cautionary whale" for her classmates.
The most distinctive new voice since Quentin Tarantino, Cody also comes with an appealing yet garish CV. With her ever-changing hair colour and vivid body art, her most intriguing creation could well be Cody herself. Juno was her first script, bashe
d out on a laptop at a Starbucks. Before that, she was a pole dancer, who detailed her experiences first in a blog, then in the memoir Candy Girl: A Year In The Life Of An Unlikely Stripper. The money wasn't great because she wasn't inclined to pander to customers' fantasies, but it was the kickstart she needed, along with her DC Comics-style pen name, conjured by a visit to Cody, Wyoming.
"If I'd known I'd win an Oscar," says the artist formerly known as Brook Busey, "I'd have written it under my own name." The combination of a racy past and a quotable present has enabled Cody to vacuum up more attention than the stars of her debut script. "But if I wanted to spend days and days talking about films with journalists, I probably would have wanted to be a rock star or a movie star," she retorts. "Some people are just born wanting to be famous, but I never really was that. I always just wanted to write, and that's really it. I became accidentally famous, which is such a strange situation to be in. But it is very cool to be a visible writer, there's no question about that. It's wonderful to be appreciated in a field where people don't always get their due. A lot of writers get the shaft in Hollywood, and I've been incredibly lucky."
Self-deprecating yet self-promoting, for Juno she drew on her experiences when she was "young and sweet". Juno's hamburger-shaped phone echoes one Cody herself had when she was growing up and Cody's verbal signatures are all over the dialogue. The wagering, honest-to-blog wordplay has been reined in just a little for Jennifer's Body, Cody's first feature film since the hullabaloo over Juno.
Like her first script, Jennifer's Body is populated with arch teenage intelligence. Unlike Juno, it's a bloody high school demonic-possession serial-killer comedy – one part Heathers, one part Carrie – starring Transformers' femme formidable Megan Fox. Any man unwise enough to be seduced by Fox's charms finds their relationship nasty, brutish and liable to end shortly around dinner time. "I've loved horror films my entire life," says Cody. "When I was a kid, I was restricted from watching them most of the time, which made that section of the video store all the more tantalising. My all-time favourites are Rosemary's Baby and Don't Look Now.
"I was just sitting at home in Minnesota a couple years ago thinking, 'What would actually scare me, what would frighten me?' All I could think of were girls. Teenage boys are pretty harmless but teenage girls are terrifying. They can be really ruthless, and irrational and evil. This is certainly not a new idea, but I just wanted to take it to another level."
Jennifer's Body centres on two high-school girls on opposite sides of the popularity divide: sexpot Jennifer (Fox) and her shy, sensible childhood pal Anita (Mamma Mia's Amanda Seyfried). Their relationship fissures after an encounter with some obnoxious devil-worshipping rockers changes Jennifer from the local bad girl into something very bad indeed. Yet it's Seyfried's nerdier character that Cody identifies with. Raised in a Chicago suburb, she claims to have been a socially awkward adolescent: "I was not very attractive. Severely nearsighted, teeth really messed up, weirdly shaped – I still am. And even when I blossomed – to use a nauseating term – it was so ingrained in me that I was a nerd, it didn't matter."
Cody's Oscar made it easier to get Jennifer's Body made ("They believed in me because I was coming off a success. I don't know if anybody would have believed in this if I wasn't") but the film is commercially astute too, although Megan Fox was cast before her alluringly bodacious yet flinty image was embraced by lad mags.
"Young actresses can be very eager to please, very wispy," says Cody, who is also one of the film's producers. "But Megan felt as if she was in charge the entire time. That's what we wanted." With a man-eating heroine who literally chews up men and spits them out, the film's profane feminism has already perplexed critics in America.
Cody, meanwhile, has already moved on to hook up with Steven Spielberg to create The United States Of Tara, featuring Toni Collette as a housewife trying to hold her family together whilst dealing with a multiple personality disorder. The initial idea came from Spielberg. When he offered the writing job to Cody, she was a little apprehensive since she isn't usually drawn towards "sensitive, research-intensive topics".
"I just want to give women the best lines. I think about what the best lines in the movie are, and then I give them to girls. That might not seem so radical, but it doesn't happen that often."
Smart characters for women may be few and far between, but that may change with the rise of Cody and other women writers such as Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist scribe Lorene Scafaria, What Happens In Vegas writer Dana Fox, and 30 Rock and Baby Mama writer/star Tina Fey.
"Tina is doing it big-time, mogul style, and for a woman to be doing that is super cool," says Cody, who likes the idea of a new "fempire" of writers. "It's said that there aren't enough female screenwriters, but I have so much respect for JK Rowling. I always think about her when she was writing the first book, and people asking her what she was doing. She was probably like, 'I'm writing a book about a boy wizard and I'm on page 700.' You constantly have to explain yourself to people, and they're always laughing at you."
Jennifer's Body is released on Wednesday, 4 November.
www.jennifersbody.comThis article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 18 October 2009