Swiped director explains capturing Whitney Wolfe Herd's story - but with NDAs preventing speaking with her
Lily James stars as the Bumble founder in the new film.
Biopics can often fall into two categories, those that are created in tandem with the estate or real person behind the camera and those that are retold, to the best of their ability, in a part-fictional tale. The latest tech biopic, Swiped, is the latter.
Director Rachel Lee Goldenberg wanted to tell Whitney Wolfe Herd’s "inspiring" story as a woman navigating a male-dominated environment from a co-founder at Tinder to the founder of dating app, Bumble.
However, Wolfe Herd is not legally allowed to talk about her time at Tinder due to a non-disclosure agreement she signed when she left, after accusing her former colleagues of sexual harassment. Tinder ultimately settled without any admission of wrongdoing for an undisclosed sum.
Speaking exclusively to RadioTimes.com, Goldenberg explained that she set out to create as true-to-life a film as possible with the extensive evidence available online.
"It was a huge responsibility to tell this story, and especially without speaking to her," she said. "It was super important to my writing partner and I and the whole team that we just did as much research as possible.
"There's a ton of stuff out there. There are interviews with everyone involved, tons of articles. We pored over her court documents. The lawsuit is available online. We literally stalked everyone's old social media. We found old Vines that people had made to try to piece together like, 'Oh, OK. So, they were a couple here'."
Naturally, some of the story had to be fictionalised due to the gaps in the complex puzzle of Wolfe Herd’s life. She added: “There’s some story shaping, but making sure that was all on a bed of as much deep research as we could do."
Even with the NDA, Goldenberg wanted to tell this "cinematic" story, as she found it to be an empowering tale of a woman who "took some of the most difficult things that ever happened in her life and forged them into this great success".
"I was reading interviews and articles with her and her talking about both having some really hard times and then also her own complicity of feeling like, initially, there was only room for one woman at the table,” she continues. "And feeding into the boys' club to get ahead.
“I just related so hard to that and thought she found such a beautiful way to change her behaviour and move in a path forward. It just felt like not only a film to me, but also a film that I felt like I need to make this."
Swiped is streaming now on Hulu in the US and on Disney+ in the UK – sign up to Disney+ from £4.99 a month or £89.90 for a year.
Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Authors
Jess Bacon is a freelance film, culture and TV critic and interviewer who is obsessed with everything from Marvel to Star Wars to the representation of women on-screen. Her work has been featured in publications such as Rolling Stone, GQ, Stylist, Total Film, Elle, The Guardian, Digital Spy, Dazed, Cosmopolitan and the i. She’s also interviewed the likes of Zendaya, Brie Larson, Amy Adams, Dan Levy, Aaron Pierre and Brian Cox. In between overanalysing her favourite new comfort watch or internet trends, she’s working on her debut non-fiction book.
