Hayley Kiyoko Turned Her Hit Single ‘Girls Like Girls’ Into Her Dream Movie

Hayley Kiyoko looked at the monitor and gasped.

It was June 2024 in Kelowna, British Columbia, and she was filming Girls Like Girls, a queer coming-of-age romance loosely based on her own experiences as a teenager. In the midst of her successful music and writing career, Kiyoko had often imagined making a movie bathed in sunlight, capturing imagery like “train tracks and lakes and all the classic tropes that I would see in heteronormative stories,” she tells ELLE.

So when she pulled up to the Girls Like Girls set in Canada’s quiet wilderness that summer, set to begin production on her feature directorial debut, she was stunned by what her hovering drone camera had captured: train tracks lined with evergreens, her two protagonists flirting below, sunlight spilling perfectly into frame. For the first time, the long-gestating vision in her head was real. Her dream had come to life.

“I was like, ‘This looks exactly how I imagined it to look,’” she says. “Like, it’s alive!”

If her revelation sounds a tad like something out of Frankenstein, it’s hard to blame her. When she initially wrote the 2015 track “Girls Like Girls,” the song from which her film draws its title, it marked her public coming-out. Kiyoko became a singular voice for a generation of queer fans starved for honest representation in pop music. Over the next decade, as her career blossomed, that ethereal song (about a girl pursuing another girl in a relationship with a boy) kept growing new limbs—first, a viral, sexy music video; then, a fleshed-out 2023 bestselling novel; and now, finally, a living and breathing feature film.

With each additional appendage, Kiyoko, 35, has maintained the song’s emotional, subversive core, obliging obsessive fan theories while mining the detailed memories of her own young, closeted, unrequited love. Now, with Girls Like Girls, that journey reaches its fullest expression: the culmination of an improbable, battle-tested 11-year quest to tell the sapphic love story she always wanted to see on-screen.

“I believed in my soul that it would exist one day,” she says. “But I also didn’t really know if it ever would.”

When we speak over Zoom in early June, Kiyoko is taking a Friday afternoon walk, squeezing in some steps around her Los Angeles neighborhood between press stops—perhaps a way to quell the jitters. Crowned “Lesbian Jesus” by her devoted fan base, Kiyoko has built a fiercely loyal and global community by giving queer female desire the kind of visibility and emotional specificity that mainstream pop culture has long denied it. But after spending more than a decade shaping Girls Like Girls into its latest form, she’s finally grappling with the unnerving reality of letting this story all go.

“I’ve boiled it down to the very core,” she says. “I’ve been able to celebrate that piece of myself that I was so ashamed of for so long. And now I get to celebrate [my coming-out] and utilize that experience to hopefully help people’s experiences in the future.”

The movie doesn’t exactly feel like closure.

“It actually feels like a beginning,” she says.

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Set in small-town Oregon in 2006, Girls Like Girls follows Coley (Maya Da Costa), a guarded teenager grieving the loss of her mother and learning to live with her estranged father (Zach Braff) in a new home. Not long after moving in, she becomes smitten with Sonya (Myra Molloy), a magnetic, popular girl who invites her into her troublemaking friend group. Over a swoony summer, Coley and Sonya’s connection grows deeper but more complicated as Sonya maintains a relationship with her boyfriend Trenton (Levon Hawke) and struggles to accept her true sexual orientation.

Like the novel before it, Kiyoko’s adaptation remains firmly tethered to Coley’s perspective, filling every touch, glance, and flirtation she receives with a heightened, hormonal intensity. The movie also revels in mid-2000s nostalgia, featuring uber-specific needle drops (The Bravery’s “Honest Mistake” makes a cameo) that underscore the stomach-churning panic of seeing your crush squeak open their AIM door and wondering whether to make the first move. Those details mattered deeply to Kiyoko because she lived them—and like Coley, she experienced much of her own yearning in isolation. “I grew up in a world where I was fed heteronormative stories,” she says. “I had to edit myself constantly to try to find myself in those stories.”

Kiyoko, who was born and raised in Los Angeles, knew she was gay around the age of 6, she says. But she spent her formative years in the closet, appearing in various Disney Channel television shows (Lemonade Mouth, Wizards of Waverly Place) and teen flicks (Blue Lagoon: The Awakening), resisting roles with easily identifiable sexual orientations. In 2010, she joined electropop girl group The Stunners, but despite earning a record deal at a major label, the ensemble disbanded before releasing an album. That led Kiyoko to release a few middling solo singles of her own, in which she says she never revealed her true self. “There were so many years where I was writing songs that had he/him pronouns in my journals—just in case someone would find my journal,” she says.

Then, in early 2015, she stopped hiding. On a rare, rainy L.A. day, Kiyoko’s friend and music cowriter Lily May-Young asked her what she was most afraid to write about. Kiyoko had recently come out to her and felt comfortable answering honestly: “I’ve always wanted to write a song about women.”

Their resulting brainstorm quickly led to the February release of “Girls Like Girls,” a synth-heavy track unlike anything Kiyoko had previously written. The casual chorus—“Girls like girls like boys do…nothing new”—belied its subversive spirit, punctuating her romantic yearnings with each staccato and echoed word. “I was manifesting feeling confident and ‘stealing kisses from your missus,’” Kiyoko says. “That was a version of myself that I wanted to be and feel. And so it really came from a place of sharing my truth.”

At the time, Kiyoko didn’t know the song was destined to “become part of my life’s work,” but she got a hint of what was to come when the music video premiered on AOL in June 2015 and began going viral on Tumblr and YouTube. (It has since racked up more than 163 million views.) Kiyoko couldn’t afford to hire a director, so she co-directed the video with local L.A.-based cinematographer Austin S. Winchell, turning the lyrics into a visual, violent sketch featuring actors portraying Coley, Sonya, and Trenton. Unlike her own teenage heartbreak, this story ended on a hopeful note.

“I think everything in my life as a creative has been built from necessity,” Kiyoko says. “It was better if I just figured it out myself, and so I learned how to direct through trial and error and necessity.”

The song and five-minute video struck a chord, and its sanguine ending suggesting a positive future—a rarity in LGBTQ stories, especially at the time—helped earn her a cult following. Although many queer female artists had come out and released provocative music over the previous decades, few had shared the specifics of their sapphic sexuality like Kiyoko had—and far fewer had built an entire narrative around it. As fans became intrigued by her trio of characters and visual palette, Kiyoko had another realization: “Maybe directing is what my life has been leading me to this entire time.”

She got fixated on the idea. I need to make this into a movie, she thought—which led to another more important one: How does a queer half-Japanese woman break into an industry in which only 5 percent of working directors are women of color?

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As Kiyoko began directing more low-budget music videos of her songs, she gained a real aptitude for real-time problem solving. “You could plan everything out, you could show up, and the actor isn’t there, or you lose the location, and then you have to immediately pivot and change,” she says. “I loved the challenge of still staying aligned creatively.” But scaling that improvisational mindset from music videos to a low-budget feature film proved far more demanding than she’d anticipated.

After absorbing the viral success of her “Girls Like Girls” music video, in 2017 Kiyoko pitched and wrote a feature-length movie, dropping her own story into the world of her three established characters. But financing became a major roadblock—especially with a mostly unproven artist. Kiyoko tinkered with her script and budgeted out the project in numerous locations, but the production company that originally showed interest in her pitch eventually backed out of developing it. “There was a moment where everything kind of fell apart, and I was like, ‘I don’t know if this movie’s ever gonna get made,’” she says. “It was kind of like a four steps forward, six steps back process.”

Kiyoko released her debut studio album in 2018, went on a subsequent world tour, and even began performing with Taylor Swift onstage that same year. She continued growing her audience as a musician, but she remained steadfast in her cinematic ambitions. “I knew I could direct this movie,” she says. “I knew I could execute it. I knew I was the person to do it, but everything around me was saying no for so long. The only thing that really was propelling me forward from not giving up was this feeling in my chest, in my body—that if I gave up, that if I didn’t do it, who else will?”

Eventually, she took a detour. If Hollywood wasn’t ready to finance the movie she wanted to make, she would write it first as a novel. “I was like, ‘If this book is successful, maybe that’ll convince the studios to finally give me the green light,’” she says. But the project also became something more personal—a chance to create the kind of story she wished she’d had growing up. “I didn’t feel like I had representation in my life to know that my feelings were valid and that they were real,” she says. Writing the book, she adds, became a way to “heal that younger part of ourselves that is so confused and looking for answers.”

That intention is evident throughout the novel Girls Like Girls, which debuted in June 2023 and quickly became a foundational queer text, filled with easy, absorbing prose and a structure built around online time capsules like LiveJournal and AIM chats. Kiyoko used her own high school journals as source material, drew upon seminal firsts in her life, and introduced openly gay characters into Coley’s community. “When you’re queer for so long, it’s a very silent experience, and there’s a lot going on in your head,” Kiyoko says. “And so writing through the eyes of Coley, I really wanted to share as much of my journey as possible.”

The book turned into an instant No. 1 New York Times bestseller and was released in seven languages. A year later, Focus Features followed her hopeful playbook, swooping in to acquire the book rights and develop the project with her as director. The news validated her patience and commitment to a community she knew deserved more. “I want to try to make someone else’s life easier,” she says. “I want to make someone else’s road more paved than mine.”

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Kiyoko still had one more uphill climb: distilling a 300-page book into a 100-page screenplay. Her natural instinct was to cram as much of her writing into the script as possible. “There are so many scenes and moments that I had developed in the book that I wanted to put back into the movie,” she says, “and it just wouldn’t work out budget-wise.” But as she mapped out the story with collaborators Chloe Okuno (an L.A.-based Asian-American horror director) and co-writer Stefanie Scott (who starred as Coley in the “Girls Like Girls” music video), Kiyoko was reminded that the shift in medium would inevitably reshape the story anyway.

“In film, you have to show the audience how you feel, whether it’s with a glance or a touch of the knee,” she says. “That’s what makes it such an exciting challenge.”

That meant embracing change: scrapping entire scenes, reworking character introductions, prioritizing certain plot beats. Even the characters themselves evolved. In the novel, Coley, like Kiyoko, is half-Japanese. But after sorting through thousands of auditions and landing on Da Costa, who is half-Vietnamese, and Molloy, who is half-Thai, the story expanded in ways Kiyoko hadn’t originally envisioned. “I have two Asian leads reflecting back my truth,” she says. “And that took me years to get to.”

To her credit, the finished film feels unmistakably handcrafted by Kiyoko, carrying the same tenderness, diversity, and ending scene that made the original music video so resonant. In addition to a revamped version of her hit track “Girls Like Girls,” Kiyoko composed a handful of other original songs from Coley and Sonya’s perspectives, using music as another way to access their interior worlds. She also kept the film’s visual language consistent with her dream: warm, sun-drenched, and inviting. “Colors and visuals really dictate how the audience feels,” she says. “It was really important for me to create a warm world where the body is relaxed while the girls are obviously navigating very intense emotions.”

The combination of those elements—her edits, her tweaks, her soundtrack—led to an unexpected feeling. This movie, this version, Kiyoko says, feels like “the most authentic version of this story.”

That’s maybe why the movie’s release feels more like a beginning than an end. Though Kiyoko teases she could see Girls Like Girls shifting forms one more time into a musical, she’s inspired to keep world-building—to direct more movies, make television, and tell more hopeful sapphic love stories. She’s not done writing books, either: In November 2025, she released her novel Where There’s Room for Us, a YA historical queer romance set in a reimagined Victorian England.

Admittedly, she’d also prefer that her next projects not take 11 years to see through. But all of those rejections, pivots, and reinventions—all the tears and thoughts of self-doubt—gave her the time and space “to really embody my self-love and self-worth,” she says. Like the story she kept telling, the long process helped her boil down exactly what she wanted to deliver to the world—and why it mattered. “It wasn’t an easy road,” she says. “I just had to remind myself that my experience and my story is valid and important.”