Anna Kendrick on her directorial debut ‘Woman of the Hour’

Anna Kendrick has made a name for herself with her signature sense of humour, from the Pitch Perfect and Twilight franchises to an earnest young graduate in Up in the Air, which earned her an Oscar nomination. She has now taken on the creative challenge of stepping behind the camera, marking her feature directorial debut with Woman of the Hour.

The thriller, which showed at TIFF in 2023 and is in theatres as of Oct. 11, is based on a true story. A woman named Sheryl (played by Kendrick) reluctantly makes an appearance on the popular 1970s show The Dating Game, and chooses a bachelor who turns out to be prolific serial killer Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto).

One of the striking aspects of Kendrick’s directorial sensibilities is her intuition in exploring danger and the real threat of violence women face regularly. She pointed to an example in the film when Sheryl is at a tiki bar with Rodney. It’s a key scene where the waitress realizes that Sheryl is not feeling safe, and with just a simple exchange of glances she helps her out. 

While the film hinges on horror and suspense, it isn’t like other serial killer narratives. Instead, Kendrick chose to honour the female characters and treat them with dignity. When it came to depicting explicit violence, she opted to “walk that tightrope of not wanting to sanitize it and also not wanting to do something gratuitous or graphic.”

One could see the connection between this film and her previous work in Alice, Darling, where Kendrick played a woman in a psychologically abusive relationship with her boyfriend. The 39-year-old actress has revealed that she too was involved in an emotionally abusive relationship with her ex-partner of six years. Kendrick admits it’s partly why she was drawn to these two particular scripts.

As Kendrick continues to explore new projects, her instinctive approach will undoubtedly shape the stories she brings to life on screen – her dream is to make a musical someday, she said. Below, she talks about making Woman of the Hour, as well as what it will take for her to deliver a sequel to her book, Scrappy Little Nobody.  

Q: I read that you felt those scenes where there’s either violence or the threat of violence didn’t feel foreign to you. Can you talk about capturing something so unsettling and relatable at the same time? Anna: It definitely was a balancing act, trying to figure out how much to show in terms of the acts of explicit violence… Then with the implicit threat in the movie, that was challenging because my instinct was to kind of take what was on paper and tone it down by 10 to 20 per cent. The trouble there is that that means that on paper, it doesn’t really look like much is happening, but I really trusted the the cast so much and I believed that we could make those moments of threat feel really real and palpable without explicitly stating what was going on. 

For example, in that scene in the tiki bar, I changed that the night before we shot it – it was a little more dramatic. The actress who played the waitress, I just kind of sprung it on her that morning, like, ‘Hey, can we do this other thing instead where you kind of pick up that I’m not feeling safe and you cover for me?’ She hadn’t auditioned to do that, but I think that because it’s an experience that women know really intimately, she just did it and just changed gears.

Q: Were there any classic thrillers that inspired you in shaping this artistically?

Anna: Oh gosh. It feels a little embarrassing to to say certain films, because, of course, they’re masterpieces, and so you want to have that caveat of like, I’m not comparing, but I was really inspired by No Country for Old Men. That was kind of the model that I used in terms of the level of violence and kind of showing the most explicit violence at the very top of the movie, and allowing the viewer to kind of use their imagination for the rest, so that you weren’t kind of in this loop of just having to show violent acts.

Q: What has your own journey of self-discovery been like when you’re taking on this new creative challenge?

Anna: I mean, it’s hard to say, but I think that there was something really nice about getting into the edit and seeing myself as the director running into the frame in between takes to give a note or adjust something. I had imagined that everybody could tell while we were making the movie that I was really nervous, and trying to cover the fact that I was nervous, and what surprised me is that I was like, ‘Oh, I’m just running on pure adrenaline and instinct in these moments.’

All that had to happen was I just needed to get out of my own way. I didn’t have a choice but to stop overthinking things, because we were shooting and there isn’t room for that. I felt like, ‘Oh, like that lady knows what she’s doing!’ 

Q: Is there something you accomplished making this film as an actor or director that you can look back on and say, “I am so proud of what I did there.”

Anna: I’ll start by saying something a little cliche, which is just that I’ve been aware for a long time that any movie that actually gets made is a miracle. I was very aware of that every second of every day on this shoot because it did just constantly feel like the movie was about to fall apart at any moment. It was such a tight schedule and such a tight budget.

I feel like something that I’m proud of is that if I felt like I had led somebody down the wrong path, or I’d made a mistake or something, I would try to find them and apologize because I feel like that’s not something that is usually modeled on a film set. There’s kind of an old school idea that, especially as the director, you just have to know the right answer and never admit fault or wrongdoing, because otherwise, you lose your standing as a leader. And that wasn’t my experience. It was actually much more rewarding and connecting to try to find those moments to say, ‘Oh, I think I was wrong about that earlier.’

Q: You are at a stage in your career where you arguably have more agency and creative control than before. How does this film align with the kinds of stories you are looking to tell now?

Anna: Oh, that’s a hard question because I feel like I was in a phase where the only scripts that I was really responding to were really dark, and getting increasingly dark. There was a part of me that felt like you kind of want to go deeper and deeper into the darkness to resolve something.

It was actually recently that I started reading scripts that just had a little bit more energy to them and power to them, that started to feel more like I wanted to go in that direction. It really is one of those corny art imitating life type things where I think I was just kind of in a funk for a while, and I think it’s promising that suddenly I’m moving away from being really drawn to material that’s just pure darkness. 

Q: The film gets dark and I imagine it takes a toll on anyone making it. How did you shake the day off? Anna: I feel like when I was filming, usually the end of the day routine was going down some kind of YouTube or TikTok internet beef rabbit hole of people I don’t even know (laughs). I don’t know what they’re fighting about, but that’s going to be the thing that I fall asleep to.

Q: I love the questions Sheryl asks the bachelors on The Dating Game show. What do you think is your favourite question to ask a bachelor that’s telling of their character? 

Anna: This is something that I actually hung on my wall, so I’m looking at it right now. I just thought of it as we were shooting it, and I was filling out the question card. I think it says: “If I met an ex-girlfriend of yours, what would she say about you and how much would you agree with that?”

Q: Lastly, are we going to get a follow-up to your book, Scrappy Little Nobody? 

I will say that writing the book was so fun, so rewarding and just so much work. The other piece of it is that, by the time that I’d finished that book, I was like, ‘Man, I need to live some more life because I am truly out of stories.’ So I feel like I would need to get a couple more solid, crazy stories under my belt before I could write a book that was longer than 40 pages.

Woman of the Hour is playing in theatres across Canada. 

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