If you haven't seen the film yet, "Woman of the Hour" is Anna Kendrick's directorial debut, where she also stars as Sheryl, a woman who was on the popular TV show The Dating Game, as a way to put herself out there on TV and break into the entertainment world. But one of the bachelors that she was testing was actually Rodney Alcala, a serial killer who was at the height of his crimes at the time.
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Short filmTranscript
00:00I was really blown away by all of your very deliberate shots and cutaways and reactions
00:05that work to build tension.
00:09The work you did with your DP, Zach Kuperstein, stands out because every single shot conveys
00:16an emotion, whether it's fear or trepidation or embarrassment.
00:20Zach was incredible and so organized, but I spoke to him early on about the way that
00:26I hoped to use reflection and distortion in key moments, a woman through a camera lens
00:35or through a mirror or a car window, in moments when she's being really missed as a whole
00:41person, in moments where she's being looked at but not seen.
00:47Because it's tricky to put that across in a film without using a kind of established
00:52visual language of the way that a predator might view a woman.
00:59If I use his literal perspective, am I contributing to a normalization of women being objectified
01:08on film?
01:09And it was just tricky and so that was a way that I wanted to attempt that.
01:15And then you sort of add in these moments with performance where, for example, Tony
01:19Hale's character seemingly won't look at me and will only look at me through the mirror
01:25and I keep trying to get him to actually just look at me.
01:30And that, I thought, created some fun performance moments.
01:34And I'll say that getting certain things across to the audience, look, I'm biased because
01:42this is what I've devoted my life to since I was 12.
01:46But I always think that performance is king.
01:50To me, the whole reason that movies exist is as a vehicle for great actors to give great
01:56performances and I love that every department in the movie thinks a movie is a vehicle for
02:02great production design or a great costume design or a great cinematography, which is
02:06exactly as it should be.
02:08Of course, I'm the one that's right, but, sorry.
02:13I think that's good.
02:14That's good.
02:15That's good.
02:16I'm into that.
02:20There were certain visual things that felt important to me.
02:27I remember when I was pitching myself, I think I talked about the parking lot sequence at
02:32the end and how I could imagine this frame where you kind of see Cheryl and Rodney and
02:40it's the expanse of the isolation that they're in in that moment and knowing that even if
02:47Cheryl ran for it, she wouldn't even make it out of the frame before Rodney was on top
02:52of her and really giving you that visceral sense of the kind of physical danger that
02:58she's in.
02:59Then, on the other hand, I think about the tiki bar and while there were very specific
03:05visual and production design things that felt important in that scene, I changed some
03:11of that scene the night before we shot it to just make it significantly more subtle.
03:19I think if you read that scene on paper, it would sort of feel like a scene where nothing
03:23happens and I was really, really trusting that Daniel Zavato, who is extraordinary in
03:30the movie, and I would be able to make something happen that felt really grounded but also
03:38really, really real and present.