In 1978, a infamous serial killer discovered his subsequent potential sufferer on nationwide tv. Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut Woman of the Hour is predicated on that true story — and you may see the new trailer above. Kendrick performs Sheryl Bradshaw, the bachelorette at the heart of an episode of the Seventies blind-courting tv present The Dating Game. “Bachelor #3, don’t let me down!” she laughs — a line with chilling significance because it turns into clear that Bachelor #3 is Rodney Alcala, the serial killer who grew to become generally known as the Dating Game Killer.
Kendrick was initially hooked up solely to star in Woman of the Hour, however ultimately signed on to direct as effectively. “Once I pitched myself to direct the movie, I realized that I love the character, but I love the movie as a whole significantly more than I love the character,” she says. “I think I was particularly invested in the script and in pieces of the script that [my character is] not in, in a way that I normally wouldn’t be.”
In this weird story of a serial killer and a courting sport present, Kendrick noticed one thing common. “I really like the complicated journey of a woman who is shrinking herself and being very pleasing and then manages to rebel and take back some power,” she says. “I love the fact that it isn’t as simple as, ‘Oh, she asserts herself and everything works out great.’ Because this is the bargain we’re making every day: How much do I live authentically, and how much danger does that actually put me in?”
Screenwriter Ian McDonald agrees. “When Anna signed on to direct, she said the thing she always found interesting was that it’s a movie about the danger that comes with our willingness to be intimate with another person,” he tells Tudum. “And that’s the case every time you go on a date with someone you don’t know — you’re making yourself vulnerable. Of course, the flip side is you also don’t want to close yourself off to the world. And so it’s a vulnerability that’s necessary, but again, comes with risk.”
Woman of the Hour flips the serial killer story on its head, zeroing in on Alcala’s victims and the lives he minimize brief. Read on for extra details about the film, coming quickly to Netflix.
What’s Woman of the Hour about?
Woman of the Hour is the stranger-than-fiction story of an aspiring actor in Seventies Los Angeles and a serial killer in the midst of a years-lengthy homicide spree, whose lives intersect once they’re solid on an episode of The Dating Game.
Kendrick and McDonald dove into the documented historical past of the Dating Game Killer and his victims — however the edges of the story had to be crammed in. “The full episode of The Dating Game seems like it’s been kind of lost to time,” Kendrick tells Tudum. “I would say that the majority of [research] was my Newspapers.com subscription.”
Kendrick stumbled onto a couple of leads of her personal just by driving round the metropolis she calls house, Los Angeles. “One of the articles listed the address of [a] victim, and I knew where it was in LA,” Kendrick says. “And I immediately thought, ‘Oh my God, she could hear the ocean when she died.’ ” Kendrick referred to as McDonald and the pair constructed one memorable second round that spot, with the digicam pulling again from crashing waves to a tragic crime scene.
Who’s in the solid of Woman of the Hour?
- Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air, Pitch Perfect, A Simple Favor) stars as Sheryl Bradshaw
- Daniel Zovatto (It Follows, Lady Bird) performs Rodney Alcala
- Tony Hale (Veep, Arrested Development)
- Nicolette Robinson (The Affair, One Night in Miami… )
- Autumn Best (4400)
- Kathryn Gallagher (HBO Max’s Gossip Girl and the Broadway musicals Jagged Little Pill and Spring Awakening)
- Kelley Jakle (Pitch Perfect, 42)
- Pete Holmes (Crashing)
Kendrick delighted in casting comparatively contemporary faces who match into the movie’s Seventies milieu. “Some of these people are performers that I know,” she says. “But I love that the movie might be introducing some of the actors to a whole new audience.”
Is Woman of the Hour primarily based on a real story?
Yes. Rodney Alcala actually did go on The Dating Game — in the midst of committing a string of murders (he was finally convicted of seven murders in two states, and is suspected of many extra). Screenwriter McDonald stumbled upon the Dating Game story on a real crime web site, and was impressed to write a screenplay that landed on the Black List of best unproduced scripts in 2017. But the killer wasn’t what grabbed his consideration. “The context around him was the thing that I found really interesting,” McDonald says. “He seemed to represent something that we were kind of wrestling with as a country at the time, which is ordinary people looking the other way so that bad people could get away with bad behavior.”
Alcala killed his first sufferer nearly a decade earlier than his look on the present, and continued to commit murders till his arrest the following yr, which solely underscores that concept. “In true crime circles you'll sometimes hear people say, ‘Oh yeah, he’s kind of like Ted Bundy,’ ” McDonald says. “But the truth of the matter is, he’s kind of the opposite. Ted Bundy was a chameleon. He was really good at pretending to be something he wasn’t. And Rodney Alcala really seems to have flouted a lot of his worst tendencies. It wasn’t that he was being sneaky, it’s that other people were kind of actively looking the other way.”
Kendrick noticed this actual-life, sluggish-movement tragedy as the driving power of the movie. “There are so many heroes in this story, but the heroes were outnumbered and outgunned by basically incompetence and negligence and a culture that did not prioritize victims,” she says.
Woman of the Hour hopes to reprioritize these victims, as a lot because it probably can. “I’m not really interested in the real Rodney,” Kendrick says. “I was more interested in trying to depict the kind of experience that we are more likely to have.”
When does Woman of the Hour come out on Netflix?
Woman of the Hour will stream on Netflix on Oct. 18.
