It’s a sweltering summer day in Los Angeles, and Anna Kendrick is nervous. “I keep saying, I’m normally good at this stuff,” she tells me excitedly. “I’ve been doing it for, like, 15 years. I know how to give an interview. But it’s a whole brand-new feeling, I guess. I wasn’t expecting it, so I feel very vulnerable.” The actress has been thriving in the industry ever since she stepped in front of the camera (most notably breaking onto the scene as Bella’s adorable firecracker of a friend in Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight). However, in 2022, while she worked on her new movie, Woman of the Hour, Kendrick took on her first project as a director and found a new desire within herself that up until then she realized she was “burying out of fear.”
Although her directorial debut received overwhelmingly positive responses at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023, both the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA were still on strike, meaning that Kendrick could do very little to promote her new work. Aside from some quick soundbites for “Variety’s 10 Directors to Watch for 2024”a recognition that Kendrick recalls, with some surprise, had her “trembling” with anxiety—I am her first official long-form interview. Over the course of our talk, Kendrick will apologize to me for making me her guinea pig journalist, taking her time to find the perfect words, and geeking out like a little kid over filmmaking minutiae, such as switching lenses for certain scenes and framing shots like Alan J. Pakula would do in Klute. It’s inspiring to see her eyes light up as she reminisces over her first experience as a filmmaker, fervor and tenacity ringing off of her in waves like heat from the city’s sizzling streets.
It’s a hard thing, yearning for more. This is especially true for women who have already been successful in a certain field. Much of what individuals label as “imposter syndrome” is more in line with rising above one’s station in the face of conformity. For director Kendrick, it took a long time to admit that she wanted to be behind the camera, even to herself. “It was just easier for me to say, ‘Oh, it doesn’t interest me’ and ‘Those people are crazy’—and they are! I do have a lot more gray hairs now than I did before,” she says, beaming. “But I did really love it.”
A film that proves the depths to which reality can be stranger than fiction, Woman of the Hour follows the true story of serial killer Rodney Alcala and his time spent as a bachelor on The Dating Game television show in 1978. Airing on the ABC network, the program featured a lone bachelorette who would quiz three potential bachelors, all of whom were hidden from her view by a partition dividing the stage, in the hopes of choosing one to date. Using the bizarre real-life event as a launching pad, Kendrick’s debut opens up a greater conversation about navigating the murky waters of gender dynamics, and the dangerous ways in which women are conditioned to abide by men. “The Dating Game and the partition, it functions as this terrifying metaphor for what we experience all the time,” says Kendrick, “which is, how can I truly know a person?”
Long before she signed on to direct the movie, Kendrick was attached to star in the leading role as Cheryl Bradshaw, the woman who appeared onstage opposite Alcala on that fateful day in the late ’70s. With her interest in true crime simmering at a low level, Kendrick was made aware of the strange occurrence in the ways you assume most people do: She had heard about this guy who was a murderer who went on The Dating Game. Although the premise piqued her interest, it wasn’t until she read the script and found it to be “so much more emotional” than she was expecting that she realized how badly she wished to be involved in screenwriter Ian MacAllister McDonald’s vision. “It was so different than I thought it would be,” she recalls. “I just loved it.”
Kendrick never even thought about directing, even when the years passed by and the window to bring the feature to fruition was slowly coming to a close. “Suddenly there was a time slot and no director and we were scrambling to find a director, and I just found myself really sad at the idea of anybody else doing it,” she says, her voice signaling her trepidation. “It was overwhelmingly terrifying to imagine pitching myself to direct the movie, but the sadness at the idea of somebody else coming in and taking the reins on this project that I had become so invested in just broke my heart more.”
Cheryl Bradshaw is familiar as a young actress in Los Angeles questing for her sense of self, trying on different sorts of roles and finding agency in her responsibilities. She crosses paths with Alcala (Daniel Zovatto) after a series of uncomfortable interactions with inappropriate casting directors pushes her agent to book her on the dating program as a last resort. (No stranger to awkward auditions, Kendrick actually added a line wherein one of the men in the room asks her if she does nudity, and when she declines, he gestures at her chest and responds that he’s sure they’re fine. “I added that because it happened to me when I was 19,” states Kendrick with an air of incredulity. “The phrase ‘I’m sure they’re fine,’—it haunts me. It’s too good.”)
Although we, as the audience, are privy to Alcala’s true nature by the time he appears in the spotlight on the popular game show, Zovatto’s natural charisma seeps through his performance when necessary, a trait that Kendrick deemed important to manifest empathy for the female characters unfortunate enough to be caught in his thrall. “The opening scene is one of the last things we shot,” Kendrick comments, reflecting on one of her last moments on set with Zovatto. “He was expressing a sense of relief that his time with Rodney was coming to an end, and I said, ‘Well, I think that the opening scene is where we need to see why these women trusted this guy, and you can kind of start putting him down the night before we shoot that,’ you know? And I had not seen him really be warm on camera up until that point, so I really didn’t know what that shoot day was gonna be like. It ended up being like, ‘Oh, that’s Danny.’ Like he put down Rodney for that scene, and he was just Danny.”
As for directing herself, Kendrick found a sense of relief in an area that others might find cumbersome. “When I was getting ready to do it, everybody of course was asking me, like, are you worried about doing two things?” Kendrick smiles. “And I felt like I’ve been doing this my whole life. That part’s gonna be so easy. If anything, at least I know that the lead actress and the director are gonna be on the same page.” Where the dual commitment did prove challenging, however, was when the filmmaker decided to approach all of the game show scenes like she was directing a play in a theater, filming roughly 25 pages at a time without stopping, and requiring every actor on stage to keep up, including herself. “I think that when I’m in a scene, I have a pretty good sense of how it’s going to translate on camera and what the viewer will be experiencing,” she says. “I had not accounted for the fact that when you’re doing 25-minute takes and you finish, all I could really do was run up to wherever video village was and say, ‘Can you just show me 30 seconds from the middle of the take?’ I just had to kind of do it with a blindfold on and find out what I had when I got into the edit.”
Kendrick is stunning in the movie. Watching her evolve from the shy, withdrawn beauty with the bunched-up shoulders and the nervous laughter into the bold and straight-backed savant with a raised chin and an appetite for dim-witted fools is mesmerizing. Every eyebrow raise becomes intentional. Each smile is calculated. It’s enthralling seeing her character acknowledge her own power in real time. It’s endearing seeing Kendrick breathe life into a figure we’ll never know.
There’s a scene in Woman of the Hour when a TV show host sizes up Bradshaw in the dressing room vanity mirror and tells her, “You’re an intelligent girl, anyone can see that. When you get on that stage, though, I don’t want you to play so smart.” He worries that she might intimidate the bachelors and suggests that she engage in her own degradation by smiling and laughing, over and over. “Tony Hale was really great in adding layers to it,” Kendrick says about Hale’s character, TV show host Ed Burke. “There’s a moment where he touches my hair in this very dismissive way. It’s such a small moment, but, you know, it’s just this additional thing that you have to smile through.”
During its initial run in the 1960s and its revival in the 1970s, The Dating Game popularized a competitive atmosphere in which women could be publicly sexualized and harshly judged for their bodies as a means of amusement, one that specifically aired nationwide across America. Correlation doesn’t necessarily indicate causation. Yet it is worth noting that the objectification of women can lead to violence against women.
Using the game show as a vehicle for providing commentary on the risk involved with resisting a man’s advances, Kendrick points to “the tiny ways that we try to be pleasing to avoid emotional danger, and obviously, how that translates when you’re dealing with someone who is very dangerous and very violent.”
Just like the real-life serial killer did in his prime, the Rodney Alcala in the movie poses as a professional photographer in order to lure in unsuspecting women and distance them from crowds. Drawing his camera like a gun, Alcala targets his victims and saves their picture as a souvenir. “We are seeing women in a reflection or through a lens or through a TV monitor, the idea of when they’re being sort of looked at versus when they’re being seen,” says Kendrick. “In that scene with Tony [Hale] when he brushes my hair, he doesn’t ever look at me in that scene. He only looks at me through the mirror.” Alcala captures still photos while TV show host Ed Burke prefers moving pictures, but both weaponize photography in an attempt to depersonalize women.
Kendrick adds, “My cinematographer and I were joking that we turned into these magpie creatures where every new space that we entered, we were just looking for reflective surfaces and getting really excited when we found one.”
In Kendrick’s interpretation of Bradshaw, she acts as a composite of both the real Dating Game contestant and a wish-fulfillment fantasy. “Cheryl is probably the most fictionalized character because there’s so little about her that we know,” says Kendrick. Hoping to bring honor to the real-life survivor, Kendrick actually hired a P.I. to track down Bradshaw but found that she is unfortunately no longer with us. The director goes on to explain how she did have a good time trying to have “this lovely juxtaposition of Cheryl when she’s in pleasing/appeasing mode and then when she kind of goes off the rails and breaks the rules and manages to gain this power.”
Female joy is, in and of itself, an act of rebellion. In the recording of the actual show, roughly 20 minutes of footage are missing from the end of the taping. Pouncing on the opportunity, Kendrick uses this section of the film as, effectively, a piece of fantasy, in which Bradshaw tosses her notecards to the side and begins quizzing her bachelors based on ideas originated in the last place they would ever think to look: her brain.
“At one point, Cheryl going off-script felt a little know-it-all in a way that didn’t have a sense of fun to it,” the director remembers. “I realized, oh, the content of what I’m saying doesn’t matter. It’s the fact that I’m doing something naughty and I’m rebelling. I think that performance came together once every line was really just about what a good time she was having, rather than her being a badass or something like that. The playfulness is the power.”
Sadly, real-life events aren’t as uplifting as Kendrick’s alternate dimension. Serial killer Rodney Alcala murdered at least seven women and children. Investigators suspect he may have actually killed as many as 130 people based on photos found on his property. What’s even more upsetting is how long he got away with it. For well over a decade Alcala had been reported to law enforcement by survivors and other observers. When Alcala appeared on The Dating Game, he was a convicted rapist who had already served time for his crimes.
Kendrick calls the history “truly maddening,” getting visibly heated at the level of police incompetence in the 1970s. Struggling not to launch into a diatribe of every specific detail of where law enforcement and the justice system failed because it makes her “so insane,” she calms herself and begins again: “There were just so many opportunities to put this guy away. To save people’s lives. There are just so many instances where people took his word over the word of a 13-year-old girl, or let him out of prison, basically based on vibes, according to the research that I got.” Seeking counsel, Kendrick spoke with Matt Murphy, who was a prosecutor in the 2010 retrial, and regained at least a little bit of her faith in the penal system upon realizing that there are some individuals in said system who are actually good at their jobs and care that justice is properly served.
Still, Kendrick wasn’t out to highlight a serial killer in the way that many movies have done before. Anyone who’s seen a picture of Rodney Alcala knows that he looks nothing like Daniel Zovatto. Kendrick isn’t interested in getting bogged down by details, especially when they concern a monster who took the lives of countless victims. She’s more intrigued by the prospect of telling a story about the women who held the light he sought to snuff out.
True crime media can provide important insight into horrific events and help people, especially women, learn how to better protect themselves against an attacker. At the same time, the subgenre has been criticized for glorifying these monsters and their barbaric acts. Where pop culture has penned these deviants as masterminds of their time, more often than not their sprees and escapes were a result of police complacency. Where Woman of the Hour shines is in the way it flips the true crime genre on its head by focusing on the women involved instead of defaulting to yet another movie where the story revolves around the killer.
“We noticed that when a scene wasn’t working and we couldn’t figure out why,” Kendrick explains, “it was like, okay, let’s go back to, how do we center the victim that we’re about to meet and get to know them and enter through them?” The director also knew that she “didn’t want to be up-close and personal for the bulk of any acts of violence,” opting to jump wide and shoot Alcala’s attacks through organic frames like car windows and big city skylights. “I rewatched Klute right before making this movie,” Kendrick says, “and I was like, oh, I feel like Charlie [one of the victims, played by Kathryn Gallagher] needs to be in an apartment with a skylight.”
Much like the character she plays in the movie, Kendrick found agency in playfulness over the course of working on this project. Digging into niceties with her director of photography, Zach Kuperstein, who is known for his incredible work on Barbarian and The Eyes of My Mother, the filmmaker gets giddy reminiscing over switching lenses to gas up certain scenes, recalling a special trick involving a flashlight used in a Dating Game scene to make it feel like a “horror fantasy. I knew that I wanted it to be bright and overwhelming, but almost cheerful in a way that you knew something was wrong. Like feeling sick from eating too much candy.” By the time this sequence occurs in the film, Cheryl is going off-script because we’ve divulged the missing minutes of the episode, leaving the blank space open for interpretation. “It just becomes this unreality, and I feel like we’re allowed to do that because that footage is lost and we’re kind of making up a fantasy, and because that’s maybe how it feels when you finally live in this fantasy that maybe you get to be a whole fucking human being and not have terrible consequences befall you.”
Riding high, Kendrick has more than earned her director stripes. There was even a moment during production when the filmmaker had to put her foot down—much to her abhorrence. “There was a point where a couple of the producers really tried to convince me to open the movie at a nightclub,” she recalls. “And for reasons I might not ever be able to fully articulate, I actually said—which is insane, by the way, like who the fuck am I to say this?—I actually said, ‘If that’s the movie that you’re certain you guys want, I don’t think I’m the person to make that movie.’” Kendrick looks just as surprised to have uttered the words as she imagines everyone else was to have heard them.
A Simple Favor 2, directed by Paul Feig, just wrapped filming. Kendrick, who reprises her role as perfectionist WASP Stephanie in the sequel, jokes that she wishes the character would “grow a spine,” but she also admits relief at the idea of limiting her participation in a project to acting only. She does have a desire to direct again but can’t quite decide on her next project just yet. She’s reading scripts and reflecting on knowledge gained yet remaining humble, in her own way. “I showed up and I told [Feig], I’m so glad that you guys have worked with me before,” Kendrick laughs, “so that you don’t look at me and go, ‘Oh wow, she makes one movie and she thinks she knows everything,’ because you know that I was always bossy and opinionated and nosy. At least all your annoyance with me just comes from a place of like, right, that’s how she always was.”
WOMAN OF THE HOUR IMAGES COURTESY LEAH GALLO / NETFLIX
PHOTOS OF ANNA KENDRICK COURTESY OF NINO MUÑOZ / NETFLIX
