Anna Kendrick makes her directorial debut with Woman of the Hour, which is streaming on Netflix. I had the incredible opportunity to discuss the movie with the director/star/EP as well as cast members Daniel Zovatto, Nicolette Robinson, Autumn Best, Kathryn Gallagher, and Tony Hale.

The stranger-than-fiction story of an aspiring actress in 1970s Los Angeles and a serial killer in the midst of a yearslong murder spree, whose lives intersect when they’re cast on an episode of The Dating Game.

“I hoped to kind of capture that feeling you have when an interaction has gone a little south but you’re not sure how much,” Kendrick shared. “There are a couple of moments in the movie where, again, the hope is that it puts you inside that feeling of, ‘Wait, what, what did — did I hear what I think I just heard?’ There’s times where certain lines are kind of obscured and it’s meant to give you that sense of like, ‘Did that person just make a sideways comment, and did they mean it as a joke? I can’t even really tell.’ And for my character especially, I figured that the question for her, particularly in the first act, is at the end of every scene that kind of hanging dissonance of, do you see me as human or do you see me as something else? By the end of the movie, I think Cheryl has her answer and it’s not a great answer, but it’s at least the truth.”

“I was new to it so I didn’t know how to start but for me, I was like, ‘Rodney Alcala, who is this guy? What has he done? What’s his childhood like? Does he have a family? Where was he raised?’ And then, little by little, you start to kind of get an idea of who he was and then, you do other research on other serial killers. But then, it was hard to find something that really gave me who this guy is and for me, it was his photographs,” Zovatto commented about the research he did for the role.

“When you’re growing up as a woman, you sort of understand that secret language we all speak and how many times we hear our intuition and we choose to be palatable, not be difficult, be polite, and be nice. Oftentimes, that’s in direct conflict with what our intuition is telling us, that we’re sensing danger,” Gallagher explained. “I think there’s a moment that I see both of you guys, and I remember feeling in the scene where you see each woman sense danger, and you see each woman go, ‘I’m being crazy,’ you know? Which we’ve all done, I mean, thousands of times probably in the last year and it’s a defense mechanism. It’s a way of protecting ourselves and I certainly, after making this film and watching this film, really will be listening to my intuition a lot more.”

Regarding how serial killers are handled in a lot of projects, Robinson said, “I was really grateful that in this particular one, I was able to really focus on the grief of my character who lost somebody in her life because of this man and you really get to see how deeply this affected so many people and also, how incredibly heartbreaking it all is. I just love that we get to focus on those women versus just focusing on like, ‘what’s going on in this serial killer’s brain,’ and all of that.”

“I really did just feel like I was sort of playing myself in a timeline that could have been very real. I grew up in a very religious town in Utah where I was taught to keep my thoughts and feelings to myself, and I was very good at that. And so, it really kind of just felt like a step back into who I was as a kid and who I was growing up,” Best expressed. “She was very smart about what she held back, and I wanted to really bring that to the character.”

“[It was] really fun ‘cause it’s a departure, obviously, from what I’ve done but it was so fun, and also, he was that way off-camera but it was really interesting to see a little bleed into his onstage performance or his presence. He would kind of say things that you’re like, what,” Hale told me about how Ed switches his persona while on and off camera. “Because it was such a part of him, this kind of just dehumanization of women and the objectification, he couldn’t help but [let] it get into his onstage presence, which was disturbing.”

We talked about their hopes for the film, the ending, the importance of telling this story from the perspective of women, The Dating Game world, and much more.

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