Anna Kendrick on haunting details that influenced Woman of the Hour script
There were moments in the film Kendrick found "so evocative and heartbreaking".
Anna Kendrick makes her directorial debut with Woman of the Hour, a chilling story of a woman who crosses paths with a serial killer, live on television.
Kendrick's Sheryl Bradshaw is the key figure in the film as an aspiring actress who wins a date with serial killer Rodney Alcala on The Dating Game, and while moments of the show have been fictionalised in the film - the chilling crimes of Alcala have not.
Alcala was convicted of murdering five people between 1977 and 1979, and Kendrick's research led to script alterations that showed audiences the terrifying nature of Alcala's crimes.
In an exclusive interview with RadioTimes.com, Kendrick explained how one key part of the film in particular was changed.
"There were certain details that would pop up and just be so haunting that they would really inform changes to the script," she said.
"I was reading this article about one of the victims and they listed her home address, and I thought, 'Oh my God, I know exactly where that is, like, I can picture it, and I've driven past there so many times.'
"And I thought, 'Holy s**t, she could hear the ocean,' because Rodney broke in through the window, so she would have been hearing the ocean while she was being assaulted."
Midway through the film, viewers are transported to yet another of Alcala's crimes, in which the windows of someone's home are rattling along with the sounds of the ocean as a woman is killed.
Kendrick explained that for that detail she called screenwriter Ian McDonald and "asked him to put that moment [in]", as she found it "so evocative and heartbreaking" to bring about a connection "to the natural world that some of these women had for a lot of reasons".
She continued: "Not the least of which is that it almost felt like a really beautiful way to kind of visually connect them to something so much larger than the moment that we're meeting them."
Speaking further of the whole film, Kendrick noted that some of the scenes between Alcala and his victim portrayed have "a very small window of screentime".
"It felt like placing them in these settings would speak to the kind of richness and complexity of what their lives were up until that moment, and what they should have been beyond that," Kendrick told RadioTimes.com.
She continued: "So I think about the ocean, and I think on the one hand, that could be the most beautiful kind of restorative place to be, and on the other hand, the ocean is a really dangerous place, and for some people, [it] could symbolise a kind of annihilation, and that's really what the film deals with when we're talking about who can I trust and who can I let my guard down [around]?"
While the movie features real accounts of Alcala's crimes, there are moments that are fictionalised in a bid to "tell the story in a way that is emotionally impactful and that the viewer can really follow for a 90-minute movie".
"So, in many ways, we were trying to not get bogged down in some kind of, like, hyper-detailed accuracy."
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