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All Of It with Alison Stewart
Zoë Kravitz’s Directorial Debut 'Blink Twice'
00:23:39
Actor Zoë Kravitz joins to discuss her directorial debut"Blink Twice" which is now streaming on Sling TV and MGM+.
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- [00:04]
Zoe Kravitz
Listener support WNYC Studios.
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Alison Stewart
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Imagine being whisked away to a private island filled with lush landscapes, an exquisite spread for dinner, and bottomless glasses of champagne. You don't have a care in the world. And why should you? Because that is the perfect setup for a place where something evil is going down. It's the premise of Zoe Kravitz's psychological thriller and directorial debut. It's also a film that the Atlantic recently named the movies that mattered the most in 2024. It's called Blink Twice.
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Zoe Kravitz
In the film, tech billionaire Slater King charms an ambitious yet broke waitress named Frida into a vacation getaway alongside her best friend, Jess. They're invited to his private island along with his BFFs. Here's a clip.
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Character from Blink Twice
Okay, here we go. Jess, Rita, this is my childhood buddy, Cody.
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Hey.
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Zoe Kravitz
Cheers, ladies.
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Cheers.
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Cheers.
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Character from Blink Twice
This is Vic, my left and right hand man.
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Zoe Kravitz
Nice to meet you.
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Character from Blink Twice
What's up, man? Heather, Camilla.
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Zoe Kravitz
How you doing?
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Character from Blink Twice
Mommy. That's Stan, my security.
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Zoe Kravitz
Tom.
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Character from Blink Twice
Hi.
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Zoe Kravitz
How's it going?
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Character from Blink Twice
Where's Lucas at?
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I think that was the guy that shot Lucas. This is our resident wonder boy in here. He's probably gonna run the world one day.
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Zoe Kravitz
Nice to meet you guys.
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Character from Blink Twice
What's up, man? I don't know who that is, but this is Frida. Sarah. Sarah, Frieda.
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Zoe Kravitz
Hi. Hi.
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Character from Blink Twice
Cute nails.
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Zoe Kravitz
Thank you.
- [01:43]
Next thing you know, they are jetting off for the vacation of a lifetime. And it seems like a lifetime to Frida. She keeps asking what day it is and why she keeps fighting dirt under her nails. And. Well, not to give anything away, but things get Bananas Part Stepford Wives meets. Get out, Add a little Midsummer. Kravitz has made a stunningly beautiful and creepy movie, which is now available to stream. Zoe Kravitz joined me to discuss the film when it came out. Here's our conversation. I want to take this first from your co writing and then your directing. So let's start with the script. You co wrote it with ET Feigenbaum, who's also known for High Fidelity, which you starred in. Yay. What kind of discussions did you have about the structure of the film? Because the structure is so important to the film.
- [02:39]
That's a great question. The structure of the film changed a lot. Both throughout the process of writing and rewriting, but then specifically in the edit, it completely changed. And I think, you know, the film does deal with the concept or the idea of memory. And so we had a lot. We had a lot to play with in that way. And I think when we wrote the film, you know, we wrote it in a very linear way, mostly so that we, the writers, could really understand, you know, what's going on here, what story are we telling. And then once we understood that part of it, especially in the edit, I decided to kind of rip the whole thing open and play with time.
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In Blink Twice Chatting Tatum plays Slater King. Naomi Acke plays Frida. What did you look for as a director in terms of casting for these two roles?
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For Slater King, I knew it was very important that he was a person whom we found charming and who we felt comfortable with. A person that we felt like we knew, even though we don't. Especially wanting to protect the character of Frida and making it somewhat understandable why she would go away with someone that she doesn't know. And Naomi, you know, she's an incredible. She's an incredible chameleon. And her journey is vast in this film. And she has to carry a lot of different emotions. You know, she has to fear, anxiety, stunts, comedy. I mean, there's so many different balls in the air. And there's also a lot of the film relies on her expressing how she feels with her eyes. And Naomi Ackee has one of the most expressive faces I've ever seen in my life.
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Let's talk about her character, Frida. I'm wondering how you thought about the character development and which aspects of their personality to reveal and when to reveal it, because you said she goes through a lot.
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Yeah, I feel. I mean, without giving too much away, there are many layers and twists in the. In the story about who she is. I. You know, I love the idea of trying to take a Cinderella story and flip it on its head, you know, and at the beginning of the film, she. You know, she has her nose pressed up against the glass. You know, she's. She's a cocktail waitress, and she's seeing this world where, you know, everything looks so glamorous and so beautiful. And she's told, quite literally by her boss, you know, before she goes out to pour champagne, to be invisible. And when she goes on this trip and is seen and all of a sudden people are pouring champagne for her, she gets. You know, she gets what she thinks that she wants. And then throughout, you know, as the story kind of ravels or unravels, if you will, you know, she really has to dig a little bit deeper and find her real power. You know, I think the story really deals with power on a very surface level. And I think What Frida has to find is her power on a very, very. On a deeper level. Power on a deeper level.
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Yeah. It's sort of interesting. She gets Slater's attention at this event. Slater's hot, we get that. But she's also a little ambitious.
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Yes.
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What does Frida want? What does she want? To mingle with this crowd. Why does she want to mingle with this high flying crowd?
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Well, me and Naomi talked a lot about this from the very beginning. And even though it might seem like it's Slater King that she wants, what she really wants is to be Slater King. And that's why I've made an effort to tell people that this is a movie or a story about power, not about empowerment. The idea of empowerment always feels very. It's usually associated with women and femininity, but it feels cute in a way that power feels very masculine. And oftentimes women are. It's looked at as a negative thing when women are ambitious, when women want power. And so of course, while she maybe wants the attention and just wants to be looked at, she also wants to be the thing that everyone respects, the person that everyone respects the person that people listen to.
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Okay, so most of the, Most of the story takes place on the island. They jet off, they take a pj, they land immediately. And then they are asked to give over their cell phones.
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Yeah.
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What does it mean to give over one cell phone?
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You know, it's so, it's interesting because at first I, I think the root of that idea really came from, you know, a not wanting to. Once there's a phone involved in the story, it's like, girl, call the police, get out of here. You know, so we just knew we had to get rid of them, you know, so that we could tell the story. The whole reason the story takes place on an island is because we wanted to isolate these characters so they had to really deal with what we wanted to explore and talk about. And it's actually really interesting because after we actually, you know, incorporated that aspect into the story, and it actually wasn't even until I started to edit and screen the film for people, but that I realized how terrifying it is to give over your phone. You know, as a storyteller, I just wanted that, you know, that device away from the. From the characters. But, you know, it really is. We're so attached to them and it's. There's our security blankets in this way. And it's complicated because the way they sell it is kind of, you know, be present, be in the moment, be Here, disconnect from the world, but also you're disconnecting from the world, which means you have no one to. To help you if you. If you need it.
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Where did you film?
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Alison Stewart
We.
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Zoe Kravitz
We filmed in the Yucatan in Mexico, which is a very, very beautiful place. You know, we. I wanted it to. To be inland. I didn't want to be able to see any ocean, any. I want it to be this kind of disorienting place that can feel a bit claustrophobic. And it was really hard to find properties of that. Of that scale. And the Yucatan was. Was incredible. We were really excited once we found it.
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Let's listen to a clip from Blink Twice. Slater is giving Frieda a tour of the island, and she turns to him and says, you know, it's not what I thought it was going to be. This is from Blink Twice.
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You know, it's not what I thought it was gonna be.
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Character from Blink Twice
What do you mean?
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Zoe Kravitz
The legendary parties of Slater King with drugs and debauchery.
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Character from Blink Twice
We still do drugs.
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We just do them with intention and we still have fun. It's just a little different now.
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Zoe Kravitz
Something's happened in his life. He's a mea culpa everywhere. How did you decide not to tell us what he did?
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I felt like once the audience knows what he did, they have different. People are going to have different reactions to that, and, you know, then we're in a territory where, you know, don't get on the island. Frida. We don't trust Frida. We think she's stupid. And the story, I think, then focuses too much on that. I felt like I wanted to kind of leave that up for debate. But the fact that he has to apologize for something, you know, obviously means that there's some insidious behavior, you know, going on there. You know, Know, we're also living in a world where, you know, the. This. There's a. The gray area is very complicated, you know, whether you have to apologize for, you know, calling someone, you know, the wrong. The wrong thing, the wrong name, the wrong gender, or someone doing something really horrible and abusive to someone, you know, and part of me wanted to explore the idea of the public apology in general. And so it was more about that rather than about what. What he had done.
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The sound in this film is wild. It's really on point. It comes in, it comes out. There are drops. Certain things sound more prominent than other things. As a director in the edit, what role did you want sound to take in this film?
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I wanted this movie to be sensory. And because the Film is about memory. I spent a lot of time thinking about memory and what it feels like. And, you know, when you think back on something, you don't necessarily remember things as they are. You remember, you. You. You highlight the things that impacted you, and that's what you remember. If I think back on a day, you know, oh, I remember I was 15, and I was, you know, sitting in my. In my. In my room, and. And I was very sad that day. And the rain was hitting the glass, and I remember that sound of the rain on the glass. And. And then, you know, my mom was making food, and I could smell the eggs and the sizzle of the eggs. It's. That's how we remember things. And so I didn't want it to feel real. I wanted it to feel like. Like a memory. And I also wanted to highlight certain things. There's a. There's a repetition that happens in the film. You mentioned that the, you know, the bottles of champagne and wanting that at first to feel luxurious and exciting, and it becomes kind of hypnotic, and then it becomes. It becomes. It gives you anxiety, you know, So I really wanted to tell a sensory story in that. In that way.
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Yeah. The color red appears a lot. The gift bags are red. The flowers are red. Even Slater's therapy chair is red. That usually means danger, stop. What does the color red mean?
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The film, it's a combination of red flags, danger, stop. But then also, I do think that red is the color of power and so really wanting to play. There's a lot of. There's a lot of red, and there's also a lot of white. And, you know, this idea of, again, like, masculinity being associated with bold, bright colors. You know, power and women. You know, we get married in white. You know, we white flowy dresses, this purity. And then, of course, what happens when those dresses are now covered in red, you know, and really wanting to kind of meld those two. Those two worlds together. The dirtiness and the grittiness and. The dirtiness and the grittiness and the violence combining with the purity and the innocence. And, you know, there's a point in the movie where they really do kind of come together.
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My guest, Zoe Kravitz, we're talking about her debut feature film as a director is Blink Twice. Let's listen to a clip. We're actually gonna ask a little bit about the character, a little bit. Adriana Arona's character, Sarah. How would you describ Sarah?
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Sarah is. She's introduced mostly as Frida's Competition for Slater. She's, you know, this beautiful woman that's brought to the island, and she is known for being on a. On a reality show called Hot Survivor Babes, where she had to kind of live in the jungle, you know, stay alive. And so she's, you know, she's incredibly smart, she's sexy, she knows how to do, you know, incredible things like climb trees. And, you know, she's just, you know, incredible at what she does. And at first, her and Frida are. They both want Slater's attention, and so they, you know, they're in constant competition, they don't like each other. And then once Frida starts to realize what's going on and starts to realize that she's in danger, Sarah comes to her and, you know, believes her, and they immediately join forces. And from then on, it really does become a story about these two women who, you know, have come together to get out alive. And I really wanted to, you know, explore, you know, the way that women are, you know, taught to compete against each other and what can happen when we. When we stop doing that.
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Yeah, there's this exploration of trauma and, like, being believed when somebody says something to you, even though you don't have the facts behind you or at the tips of your fingers between. Between the two women.
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Yeah, there's. I wanted, you know, a lot of this film is also about intuition. Sarah has this line where she says, I'm having a great time here, but I also have this feeling that I'm not. And, you know, a lot of the breadcrumbs that, you know, eventually do lead to the reveal of what's been happening. You know, I. I wanted the audience to try and, you know, have the experience of, you know, there's unease here, and I can't put my finger on it, but I feel it. And I think. I know as a woman, you know, we spend a lot of our lives having these feelings but not knowing where to put them or how to say them. You know, even if we feel unsafe or uncomfortable, unless someone has done something so loud that we can say, hey, don't do that, you're often left feeling like, you know, we have to keep that to ourselves. And. And, you know, that's trauma in itself.
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I'm not going to give away a spoiler, but this is a little spoilery. You know, I looked at my notes after I left the film, and I put this has a lot of Me too in it. And you began writing it around 2017, and that's the time when the New York Times did a large scale investigation to Harvey Weinstein and Louis C.K. confess to sexual misconduct. How much did actual events shape the narrative of the film? Of the, of the film?
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Well, I started writing in the summer of 2017 and I believe things, you know, like the breaking of Weinstein and all of that. I think that was more in the fall. I think it was in October.
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Oh, wow.
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And so it was really interesting, you know, I started to write and I do think it was, you know, because I, you know, between, you know, my own experiences being a woman in this world and specifically, you know, in the industry that I'm in, but also so many, you know, friends of mine, family members that, you know, have different jobs, live in different places in the world, I just felt, you know, there, there wasn't really a. I don't know, there wasn't a place to put all of this anger I was feeling. And so I started to write the story and then it's, you know, it's pretty insane actually. You know, how soon after that the conversation really escalated, you know, people being exposed again, the concept of the island, like that had already been written. And so I, you know, part of me thought, okay, do I, do I stop? Is this too, you know, on the nose now? Are people going to think I'm actually, you know, taking the story and making it mine? Which it's not, you know, it's about my own experience. But there's also something really magical in terms of, you know, I believe in collective consciousness, you know, and I felt like this was something that obviously was bubbling up, you know, culturally and so it was just popping its head up in different, in different ways in different places.
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Yeah. I believe creators, creatives have sort of a vision about those things. Things that are.
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Yeah. Sometimes when I'm writing, I don't even feel like it's me writing. I like, something comes out and I, I read it later and I go, oh, wow. I didn't even realize what I was really saying here. So, yeah, the only thing that kind of had to change once those things happened was, and I think in a good way was having to obviously change the behavior and the dynamic of these characters in certain ways.
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Because this was your directorial debut. What's something, you know, about being a director that you didn't know before?
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Oh my gosh. I mean, I didn't know anything. That's the thing. I've studied a lot. I've always been so interested, so I pay a lot of attention on sets, but there's just absolutely no way to know what it really takes to make a film until you do it. I think the thing that I learned that to me felt the most important was how to stay creative in a crisis, because nothing is ever going right when you're making a film. You never have enough time. And it can be really, really easy to kind of panic and, and, and shut down creatively and emotionally. And what I found was, you know, when something did go wrong, it, it was asking me I was being asked to be more creative. And it almost always led me to something more interesting than I had originally planned.
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Every director has always said to me, being a director is a lot about the decisions you make.
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Yes.
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What was one decision you made that paid off?
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Oh, wow. I mean, my casting. I think I was really, I was so clear on who I wanted. And when you see them on camera together, it's absolutely, absolutely amazing. And I also think, you know, while this film is, you know, it's, it's entertaining, I, that's what I wanted it to be. It does deal with some really serious subject matters. You know, there is sexual assault. You know, there is sexual violence. And, you know, I, I, my, my intention is not to, you know, traumatize or re, traumatize anybody, but I did really want to start a conversation that I think is necessary. And so I stuck to my guns in terms of, you know, having it be fun, having it be playful, but also not being afraid to make people, you know, feel some things that may be uncomfortable.
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It's rare to find a woman who hasn't been gaslit in this business. What do you remember about a time that you were gaslit or treated strangely that you wanted to use in the film? What feeling?
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What feeling? I mean, I touched on it a little bit earlier, but I've been in a lot of situations where the inappropriate behavior or the scary behavior is so subtle and yet so loud that I have felt frozen and I felt like I don't. Maybe, maybe I'm crazy. Maybe I'm being over the top. Maybe his hand was just there because he really needed to get by or whatever it is, you know, But I think it's really just about the, the feeling of, or feeling like I should be ignoring my intuition, you know, that I feel uncomfortable. And the film really touches on the idea that women are constantly talking to each other with our eyes, you know, and it's become so normalized to be at a party or at a bar and have someone making you feel really uncomfortable and looking at your friend or looking even sometimes at a stranger at another woman and checking in with each other, this guy, you know, and it's. It's fascinating because, again, it's become so normalized that we all just kind of do it. But if you really think about it, you know, we're doing that because we're afraid to say what we really feel. And I wanted to try. Try and find a way to highlight the absurdity of that request and expectation.
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When people go see this film, what is something that you'd like them to spend an extra second looking at? Whether it's a shot, because you just love that shot. Whether it's something that was hard to do and you pulled it off? What do you think?
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Oh, that's a good question. I. I do think that this film really try. I'm trying to highlight, again, these kind of silent, invisible games that we all play with each other. You know, we all kind of. And we're all playing a part of it. You know, we're all. We're all. There are. And there are rules here, right? That's kind of what the games. What the movie's about is what happens when, you know, women stop playing by the rules, you know, and what about all these microaggressions? And, you know, we all know what's happening and we don't talk about it. And I do hope that people leave asking themselves, you know, what. What is the part that I play in this game, you know, and how can I be more aware of that? Or how can I learn how to, you know, stand up for myself in those situations? Because even though, again, it's been made to feel normal, it doesn't have to continue to be that way.
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I think people should pay attention to. Why are we running? Very key. And the quick cameo of your dad.
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Yeah, that's a fun moment. That's a fun moment. But, yes. Why. Why are we running? Sorry, I went in, like, a more thematic answer to your question, but I do. Yeah, I love that moment. And it's. It's subtle and small, but a lot of women do connect to that. That's amazing.
- [23:29]
That was my conversation with Zoe Kravitz on her directorial debut, Blink Twice, which is now available to stream online. Coming up in the next hour, two concept album projects from John Legend and Lin Manuel Miranda. That's right after the news. This is all of it.
- [23:48]
Ira Flatow
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- [24:18]
Character from Blink Twice
I'm Ira Flato, host of Science Friday. For over 30 years, our team has been reporting high quality news about science, technology and medicine. News you won't get anywhere else. And now that political news is 24 7, our audience is turning to us to know about the really important stuff in their lives. Cancer, climate change, Genetic engineering, childhood diseases. Our sponsors know the value of science and health news. For more sponsorship information, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.