The Alice, Darling stars gets candid about portraying psychological trauma, and her upcoming directorial debut
paints a detailed psychological portrait of a woman trapped in an abusive relationship. Unlike most such depictions, however, Alice lives through manipulative emotional abuse, which as Kendrick points out is inherently more difficult to convey in a film.
Embracing how little is straightforward in such a relationship became Kendrick’s north star, and it’s emblematic of what she’s accomplishing in Hollywood as actor, producer, and soon as a first-time director . Here she covers that behind-the-camera transition, why collaborators are more than just collaborators, and whether acting is always therapeutic .: So you’re making your directorial debut! What was it like stepping behind the camera?I remember saying to [my director of photography Zach Kuperstein], maybe a couple days before we were filming, that I have this terrible habit of having just the job of being an actor yet feeling like everything is my responsibility, in a way that is super not helpful and very counterproductive. And I was very excited for it to actually all be my responsibility and see how that feels! I had the time of my life, it was so exciting. I haven’t had that much fun in years. We just wrapped filming in December and yeah, I just couldn’t be more grateful and over the moon about it.The behind the camera stuff, I definitely, fully went into it hands up, going, “I have visual deficits.” Like, I’m never going to be the color palette guy. I think that so often there’s stuff that we don’t want to step into because we’re like, Well, if I’m not an expert on it, I don’t deserve to try. I was really excited to work with actors and that was a total joy. But I also realized that usually my best friend on any set is A-camera [operator]. So I’m around the camera all the time, thinking about the camera. And I’ve really tried to become the kind of actor who is helpful in the edit, you know? Like I think about what the editor needs. And I think that that kind of thought process was helpful in transferring that to directing.All you need to do is sign up with your email and boom: credit for your preorder on a new Samsung device.Alice, Darling , which details a form of abuse we haven’t often seen on screen. Were there other depictions of this psychological dynamic that inspired you?Someone else was just asking me about that and they’re a huge, huge movie buff and they couldn’t think of anything, which made me feel better, because I haven’t been able to think of any movies quite like this. I think it’s a really difficult thing to capture on screen. And the combination of the screenplay and the direction and all these amazing performances from the entire cast have really helped put something impossible into film. It’s challenging because the experience of being in that kind of relationship, it’s so fucking difficult to even describe. So how the hell do you put it on screen? But I think that we all had this common goal of never taking the easy way out—like having at least one scene where Simon shoves Alice into a wall, so that we can all kind of agree, okay, so he’s the bad guy and she’s the good guy. [Instead it was about] forcing the viewer to live in a space of not being sure if they can trust Alice, in some ways. Because, yeah, when you’re in that, you don’t know whether you can trust your own thoughts or your own feelings. And I think that’s the most insidious thing about it, it really robs you of your self-trust.AVC: In that vein of unreliable narration, how did you approach the gradual unveiling of what’s really going on with Alice? It seems to me that you, as an actor, had to signal to us that something is amiss without yet specifying what that is.One of the interesting things is that when I shot anything with Charlie [Carrick], who played Simon, he and I would always give a lot of variation to each other. There were times where even I would really step into the role of the perpetrator and he would step into the role of the victim. And that way, when I was shooting the scenes where I knew that Alice was going to be having these flashbacks, I, as an actor, didn’t even know what version Mary was going to use. And I think that was a perfect thing. Because again, the experience—like, what do I remember? How did that go down? Like, I’m not even sure. We kind of played with the idea of Alice having flashes to both versions, something we ended up not needing. But that was always something that I found to be helpful in terms of knowing the world of the film and the tone of the film. That this person is in so deep that every memory is just kind of a dealer’s choice of, How do I remember that going down? And was I the abuser or the injured party at any given moment?AVC: That goes back to your idea of giving the editor lots of options, that performances are made in the editing room. Playing so many different versions of a scene must have really deepened the dynamics of Alice’s relationship with Simon.Yeah. And I asked Charlie if he would be comfortable with that and then asked Mary if we tried the scenes like that. Because he was such an incredible creative ally and he was being so thoughtful about a character who I would understand any actor not really wanting to give a ton of thought. But he was really able to find this balance of having some compassion for Simon, which is the only way for him to play it grounded and real.Courtesy of Lionsgate AVC: Without getting into too many personal details about the relationship that you’ve said informed your approach to these characters, you said at one point you were worried that you might be filming this too soon after your own real-life experience. Have you seen actors who use storytelling to work through something only to have it further traumatize them?
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