Alice, Darling Director Details Film's Deftly Managed Tension [Interview]

What I really respect about this movie is that it gives the impression - restrained isn't quite the right word - but it feels like there are rules stills that you and your crew established for the film so that you're portraying a survivor of an abusive relationship, but in a way that's not like others I've seen where all of a sudden the calls rise to level 11 - sometimes this just seems insulting to the characters involved. I'd like to know if there were aspects of that - whether it's how much Kendrick can move outside of herself or how sinister Simon should be played - that you put in place to keep that crescendo feeling steady. The tension in the film is so delicate.

Oh, thanks for saying that. We were really driven by the idea of ​​trying to take the audience with Alice, and for them to have a really insight throughout. Our fear was that, as you described, dial up to 11 where it doesn't, and the audience can't understand that the whole movie would lose meaning because you would lose that insight.

What we did on set was about Charlie Carrick, who played Simon, he and I had a lot of conversations about how we really had to play against what was almost written and humanize that character there so that be three-dimensional. But also to make it believable that Alice stays in this relationship and wants to be with him. So that our understanding as an audience is more progressive about what's going on between him and Alice.

I think one thing that happened with Anna before filming, but also happened during editing with editor Gareth C. Scales and me, is that we eliminated a lot of of Alice's dialogue. What we decided as kind of a rule in the edit is that whenever Simon is around, Alice goes a bit mute so that you feel like she's really transforming when she's in the cottage with friends. So when she's in Toronto, we cut a lot of her dialogue, and even more when Simon arrives at the chalet. For example, in the bedroom scene where he says to her, "You're so incredibly selfish" and says, "You don't exactly live in luxury. To all these lines there was an answer. Anna delivered these answers beautifully. But we decided to cut them because we thought it was very powerful – this idea that he literally shuts her up. And you saw her having fun with her friends. You saw her outside. You saw her singing drunk in the street. You know she can be a very lively and lively character. But we wanted to show what Simon did to her and how she shrinks when he's around.