[MUSIC- Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. I'm really grateful that you're here. On today's show, we'll conclude this month's full bio conversation with Brad Gooch, the author of Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring, we'll talk to author Bill Schutt about the book, Bite: An Incisive History of Teeth, from Hagfish to Humans, and we'll talk about how to enjoy your time off from work right here in your hometown. Get ready to call in with staycation tips, because who doesn't love New York? That's the plan. Let's get this started with the new thriller Blink Twice.

[MUSIC- Luscious Jackson: You and Me]

Alison Stewart: Imagine being whisked away to a private island filled with lush landscapes, an exquisite spread for dinner, and bottomless glasses of champagne throughout the day. You don't have a care in the world. Why should you? Because that is the perfect setup for a place where something evil is going to go down. That's the premise of Zoë Kravitz's new psychological thriller and directorial debut. Tech billionaire Slater King charms an ambitious yet broke server named Frida into a vacation getaway alongside her best friend Jess, to his private island along with his BFF's.

Slater King: Okay, here we go. Jess, Frida, this is my childhood buddy, Cody.

Cody: Hey. Cheers, ladies.

Ladies: Cheers.

Slater King: This is Vic, my left and right-hand man.

Ladies: Nice to meet you.

Vic: Hey, what's up, man?

Slater King: Heather, Camilla.

Ladies: How you doing?

Slater King: That's Stan, my security. Tom.

Tom: Hi. How's it going?

Ladies: Hi.

Slater King: Where's Lucas at? Lucas? He's our resident wonder boy here. He's probably gonna run the world one day.

Ladies: Nice to meet you guys.

Lucas: Hey Slater, what's up, man?

Slater King: I don't know who that is, but this is Frida. Sarah. Sarah, Frida.

Ladies: Hi.

Frida: Hi.

Sarah: Cute nails.

Frida: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Next thing you know, they're jetting off for a vacation of a lifetime. It seems like a lifetime to Frida. She keeps asking what day it is and why she keeps finding dirt under her nails. Well, not to give anything away, but things get bananas. Part Stepford Wives meets Get Out. Add a little Midsommar, Kravitz has made a stunningly beautiful and creepy movie.

A review in Indiewire states, Blink Twice is cunningly funny and high stakes, but not at the expense of having plenty to say about what it means to be a woman in a distinctly man's world, Blink Twice opens in theaters on Friday, August 23rd. The film's director, Zoë Kravitz, is with us now. Hi, Zoë.

Zoë Kravitz: Hi.

Alison Stewart: I wanted to take this first from your co-writing and then your directing. 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?

Zoë Kravitz: 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. I think the film does deal with the concept or the idea of memory. We had a lot to play with in that way. I think when we wrote the film, we wrote it in a very linear way, mostly so that we, the writers, could really understand what's going on here, what story are we telling? Once we understood that part of it, especially in the edit, I decided to rip the whole thing open and play with time.

Alison Stewart: In Blink Twice, Channing Tatum plays Slater King. Naomi Ackie plays Frida. What did you look for as a director in terms of casting for these two roles?

Zoë Kravitz: 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 know, 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.

Naomi, she's an incredible chameleon. Her journey is vast in this film. She has to carry a lot of different emotions. She has to fear, anxiety, stunts, comedy. There's so many different balls in the air. There's also a lot of the film relies on her expressing how she feels with her eyes. Naomi Ackie has one of the most expressive faces I've ever seen in my life.

Alison Stewart: 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.

Zoë Kravitz: Without giving too much away, there are many layers and twists in the story about who she is. I love the idea of trying to take a Cinderella story and flip it on its head. At the beginning of the film, she has her nose pressed up against the glass. She's a cocktail waitress, and she's seeing this world where everything looks so glamorous and so beautiful, and she's told, quite literally by her boss, before she goes out to pour champagne, to be invisible.

When she goes on this trip and is seen and all of a sudden people are pouring champagne for her, she gets what she thinks that she wants. Then throughout, as the story ravels, or unravels if you will, she really has to dig a little bit deeper and find her real power. I think the story really deals with power on a very surface level. I think what Frida has to find is her power on a deeper level. Power on a deeper level.

Alison Stewart: Yes, it's interesting. She gets Slater's attention at this event. Slater's hot. We get that, but she's also a little ambitious.

Zoë Kravitz: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What does Frida want? What does she want to mingle with this crowd? Why does she want to mingle with this high-flying crowd?

Zoë Kravitz: Well, me and Naomi talked a lot about this from the very beginning. Even though it might seem like it's Slater King that she wants, what she really wants is to be Slater King. 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.

Oftentimes women are-- It's looked out as a negative thing when women are ambitious, when women want power. 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.

Alison Stewart: We're talking to Zoë Kravitz about co-writing and directing her debut filter film, Blink Twice. It opens in theaters this Friday, August 23rd. Most of the island, 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.

Zoë Kravitz: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What does it mean to give over one cell phone?

Zoë Kravitz: It's interesting because at first, I think the root of that idea came from, A, not wanting to-- Once there's a phone involved in the story, it's like, girl, call the police, get out of here. We just knew we had to get rid of them 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.

It's actually really interesting because after we actually incorporated that aspect into the story, and it actually wasn't even until I started to edit and screen the film for people that I realized how terrifying it is to give over your phone. As a storyteller, I just wanted that device away from the characters. It really is we're so attached to them, and there's our security blankets in this way. It's complicated because the way they sell it is 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 help you if you need it.

Alison Stewart: Where did you film?

Zoë Kravitz: We filmed in the Yucatan in Mexico, which is a very, very beautiful place. I wanted it to be inland. I didn't want to be able to see any ocean. I want it to be this disorienting place that can feel a bit claustrophobic. It was really hard to find properties of that scale. The Yucatan was incredible. We were really excited once we found it.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to a clip from Blink Twice. Slater is giving Frida a tour of the island, and she turns to him and says it's not what I thought it was going to be. This is from Blink Twice.

Frida: It's not what I thought it was gonna be.

Slater: What do you mean?

Frida: The legendary parties of Slater King with drugs and debauchery.

Slater: We still do drugs.

Frida: [chuckles]

Slater: We just do them with intention, and we still have fun. It's just a little different now.

Alison Stewart: Something's happened in his life. He's like mea culpad everywhere. How did you decide not to tell us what he did?

Zoë Kravitz: I felt like once the audience knows what he did, different people are going to have different reactions to that. Then we're in a territory where don't get on the island, Frida. We don't trust Frida. We think she's stupid. The story, I think, then focuses too much on that. I felt like I wanted to leave that up for debate, but the fact that he has to apologize for something obviously means that there's some insidious behavior going on there.

We're also living in a world where the gray area is very complicated. Whether you have to apologize for calling someone the wrong thing, the wrong name, the wrong gender, or someone doing something really horrible and abusive to someone. Part of me wanted to explore the idea of the public apology in general. It was more about that rather than about what he had done.

Alison Stewart: 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?

Zoë Kravitz: I wanted this movie to be sensory. Because the film is about memory, I spent a lot of time thinking about memory and what it feels like. When you think back on something, you don't necessarily remember things as they are. You highlight the things that impacted you, and that's what you remember.

If I think back on a day, oh, I remember I was 15, and I was sitting in my room, and I was very sad that day. The rain was hitting the glass, and I remember that sound of the rain on the glass. My mom was making food, and I could smell the eggs and the sizzle of the eggs. That's how we remember things. I didn't want it to feel real. I wanted it to feel like a memory.

I also wanted to highlight certain things. There's a repetition that happens in the film. You mentioned the bottles of champagne and wanting that at first to feel luxurious and exciting, and it becomes hypnotic, and then it gives you anxiety. I really wanted to tell a sensory story in that way.

Alison Stewart: The color reduced 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 in the film?

Zoë Kravitz: 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 red, and there's also a lot of white. This idea of, again, like, masculinity being associated with bold, bright colors, power, and women, we get married in white flowy dresses, this purity. Then, of course, what happens when those dresses are now covered in red, and really wanting to meld those two worlds together, the dirtiness and the grittiness and the violence combining with the purity and the innocence. There's a point in the movie where they really do come together.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Zoë Kravitz. We're talking about her debut feature film as a director. It's Blink Twice. Let's listen to a clip. We're actually going to ask a little bit about the character a little bit. Adria Arjona's character, Sarah. How would you describe Sarah?

Zoë Kravitz: Sarah, she's introduced mostly as Frida's competition for Slater. She's this beautiful woman that's brought to the island. She is known for being on a reality show called Hot Survivor Babes where she had to live in the jungle, stay alive. She's incredibly smart. She's sexy. She knows how to do incredible things like climb trees. She's just incredible at what she does.

At first, her and Frida, they both want Slater's attention, and so they're in constant competition. They don't like each other. Once Frieda starts to realize what's going on and starts to realize that she's in danger, Sarah comes to her and believes her, and they immediately join forces. From then on, it really does become a story about these two women who have come together to get out alive. I really wanted to explore the way that women are taught to compete against each other and what can happen when we stop doing that.

Alison Stewart: Yes, there's this exploration of trauma and 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 the two women.

Zoë Kravitz: Yes. 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 a lot of the breadcrumbs that eventually do lead to the reveal of what's been happening. I wanted the audience to try and have the experience of there's unease here, and I can't put my finger on it, but I feel it.

I know as a woman we spend a lot of our lives having these feelings, but not knowing where to put them or how to say them. 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 we have to keep that to ourselves. That's trauma in itself.

Alison Stewart: I'm not going to give away a spoiler, but this is a little spoilery. [laughter] I looked at my notes after I left the film, and I put, this has a lot of me, too in it. You began writing it around 2017, and that's the time when The New York Times did a large-scale investigation of Harvey Weinstein and Louis CK, confessed to sexual misconduct. How much did actual events shape the narrative of the film?

Zoë Kravitz: Well, I started writing in the summer of 2017, and I believe things like the breaking of Weinstein and all that, I think that was more in the fall. I think it was in October.

Alison Stewart: Oh, wow.

Zoë Kravitz: It was really interesting, I started to write, and I do think it was because I-- Between my own experiences being a woman in this world and specifically in the industry that I'm in, but also so many friends of mine, family members that have different jobs, live in different places in the world, I just felt there wasn't a place to put all of this anger I was feeling. I started to write the story, and then it's pretty insane, actually, how soon after that, the conversation really escalated, people being exposed again.

The concept of the island, that had already been written, and so part of me thought, "Okay, do I stop? Is this too on the nose now? Are people going to think I'm actually taking this story and making it mine, which it's not it's about my own experience," but there's also something really magical in terms of I believe in collective consciousness. I felt like this was something that obviously was bubbling up culturally, and so it was just popping its head up in different ways in different places.

Alison Stewart: Yes, I believe creatives have a vision about those things, things that are--

Zoë Kravitz: Yes. Sometimes when I'm writing, I don't even feel like it's me writing. Something comes out and I read it later and I go, "Oh, wow. I didn't even realize what I was really saying here." Yes, the only thing that 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.

Alison Stewart: Because this was your directorial debut, what's something, about being a director that you didn't know before?

Zoë Kravitz: Oh, my gosh. 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 panic and shut down creatively and emotionally. What I found was when something did go wrong, 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.

Alison Stewart: Every director has always said to me being a director is a lot about the decisions you make.

Zoë Kravitz: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What was one decision you made that paid off?

Zoë Kravitz: Oh, wow. My casting, I think. I was so clear on who I wanted. When you see them on camera together, it's absolutely amazing. I also think while this film is- it's entertaining, that's what I wanted it to be- it does deal with some really serious subject matters. There is sexual assault. There is sexual violence.

My intention is not to traumatize or re-traumatize anybody, but I did really want to start a conversation that I think is necessary. I stuck to my guns in terms of having it be fun, having it be playful, but also not being afraid to make people feel some things that may be uncomfortable.

Alison Stewart: It's rare to find a woman who hasn't been gaslit in this business [chuckles]. What do you remember about a time that you were gaslit or treated strangely that you wanted to use in the film? What feeling?

Zoë Kravitz: What feeling? 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. I felt like 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.

I think it's really just about feeling like I should be ignoring my intuition that I feel uncomfortable. The film really touches on the idea that women are constantly talking to each other with our eyes. 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.

It's fascinating because, again, it's become so normalized that we all just do it, but if you really think about it, we're doing that because we're afraid to say what we really feel. I wanted to try and find a way to highlight the absurdity of that request and expectation.

Alison Stewart: 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?

Zoë Kravitz: Oh, that's a good question. I do think that this film, really, I'm trying to highlight, again, these silent, invisible games that we all play with each other. We're all playing a part of it. There are rules here. That's what the game's about is what the movie's about is what happens when women stop playing by the rules and what about all these microaggressions? We all know it's happening and we don't talk about it. I do hope that people leave asking themselves what is the part that I play in this game and how can I be more aware of that, or how can I learn how to stand up for myself in those situations? Even though, again, it's been made to feel normal, it doesn't have to continue to be that way.

Alison Stewart: I think people should pay attention to why are we running? Very key. The quick cameo of your dad.

[laughter]

Zoë Kravitz: Yes, that's a fun moment. That's a fun moment, but, yes, why are we running? Sorry, I went in a more thematic answer to your question, but I do. Yes, I love that moment. It's subtle and small, but a lot of women do connect to that. That's amazing.

Alison Stewart: The film Blink Twice opens in theaters on Friday, August 23rd. I've been speaking with director Zoë Kravitz. Congratulations on the film, Zoë.

Zoë Kravitz: Thank you so much. Thanks for talking to me today.

 

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