Zoë Kravitz pitched a film idea she had to Channing Tatum, an actor she barely knew but thought would work in what would become “Blink Twice.”
Once the collaboration began, they fell in love and are now engaged to get married. She also directed the movie.
“We know each other so well and trust each other so much,” said Kravitz during an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution at the Four Seasons in Midtown Atlanta earlier this month to promote the film, which comes to theaters Aug. 23. “We had a great time working together.”
Tatum plays a billionaire tech mogul named Slater King who invites friends and select strangers to his private island for rest and relaxation.
“Even in terms of directing him, there’s a shorthand,” Kravitz said. “We were able to push him to a place that I think was really vulnerable and wonderful.”
Kravitz, an accomplished actor with an extensive résumé including “Mad Max: Fury Road,” the “Divergent” trilogy and “Big Little Lies” said she deliberately wanted to try her hand behind the camera as a fresh challenge rather than act in it.
“I’ve been on so many movie sets my entire career and still had so little knowledge of what it really takes to make a film,” she said. She learned to appreciate how much more work it takes to direct and create a movie, including all the pre- and postproduction responsibilities.
Now she’s in the promotional part of the movie cycle: “It’s like a rotating wheel of excitement and anxiety and fear, kind of like the movie, right?”
In 2017, Kravitz came up with the concept of “Blink Twice,” inspired by the #MeToo movement and focused around the experience of Frida, played with confusion and complexity by Naomi Ackie, who starred in the 2022 film “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody.”
“I had a lot of feelings: rage, confusion, curiosity around power and power dynamics and really had no place to put those feelings,” Kravitz said. “So I started to write a story and with no intention of it being a script. I wasn’t really thinking that far and I started writing with a friend of mine. It just kind of kept going until I’m here now with you.”
The island, she said, was a way to “isolate these characters and put them in an environment where they had to deal with these things.”
Tatum’s Slater King appears to be chastened by his “bro” tendencies and at the top of the movie, expresses regret over past actions.
“I wanted to subvert the audience’s expectations of who he is,” Kravitz said. “Slater King had to be somebody that we felt comfortable with and someone that Frida would feel comfortable with in order to make her character not look stupid.”
She also thought Tatum offered the right persona for Slater because he would “feel warm and inviting” and “hasn’t played a villainous person over and over again.”
Frida is the film’s true protagonist, a woman in a dead-end job as a server who is working a party for Slater where her boss literally tells her to be invisible. “She knows she has something to offer and she’s in an environment that won’t allow her to be herself,” Kravitz said.
She has a plan: change into a fancy dress with her colleague and best friend Jess and pretend to be one of the rich attendees. (Yes, somehow their work colleagues don’t notice.)
Frida catches Slater’s eye after she trips and falls on her fancy heels. After heavy doses of flirtation with Frida, Slater invites Frida and Jess to his private island to party. They surrender their phones, imbibe, eat and cavort about a pool with characters played by the likes of Geena Davis, Haley Joel Osment and Christian Slater.
Kravitz said the name Slater did not come from Mario Lopez’s character A.C. Slater of “Saved by the Bell” fame. Rather, when she was writing the screenplay, she had seen the classic 1989 dark comedy “Heathers” starring Christian Slater and Wynona Rider. Slater King, she said, sounded like a good name for the rich dude.
She then convinced the actor Slater to actually join the cast, which caused some minor confusion on set. “Whenever he heard Slater,” she said, “he would kind of turn around.”
The weird vibes in “Blink Twice” evoke the style of Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” which came out in early 2017. Kravitz doesn’t deny the connection.
“I was wildly inspired by that movie” Kravitz said. “I saw it several times and I was deeply moved and entertained and reminded of how wonderful it can be when you talk about things that can be uncomfortable in this fun way, in this entertaining way.”
“Blink Twice” was shot in Yucatán and Quintana Roo, Mexico, in the summer of 2022 not long after Netflix produced a sequel to “Knives Out” set on a Greek island of a rich tech billionaire starring Daniel Craig, Edward Norton and Janelle Monae. That film came out in late 2022.
That plot contrivance, she said, is a common trope so she was not perturbed by that comparison: “In terms of theme and tone, I think this movie is very, very different.”
Credit: PUBLICITY
Credit: PUBLICITY
While box office pundits are expecting modest numbers from “Blink Twice” this weekend, it might have decent legs based on word-of-mouth. So far, the early reviews have been largely positive with an 79% positive rating critics compiled by Rotten Tomatoes.
“This movie is wild and fun and funny and thrilling and it’s a great communal experience,” Kravitz said. “Most people who have seen the film want (to) see it again right away because there’s a whole other film to be seen.”
IF YOU WATCH
“Blink Twice”
In area theaters starting Aug. 23.
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