How Anna Kendrick's true crime film “The Woman of the Hour” came to Netflix

Woman of the hour found a savior in Anna Kendrick just when she needed it most.

The true-crime thriller is now streaming on Netflix and marks the directorial debut of Kendrick, who also stars. The film is based on the story of real-life serial killer Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto) and his reputation as the “Dating Game Killer,” as the narrative includes his appearance in a 1978 episode The dating game with bachelorette Cheryl Bradshaw. (The name of the main female character, played by Kendrick, is “Sheryl” in the film.)

During his conversation with The Hollywood Reporterexplains screenwriter Ian McDonald why he felt compelled to change the game show's dialogue, his failed attempts to connect with the film's theme, and why he hopes the streaming film “is perceived as art rather than content” .

How did you know this story would work for a film?

It really started when I read an article online about one of those lists of weird true crime stories.

Are you a real crime fan?

Somehow yes, someway no. The serial killer stories I love are mostly fictional. What sparked my interest in Rodney Acala wasn't so much him, but everything that surrounded him. When I did more research, everyone (who knew him and learned about his crimes) said, “Yeah, that makes sense.” People will compare him to Ted Bundy, but Ted Bundy was really good at pretending he was this good-natured, all-American guy, and Rodney Alcala really didn't even pretend. The most interesting thing about him is the way the people around him look the other way and how that allowed him to get away with bad behavior for so long. Sometimes it's the police or The dating game or just the court system in general.

Her script was blacklisted in 2017. How did it end up being Anna Kendrick's directorial debut?

It was a very long process. I started the first sketch in 2016, so it's been almost eight years. It almost died about four times with one production company and then it collapsed. There was a podcast about Rodney Alcala, and the podcast company had a first-look deal with a television network, and I'm like, 'Mine died right around the time that podcast came out.' That's the end of it.” And it's heartbreaking; it's terrible. Honestly, when Anna took over directing, everything was moving very, very slowly, and then suddenly it moved extremely quickly, and suddenly we would be shooting in six weeks, and we had a financier and a budget. Anna saved the film.

What was it like working with her?

It couldn't have gone better. She saw the movie the same way I did, and she just had really smart, succinct comments. But more importantly, your notes made the script more of what I wanted, not less. She had new eyes and could see things that I had become blind to over the years. A wonderful employee.

Were you hoping to get in touch with the real Cheryl?

I tried to connect with Cheryl. Firstly, I couldn't find her, and to some extent I saw that as a choice. There were these Dateline Episodes about Rodney Alcala that also feature previous victims, and she's never appeared in anything like this. I understood it to mean that she didn't really want this chance encounter with a psychopath to dictate her life. That's one of the reasons I changed the name and a number of important elements of the biography and background. It's more of an alternate world version of Cheryl. If The Cheryl was on that game show, that's how it could have turned out.

Is Daniel's performance what you imagined for Rodney?

He was just perfect. The really tricky thing was when you go back and look at Rodney in reality dating gameyou couldn't just take that dialogue and put it in a movie today because it would look like this: “Obviously he's a serial killer.” Dating etiquette and norms have changed between 1978 and 2024, and what a funny joke and What is an inappropriate, disgusting joke has changed in the last 50 years. If you just take it as it was, people will say, “Well, Cheryl's an idiot.” Daniel's great success was making sure contemporary audiences could feel the women's feelings, and he does a wonderful job.

Why would Rodney do something so public in the midst of this criminality?

He's like many sociopaths and doesn't believe he'll get caught. I suspect he probably thought it would be fun. There may even have been a touch of bravado.

Are there any important takeaways from the film that apply to today's society?

Rodney's behavior strikes me as very male, but he represents only one end of the spectrum of toxic male behavior. The other end of the spectrum is the friend who asks, “Don't you think they checked on him?” The game show host falls somewhere in the middle. So, really examining all of that, and the way you look away when you're faced with a problem helps and benefits all of that. Many people will be able to look at the spectrum and say, “I can see me in a part of it, and we have a shared responsibility to make it better.”

What’s next for you as a writer and are you being offered similar projects?

I'm working on five or six things right now and I'm excited about them all. What really excites me is that they are all very different, and I try to be very careful and conscientious and not to be the “serial killer,” especially because that would be a very depressing way to live. In fact, the years of research it took to write this were just exhausting because you read about terrible, traumatic, terrible things day after day and yet there is no other alternative because you have to deal with the material around them To tell the story truthfully. I'm proud of the film and could imagine writing something like it again one day. I just want to make sure it's not the only thing I do.

What do you hope to achieve from the film?

I know true crime is very zeitgeist right now. I hope it survives the zeitgeist. I hope that in 10, 20 years it will be a film that we are talking about. And I hope that it is perceived as art and not as content, and that is completely out of my hands. Both Anna and I took the story we were telling very seriously and put a lot of thought and effort into it. I just hope it's received that way, because that's always been my biggest fear, that it's just like, “Oh, it's another serial killer, true crime movie of the week.”