WAMG speaks to DESTROYER director Karyn Kusama and co-writer Phil Hay – Interview

Director Karyn Kusama and actor Nicole Kidman on the set of DESTROYER, an Annapurna Pictures release.

The crime drama DESTROYER stars Nicole Kidman as a hardened L.A. policewoman bent on vengeance, in a gritty role unlike anything she has ever played. The film is directed by Karyn Kusama from a script by Phil Hay, who is also Kusama’s husband, and his writing partner Matt Manfredi. Kusama’s breakout film was 2000’s GIRLFIGHT.

Karyn Kusuma, who grew up in St. Louis, and husband Phil Hay were in town last November for the 2018 St. Louis International Film Festival, where DESTROYER made its local debut. The film-making couple spoke to a group of St. Louis-area film critics at a round-table interview.

Below is a portion of that interview. Questions from all film critic participants are combined, and the interview is edited for length and clarity. DESTROYER opens Friday, January 18.

Interview with DESTROYER director Karyn Kusama and co-writer Phil Hay

Question:

“I watched this film on Wednesday and I’m still thinking about it.”

Karyn Kusama:

“Oh, cool. That’s great. Happy to hear it.”

Q:

“Something particularly striking about the film was the way you shot L.A. It reminded me of Michael Mann and COLATERAL. Was he maybe some of the inspiration for your visual approach in shooting the movie? Because the way it looked really added to the whole quality of the film.”

KK: “Obviously, because Michael Mann has made some classic crime films in Los Angeles, it is hard not to acknowledged the influence of those films. But I think for me, I looked more at films from the ’70s, particularly I’d say TAXI DRIVER, THE FRENCH CONNECTION, [and] CHINATOWN to a degree. Movies like THE PARALAX VIEW, KLUTE, where there was a gritty, dark photographic style, that also could meet up against harsh sunlight, unrelenting brightness.

Q: “I’m curious – as a writing and directing team, what is your process for starting a new project? Do you come up with an idea? Do you automatically just say I’m going to direct what you write? Or do you both discuss the idea first? How does that work?”

Phil Hay: “We have to earn it (laughs). So Matt (Manfredi), my partner, and I, you know, we’ve been writing together for more than 20 years. Usually what happens is…it takes us a really long time to figure out if it is a movie for us or not. In the case of both this movie DESTROYER and THE INVITATION, our previous movie, [it was] like ten years [from when] we came up with the idea, basically, until we said, ‘OK, now we’re going to write this script.’ ”

“[W]hat we do, Matt and I, we have these little questions [about the script idea]. It could be a theme, could be a character, it could be a specific story item, but something that kind of interests us. We keep talking about it, talking about it, talking about it. And when it gets to that point – and it may take years – where we think there is something there, then we bring it tentatively to Karyn and say ‘What about this?’… and she might have some thoughts and might, you know, have a perspective on it.”

“In the case of DESTROYER, we went back and, really, specifically sort of outlined the story. Normally, Karyn says ‘you guys write it and give it to me’ and then we start the conversation. In this case, we said ‘let’s show you, we want to walk you though the story, so you can start thinking [about it].’ Now that we have this team, this family – we try to do things in a kind of simultaneous manner, so while we’re writing script, Karyn is already starting to think about the visual conception, already starting to put together her “look” book, [and to] think about collaborators we might want to work with. Our composer, who is one of our oldest friends, is already writing music based off the script, even before the movie is shooting. So there is a lot of simultaneity that goes on, which is really great for us.”

Q: “Did you always want to tell this story through a female perspective? Or did that change throughout the process?”

PH: “I think, from the writing side, we knew we had a story [but] it was kind of nebulous who the story was going to be about. We had some things that were almost around the center [but] there was this hole in the center, in a way. And it was when – and that was sort of Matt, and I and Karyn starting to talk about this story – we all had this realization that not only that this story needed to be about a woman, but [that it needed to be] about this specific woman and her specific problems. That was “the reason for being” of the whole thing. So I can’t imagine a version of this [without that]. For us, it wouldn’t be worth telling, because it wouldn’t be that character, if it was not this particular woman. And I think that did invigorate us from the beginning. That’s what made it special to us, that’s what made it feel right.”

KK: “Yeah. And it’s distinctive. For me, reading those early scripts, I knew, kind of, in my gut that we really hadn’t seen this woman [on screen before], and I don’t even think we’ve seen such as interesting version of this [character as a] man before. Personally I felt really … I just felt excited by the idea that she was so, kind of, difficult and cantankerous and problematic. You know, I have a very… I don’t want to say love-hate but a “tough love” relationship with that character, because she demands pretty tough love. I don’t know, I felt there was just something about her that felt incredibly distinctive.”

Q: “I was drawn to this character played by Nicole Kidman. You see a lot of movies where the plot drives it – what is going to happen, what is going on – but then it can have a certain emptiness about the actual character. That was not the case here. I saw the movie last night, and was thinking about it this morning. Like that scene with Shelby, her daughter. The character’s whole story could be sort of reverse engineered from that moment.”

KK: ‘When [Kidman’s character] has that final conversation with her daughter?’

Q: “Yeah. She’s talking to her, and she gives her a kiss at the end, and we know that [Kidman’s character] doesn’t really know what is going to happen but she’s very self-aware about her limitations as far as how she’s able to be a mom and how she’s able to love her daughter. But the thing is, it would be easy as an audience member to kind of judge that but what I was thinking was that we all have that, we all have certain limitations as far as what we are able to do.”

KK: “I think that was what we were striving for, to depict a character who as extremely limited… Nicole [Kidman] herself actually made a comment that I hadn’t really thought about in terms of playing the character. She said that, first and foremost, the character is so emotionally shut down. And I hadn’t really thought about it that way, that it is so hard for the character to even know when she is feeling something. You know, she acts more out of these base emotions, [feelings] about rage and about shame, and about deprivation. She’s sort of this person who’s always trying to protect her territory and her, kind of, very limited kingdom. So I think it was important to us that we see the character like that, because we’ve all been there, or I felt I have. We’ve all had our moments of feeling petty and small and grabby, and I think she’s just a bigger, slightly bolder version of those qualities. But I hope what we do is humanize that.”

PH: “I think it’s good you brought that up in the way you did because, always for us, that scene in the diner is the center, in a way, of the whole thing. It is the meaning of the thing, because of what the cost is [for the character]. The difficulty for her to be honest, finally, and to offer her daughter something extremely valuable in her life, and to change the context of their relationship, which I think is true of many parent-child relationships, the idea of who’s right and who’s wrong.”