When director and co-writer Zoë Kravitz’s was acting in a film in 2017, the seed was planted for what would ultimately become Blink Twice. The #MeToo movement had just begun but notable predators like Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein hadn’t yet been exposed yet. “Between things that I had seen, experienced, read, things that have happened to friends of mine, I just felt like there was such a lack of conversation about the dynamics between men and women,” Kravitz says.
Kravitz, who makes her feature directorial debut in Amazon MGM Studios’ wild new psychological thriller Blink Twice enlisted her friend and now co-writer E.T. Feigenbaum to help her develop the screenplay. “We finished the first draft of the script the end of that year, but in the interim during that time there were a whole lot of things that were happening regarding sexual politics in Hollywood and in the business world in that time and it kind of pushed us down the right path,” Feigenbaum says.
Feigenbaum encouraged Kravitz to show the treatment to her godfather Bruce Cohen, the Academy Award-winning producer (1999, Best Picture, American Beauty), who says he saw the potential for it to be an “extraordinary film.”
“I saw this story that was a phenomenally entertaining thriller, horror genre piece that was talking about the relationships between men and women and how that power dynamic gets used and how problematic it can be,” Cohen says.
As the cultural conversation started to shift around women and sexual politics, Kravitz was able to refine what she wanted to see on screen. “I wanted to see a group of women that we judged and then we wanted to see them become full characters and see them kind of emerge into their power,” she says. She also reconsidered the male characters in light of the shifts in perception she was witnessing. Slater’s crew of guys couldn’t be boorish bros, they had to seem like they were “hyper aware,” and concerned with being seen as woke in the public eye.
Slater became a tech billionaire, a profession that would make him feel like his generation’s rock star. “That was also something that people would relate to and like to see,” Kravitz says. “He was a kid and got billions of dollars and made a mistake and now he just wants to be one with nature on his island and hang out with his friends. It was really about creating a safe environment so that we could lure Frida and the audience into this world.”
Frida also evolved over time into the character we now see. “She wants to be respected, she wants to not be invisible,” Kravitz says. “So what will she do to get that? It’s something that we can all relate to. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be accepted and looked at and to not be ignored and to have champagne poured for you and not be the one pouring champagne. It created a character who is strong, she knows what she wants, she’s willing to do a lot to get it. That want is what pushes the story forward.”
Cohen felt that Kravitz tapped into something unique in developing this story. “You could tell that it was coming from a woman’s voice, you could tell that it was coming from a woman of color, and you could feel that it was a combination of her actually lived experience, not that these specifics actually happened to her, but just being a person in the world and knowing all the shit that goes on,” he says.
Producer Tiffany Persons explains “Zoë’s superpower as a screenwriter and director is that she masterfully weaves her comedic sensibility with her sense of discernment regarding complex hard topics.” “By truly capturing the unique visual and emotional tone of Blink Twice, she has truly shown that she has a distinct and distinguished voice, ” she says.
When tech billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum) meets cocktail waitress Frida (Naomi Ackie) at his fundraising gala, sparks fly. He invites her to join him and his friends on a dream vacation on his private island. It’s paradise. Wild nights blend into sun soaked days and everyone’s having a great time. No one wants this trip to end, but as strange things start to happen, Frida begins to question her reality. There is something wrong with this place. She’ll have to uncover the truth if she wants to make it out of this party alive.
Zoë Kravitz’s Director Statement
Zoë Kravitz’s debut film is a party-turned-nightmare about the want of power, the abuse of power and taking power back. The film features a captivating performance from Ackie as Frida, a complicated heroine who challenges victim narratives. Through striking visuals and an eerie tone, Kravitz plunges you into a world you won’t soon forget.
My whole life I’ve had access to rooms filled with very powerful people.
When you’re a child, you see things from a very honest point of view. As you get older, everything becomes a bit more grey. Normalized. Romanticized.
As I morphed from a little girl; a fly on the wall, to a woman in these spaces, I grew to understand the true complexity of the game at play. I found myself having conversations with women I knew, or sometimes women I didn’t know, with only our eyes. A language we are all, unfortunately, fluent in, because it is not safe to speak these thoughts out loud. To do so would be to break the rules of the game.
I wanted to see a story that explored what might happen if women stop playing by the rules. What if Eve WOKE UP and realized—the Garden of Eden is uh, kinda bullshit. And wait, actually, this place suuuucks. And wait, Adam, you also kinda suck. And WAIT…
This place is fantasy, like a full matrix. AND WAIT! EVE ISN’T EVE, EVE IS NEO—AND girl, eat that apple, follow the serpent, get that fucking knowledge and GET THE FUCK OUT OF THERE!
I decided the most engaging and horrific way to tell this story was to isolate the characters. Take this “garden” and turn it into an island—á la Lord Of The Flies.
I began to write in the summer of 2017, mostly out of disbelief that no one else had done it yet. (In a modern setting there are obviously many stories that explore similar themes, some of which are my favorite films.)
By October of the same year, Harvey Weinstein was exposed—holy shit! The public reckoning had begun. I continued to write and adjust the story for a post “time’s up” world. By 2020, Jeffrey Epstein had been exposed—I had not known anything about him beforehand. I knew this evil existed in the world and I was horrified and thus inspired to keep going.
I say this to make it clear that this movie is about NO ONE particular person. This is about people. Women are being told to smile, every day, all the time. We are expected to “forget” moments of discomfort, terror and abuse and to keep pretending we are having a good time. We are expected to play the game.
As a true lover and fan of cinema, it was important to me to make this story honest and entertaining at the same time. I wanted to make a film that I wanted to see. Let’s explore these moments of discomfort, no seriously, let’s…hang out here for a minute—‘cuz shit this is wild, and is worth looking at. Humans are so complex, and fucked up, and funny, and beautiful and brutal. We all want power—social, cultural, financial, political. The question is: what will we do to get it? How do you play the game? This is not a story about empowerment. This is a story about power. Period.
A Director emerging
Kravitz, who has earned critical acclaim for her work in The Batman and High Fidelity, always was interested in directing and extending involvement in the film world beyond just acting. “I think what I realized was that while I worked as hard as I can and always want to do the best job that I can, that I just really love movies as a whole,” she says. “Acting was the way that I knew I could contribute.”
Once she got deeper into the writing process of Blink Twice she found it hard to let go. The idea of handing it off to a different director became unthinkable. “I think I just got a little scared to pass this off to someone else,” she says. “I don’t know if they are seeing what I’m seeing. I’ve gone through this incredible magical journey of starting something with a feeling and that feeling starts to incept your dreams and your thoughts and the way you see things. And then you get to birth that into reality…it’s such an incredible journey to go on.”
Even during the writing process, Cohen says he could see the director that Kravitz was starting to become. “She had a vision for every aspect of this film from the beginning,” he says.
Ackie, who plays Frida, concurs, explaining that Kravitz was involved in every aspect of production. “She was taking extra care to make sure—even down to the strands of my hair being in the right place—and what each set looked like in particular that it matched the style of the story. There was a real need for her for everything to be as specific has she had dreamt it up in her mind,” Ackie says.
Feigenbaum also spoke about Kravitz’s commitment to bringing her ideas to life. “I’ve seen her grow into a first-time director like I’ve never seen a director before,” Feigenbaum says. “It’s insane what she’s accomplished, and she is somebody of such a singular drive and such a singular vision, and she brings an unrelenting ideology to what this story is.”
Persons, who has known Kravitz since she was 17, witnessed a transformation when Kravitz stepped behind the camera. “There was a complete shift in her being and this is truly what she is born to do,” Persons says.
From Page To Screen
While Frida is the protagonist of the story, the first character that was cast was Slater King. Kravitz immediately wanted Channing Tatum. At the time she didn’t know him, but she wanted to see him do something unlike anything he had ever done before, and thought he would be a perfect match for Slater. His naturally good-natured demeanor would lure the audience—and Frida—onto this island.
Kravitz was looking for someone who was charming and who would make the audience feel safe. “Who else is that but Channing Tatum?” she says. “The whole world would be like, yes, I would go on vacation with you and feel totally safe. There’s nothing creepy about him.”
Kravitz also had a feeling that Tatum himself was a feminist thanks to his work on the Magic Mike movies, which are geared toward female audiences. That meant he would be both a good presence on set, and his persona as Slater would be something of a subversion.
Photo credit: Zachary Greenwood © 2024 Amazon Content Services LLC. All Rights Reserved.
When the script got into Tatum’s hands he found it both “exciting” and “terrifying.” Slater offered up a new challenge for him in that he would have to inhabit a person who was nothing like him. “Almost every dude I’ve ever played I’ve had some sort of connection to them,” he says. “There’s nothing really to love about Slater. There just isn’t, he’s a full psychopath.”
But Tatum was also intrigued by the possibility of doing something daring, and in Kravitz he found an eager collaborator in challenging himself. “We’ve talked about lots of different versions of Slater,” he says. “The one thing that we, both agreed upon is that we didn’t want to do the, the very stereotypical movie moment in a thriller where you reveal the bad guy.”
Finding her Frida was a “whole other journey” for Kravitz. “It’s a hard part,” Kravitz says. “She’s many things at once. You kind of never really get a real handle on who she is. How manipulative is she? How unaware? Is she the villain? Is she the victim? There’s so many different elements to that character.” She knew she wanted a Black actress because she was writing from her own perspective, and after a few conversations, casting director Carmen Cuba offered up an option: Naomi Ackie, star of films like Lady Macbeth and Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody. Kravitz was not as familiar with Ackie’s work, but once she watched her projects like Master of None and The End of the F***ing World she was blown away. “I was like, ‘What a beast!'” Kravitz says. “And also her face is like so cinematic.”
Photo credit: Carlos Somonte. © 2024 Amazon Content Services LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Ackie remembers that what was supposed to be an initial chat with Kravitz turned into a two hour conversation around the ideas of the film.
“There was a lot that conversation brought up for me around the idea of the pursuit of power, about sexual assault, but also about Frida’s want for something more,” Ackie says. “Her relationship with the symbol of power that is Slater, how that affects her and that gives her blind spots to certain things. There’s many different things going on at the same time about how people are interacting with each other when it comes to these ideas of status and money, and they’re all abusing it in one way or another. We talked about Frida as quite an interesting, imperfect character, and how that made her a really interesting victim.”
Ackie explains that she believes Frida is a new kind of character for cinema, one whose desires force the audience to empathize with her in a different way than they normally would. “I think this is the first character I’ve seen in this kind of situation where audiences are really brought on the base level of what it might feel like to be someone who is vulnerable, not because of their status, but vulnerable because of what they want in life,” she says. “When I watched it I thought, ‘Wow, this is a film for anyone who says, “she shouldn’t have been wearing that skirt.”'”
In Tatum, Ackie found a supportive partner to play off. “I think there was an awareness for both of us that we were tapping into some really hard shit,” Ackie says. “His character as this awful guy who does really fucking awful things, and my character as someone who is suffering from those awful things. Those aren’t easy, so we had to balance it with silliness and goofiness and making sure that everyone felt safe.”
Of Ackie, Tatum says she’s “probably one of the more talented people I’ve worked with.” He adds: “You walk into a scene and you’re like, man, this is kind of a hard scene. And she’ll just, will just, just walk right through it. Like, not a problem at all.”
Kravitz says that Ackie brought a sweetness to Frida that she wasn’t expecting. “It was a bigger leap than I was thinking originally from the badass that she becomes,” Kravitz said. “There’s a big innocence to her that’s part of her face too.”
© 2024 Amazon Content Services LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Zoe Kravitz / Director, Writer, Producer
ZOË KRAVITZ has captivated audiences in diverse group of acclaimed major motion picture films, notable independent releases and blockbuster franchises including The Batman, Mad Max and Fantastic Beasts, as well as the celebrated EMMY® Award-winning series Big Little Lies.
Following her role both starring in and Executive Producing the critically acclaimed series adaption of High Fidelity for Hulu, Kravitz most recently starred as Selina Kyle in Matt Reeves and Warner Bros.’ acclaimed blockbuster film The Batman. In 2024, Kravitz will make her directorial debut with the original motion picture film, Blink Twice. Written by Kravitz and E.T. Feigenbaum, the film stars Naomi Ackie alongside Channing Tatum.
At the onset of this multi-talented entertainer’s career, Variety touted her among its “10 Actors to Watch,” while Forbes spotlighted Kravitz on their coveted “30 Under 30 List.” She has since gained global recognition and was recently named one of “the most influential people of 2022” by TIME.
Outside of her film endeavors, Kravitz is the global face of YSL Beauty and a brand ambassador for Saint Laurent, as well as the face of YSL’s Black Opium fragrance.
E.T. Feigenbaum / Writer
E.T. Feigenbaum is the co-writer of BLINK TWICE alongside writer/director Zoë Kravitz. Previously, he also co-wrote the Kravitz-led Hulu TV series HIGH FIDELITY. Feigenbaum is a Brooklyn-born writer-director-composer. Prior to his work in film and television, he spent many years in the music industry, working with the likes of The NBHD, David Lee Roth and many
others. He has directed notable short narrative films and documentaries, as well as music videos, including the official video for Charles Bradley’s “Changes”.
