Anna Kendrick makes her directorial debut with Netflix’s true-crime drama Woman of the Hour. In a video conversation with Letterboxd she shares the movie influences and inspirations she and her crew referenced in the making of her film. 

Set in the 1970s, Woman of the Hour follows a struggling actress, Sheryl Bradshaw (played by Kendrick) who—after a bad audition and being short of rent money—takes a gig as a contestant on The Dating Game. Unknown to her a serial killer, Rodney Alcala (Lady Bird's Daniel Zovatto), is one of her three bachelors to choose from.

As Kendrick notes in the interview above, Woman of the Hour starts with an act of violence in the desert. As a director, the approach she wanted to take with the violent murders was to start to dwell less on the victim’s final struggle as the film went on and focus more on the horror of being in front of such an evil man. She thanks the Coen brothers “for their incomparable cinema” but also allowing her to pushback against the financiers who didn’t like the sound of that by calling it “the No Country for Old Men approach” because, in her words, “when you reference an absolute masterpiece” people tend to come around.

Another film that Kendrick used as a reference for making her first feature is Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur for the ability of making the viewer “feel sick” without being able to pinpoint why for most of the film. “You’re watching something unfold in a way that’s so pleasant that you’re wondering like, how is it that I feel like I’m gonna be sick when everything in this movie feels beautiful, lovely, saturated, warm,” she says with praise.

Kendrick also chose a ’70s paranoia thriller for “being one of the coolest movies ever made” and a Jean-Pierre Melville picture as an influence on the epilogue in her film. By the end, Kendrick “wanted to give the audience something that was somehow emotionally satisfying without really betraying the deeper truth of this case which was that people were continually let down by this system and the culture at the time.”

Woman of the Hour is now streaming on Netflix.