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If there’s one movie that pairs perfectly as a double feature with Woman of the Hour, it’s Alan J. Pakula’s 1971 paranoia thriller Klute, starring Jane Fonda (in an Oscar-winning role) as Bree Daniels, a sex worker who is stalked by a psychopath and finds aid from detective John Klute (Donald Sutherland). “It was something I wanted to rewatch right before making the movie,” says Kendrick, who also refers to Pakula’s film as “one of the coolest movies ever made.” She points out “a surprising number of hyper-specific things that informed [Woman of the Hour],” including the wardrobe and production design, especially as one sequence of Kendrick’s film takes place exactly when and where Klute does: 1971 New York.
“I didn’t really want the wardrobe to feel so hyper ’70s that it made you think, ‘Man, the ’70s were a tough time for women!’, because it’s still a universal thing,” she explains. Woman of the Hour does a tremendous job of capturing the timeless quality of its core themes, while also accentuating the specific lives of the women who come into Alcala’s path. “This is silly, but it’s not silly to me,” Kendrick begins. “I really wanted all the women in the movie to be connected to a piece of nature, because we have such limited time with them. We’re meeting them in the worst moment of their life, and I wanted the backdrop of their scenes to speak to the vastness and complexity of their lives, beyond the moment we’re meeting them in.”
In the ’71 New York sequence, we meet Charlie (Kathryn Gallagher), whose defining detail Kendrick struggled to figure out, as the city doesn’t afford much in the way of nature. “I noticed that in Klute, [Bree] has this beautiful vaulted skylight,” Kendrick explains of her lightbulb moment. Her location manager was able to find an apartment with the right skylight, “and that’s [Bree’s] connection to the wider world and that corner of nature.” This new vantage point proved an added advantage to the director, as she recalls, “I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I could shoot on the roof!’ That would continue this theme of only seeing certain acts of violence through glass and at a distance, because it feels too intense to be really up close in those explicit moments.”
The impact of Klute is so present across Woman of the Hour that you can spot it in one of the very first scenes. Kendrick’s character Sheryl Bradshaw is grinding her way through humiliating casting calls in LA, trying to make it as an actor. “I called the screenwriter and asked him to write in this moment where these two casting directors are talking about Sheryl as though she’s not there,” Kendrick recalls. The scene directly reflects a casting call session at the top of Klute, where Fonda’s character is one of a row of actors who are sitting and being spoken about, not to. It’s a moment that Kendrick utilized in Woman of the Hour, to illuminate the clear line between these misogynistic microaggressions and the extreme violence against women that men are so often allowed to get away with.
“I wanted it to feel disorienting,” Kendrick explains of the scene, which comes immediately after the opening murder sequence. “I thought, ‘Well, I wonder if there’s a way for it to be unclear for a little while who they’re talking about—if they’re talking about the victim we’ve just seen, or if they’re talking about someone else.’” This is one of the great magic tricks of her film, as it “led me down a path of figuring out, sometimes while we were shooting the scene, a way to transition from scene to scene that would connect all of these very disconnected storylines in a way that felt like the women were almost spiritually connected.”
