Blink Twice’s Channing Tatum Says Zo? Kravitz Was Always Meant to Be a Director
The post Blink Twice’s Channing Tatum Says Zo? Kravitz Was Always Meant to Be a Director appeared first on Consequence.
During a recent press day for the film Blink Twice, I ask Channing Tatum what it was like to work with director Zo? Kravitz — which leads to a slightly awkward moment of laughter, as Tatum and Kravitz have been publicly dating since 2021. “It was okay, it was alright,” he says at first, with no shortage of dryness.
Then, however, he offers up some real insight on the Mad Max: Fury Road and The Batman star’s path to the director’s chair. “She’s obsessed with stories in movies — specifically movies. Like, we don’t do very much other than just watch movies. To get to be around someone that is so in love with it, that it consumes their whole life… It is who they are. This isn’t just like, ‘Oh, I want to see if I can direct a movie.’ This has always been the plan.”
He pauses, then, to correct himself. “I don’t even know if it was a plan. I think it was just something that she had to admit — that this is always what she was supposed to do. Because she loves it that much.”
Blink Twice, directed by Kravitz and written by Kravitz and E.T. Feigenbaum, begins when two struggling cater-waiters, played by Naomi Ackie and Alia Shawkat, get whisked away to the private island of tech mogul Slater King (Tatum). Once there, they come to suspect that below the beauty and glamour of the experience, something far darker is going on — and they may be powerless to fight it.
Small in scope but filled with big characters and ideas, the film is a bold directorial debut, with a compelling ensemble that also includes Christian Slater, Haley Joel Osment, Simon Rex, Adria Arjona, Geena Davis, and Kyle MacLachlan — actors who, Kravitz tells Consequence, “really understood the story and the tone. It’s very strange and specific, and so finding people who get it and get it easily was important to me. I wanted to curate a group of people who fit together. Magic can happen when you do that. And so, yeah, I think I just paid attention to everyone’s vibe.”
This was something that almost took on a meta energy, Kravitz says, thanks to the subject matter: “I wanted this to feel like a group of people who you believe are friends you want to hang out with, they all gel together. So that when the shift happens, it’s even more jarring.”
No one on set had an identical relationship to Kravitz, though speaking with members of the supporting cast, she did have a pre-existing personal connection with many of them. During a group interview with Christian Slater, Simon Rex, and Alia Shawkat, Slater croons that he “held her as a baaaaaby,” while Shawkat says they’ve been close friends “for a minute now. I don’t want to say how long, but for a while.”
As a friend, Shawkat had known Kravitz was working on this project for years, “and I would always check in with her, just as a bud, to be like, ‘How’s that script going? You gotta keep doing it.’ We had gone on holiday together, and we were talking about the movie on the beach, stuff like, ‘This should be like this and you should do this.’ Then, as it was getting closer to getting made and she got the money, I was genuinely surprised when she asked me to be a part of it — she just texted me and was like, ‘Do you wanna play Jess?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, right.'”
As Rex interjects, “It’s so funny, because normally that happens… and then nothing ever happens.”
“Yeah,” Shawkat agrees. “I was really excited, because it felt like we were getting excited on it together, and then I got to actually be there for it.”
When it comes to working with a first-time director, Rex says, “obviously you’ll wonder if she can pull this off.” However, he continues, “She was extremely confident. She was extremely relaxed in the chaos, which is a good sign. And she wrote the movie so she knew what she wanted — it was very clear and very specific, and that’s what you want in a director. And she was more than accommodating — especially as an actress, she knew how to manage and talk to actors very well.”
Adds Slater, “And we loved her already so much that we wanted to give her everything that we possibly could.”
Kravitz made that easier, Shawkat says, because “she set up the environment where we felt creative and could take risks and try stuff. Sometimes you just go in and you’re like, I’ll just play this safe choice. She encouraged us to go for it.”
Ackie, paired with Tatum for our interviews, says that Kravitz is the first first-time director she’s ever worked with, and “like, what an honor. I think watching her grow in that journey and being with her in the great times and also the hard times of being like, ‘Wow, how can I support you in this moment?’ — it felt like we were some sort of sports team. We had to hustle.”
Filming in Yucatán, Mexico didn’t make things easy, with the temperatures reaching a level where heat stroke was a real issue. “We almost lost Geena Davis one day,” Tatum says. “We were out there during the scene where she collects the cell phones and we see the villa for the first time, and it was at least 107 degrees. It was like a microwave out on that lawn.”
“And we’re trying not to sweat on the clothes,” Ackie adds.
“Brutal, brutal,” says Tatum.
“And yet you just make it work — you’re like, this is Zo?’s baby and therefore it’s our, I don’t know, niece or nephew,” Ackie says. “We’re going to put our all in. It was brilliant to see her grow and then just become this mindblowingly amazing creator. It is so inspiring.”
Behind the scenes of Blink Twice, courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios
Tatum remembers first reading the screenplay early on, “kind of out of nowhere. A friend of mine, Riley Keough, sent me a text that was like, ‘Hey, I’ve got a friend that wants to send you a script. Zo? Kravitz, do you know her?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I definitely know Zo? Kravitz.'” He chuckles at that.
When Tatum first met with Kravitz, he didn’t realize she was going to direct the film: “I don’t know if she even knew yet. We didn’t ever talk verbally about her directing it. I felt like it was in the room. But we weren’t specifically saying it.” After that first meeting, some time passed — during which Kravitz “really went and worked on the movie,” as Tatum puts it. And when he eventually read a new draft, he was impressed, because “the changes that she had made were pretty significant, and the movie took a giant jump into a place where you could actually make it.”
The first draft, Tatum clarifies, “was so wild. It was taking massive swings. And it was 15 times crazier than it needed to be. At some point there was cannibalism, there were Indigenous tribes…” That, to him, is “what’s so beautiful about the developmental process: You go, ‘Oh, we could do anything,’ before the conversation of ‘How much money does that cost? Are we capable of doing that? Where would we do that? How would we do it?’ You really can just go, ‘The world is literally at our behest and let’s write anything that we want.’ And she did.”
The theatrical cut of Blink Twice comes in at one hour and 42 minutes, though Slater notes that “you could have made this a three-hour movie for sure” with the footage they shot. Much of that material, though, was background information on the characters, and as he says, “you could get a lot of that stuff just from a shot or a glimpse. It made it much more interesting. It’s always better to show it than to say it, let the audience discover it that way. Like the shark in Jaws.”
Getting the film as tight as it is was something Kravitz really focused on, she says. “I’ve never been so obsessed with runtime before — that was a whole thing where I’m like, ‘We’ve got to get this down.’ At the same time, you want to serve and honor the story, so it was really about finding the right balance — not just doing [cuts] because you’re afraid people will get bored, but actually paying attention to the rhythm of the film and what the film is asking to be,” she says.
Kravitz adds that while lots of cuts were made, “a lot of the stuff that’s gone is still energetically there, and was necessary to make the characters feel as fleshed out as they do. But pacing is important and focus is important and killing your babies is a real thing.”
Blink Twice (Amazon MGM Studios)
The result is a movie that, as Ackie says, gets to explore “the dynamics of power and how different people relate to power. People stepping on people’s toes to get what they want and abusing that power, the lack of fulfillment you have when you get that power — my god. All of those things are so complicated, that this felt like the right way to explore that subject matter.”
For Tatum, it makes sense that Kravitz found herself in this place. “Just being an actress, a player in the game — it wasn’t enough, in a way,” he says. “I think she likes acting. I don’t know if she loves it as much as she loves movies. Because it’s different. There’s being an actor — and then there’s making movies. It’s such an honor and a pleasure to get to watch someone love something so much, and get to do what they love.”
When asked what surprised her most about directing, Kravitz laughs a bit. “I knew it was going to be hard, but not that hard. It’s so, so hard and I felt the need to stay creative in a crisis, because it’s almost all solutions — because everything is constantly going wrong. And sometimes when things aren’t going the way they’re supposed to, you can get upset and then you shut down and then you’re just not open-hearted and you’re not creative.”
However, she adds, “I did find that when things did go wrong, if you stay creative and engaged, it’s almost always leading you towards what actually was always meant to be.”
Blink Twice arrives in theaters on Friday, August 23rd.
Blink Twice’s Channing Tatum Says Zo? Kravitz Was Always Meant to Be a Director
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