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Director Olivia Wilde and screenwriter Katie Silberman aim to give the female gaze its due with their genre-blending thriller Don’t Worry Darling. Set in 1950s Palm Springs, it presents Alice (Florence Pugh) and Jack Chambers (Harry Styles) as the newest residents of the insular, gated company town of Victory.
It’s through Alice’s eyes that the audience experiences Victory, and Silberman tells SFX magazine that she provides the "slight tilt of focus that opens up a whole new world, where maybe you think you know what’s going on, but you don’t.' As they crafted the script around Alice, she says they learned that the audience can weather a multitude of reveals if their heroine is compelling enough.
"We knew that the whole movie lived and died on us caring about, and loving, Alice," she explains in the new issue, featuring Chucky on the cover. "So we were beyond lucky to have Florence in that role, because she’s so vibrant. She’s just so charming and lovely and vivacious, but also really smart and really tough and brave.
"We knew the role was going to require all those things, which is hard to find in one person, and she has them. The performance she gives is beyond a writer’s wildest dreams."
Silberman also praises the entire cast for their part in selling the allure of this place, from Harry Styles and Gemma Chan to Chris Pine, whose Frank is seemingly controlling the proverbial strings of the whole town. "I had an amazing time collaborating with him on the role of Frank," she enthuses. "Even the little things in the way Frank would speak or approach someone, he had a really distinct and wonderful idea of who this person was.
"And so that role really became a chemical equation of the Frank that we had written, and how we were able to mold him and his ideas into it. He’s so good at so many things that it’s incredibly disarming. And that unpredictability is something that works with comedies and thrillers. It’s something that we were able to bring in, because you’re trying to keep people off-balance."
Hoping to appeal to those hungry for the unexpected and a story different from the normal blockbuster fare, Silberman says she hopes audiences find Don’t Worry Darling to be one of those movies that has people excitedly talking about it afterward in the cinema car park.
"I think it’s thrilling and sexy and beautiful," she enthuses. "I’m excited for people to see it and to be able to have those conversations afterward. And to see something I don’t think they’ve ever seen before."
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Don't Worry Darling arrives on the big screen on September 23. That's just a snippet of the interview in the Chucky issue of SFX Magazine, available on newsstands now. For even more from SFX, sign up to the newsletter, sending all the latest exclusives straight to your inbox.
