Anna Kendrick Says Movies Are Ruined For Her
Anna Kendrick says that making movies has distracted her from movies as entertainment, as she watches them with production always on her mind.
Knowing how a magician does his tricks spoils the trick for audiences who want to suspend their disbelief in the magic of the show. The same is true for insiders in any industry, and acting is no exception, as Anna Kendrick discussed in a recent interview with the YouTube podcast First We Feast. She told host Sean Evans, “I think that when you start making movies, there’s a period where they’re kind of ruined for you, because you’re just thinking of behind the scenes and how the sausage gets made of it all…”
While eating the hottest of spicy wings, Anna Kendrick went on to explain that while watching any movie, there’s a running dialogue going through her head that is making critiques about how the film was made. She continued by saying, “So when a movie is really bad, it’s so much worse, because I can see like, ‘Why that choice? It would have been so easy to do this or whatever.’ And when it’s good, the running script is not just like, ‘I’m immersed and it’s great.'”
While this means Anna Kendrick knows many of the behind-the-scenes tricks the magicians who make movies use, it also has given her an appreciation for the hard work that goes into making one. Moviegoers might need to be bribed with post-credits scenes to watch the credits for a movie, but anyone who sits through the 5-10 minute list of names knows that there are hundreds of people involved in different aspects of making a movie, from the director and stars down to the guy who gets the coffee for the people on the set. The high-profile jobs like director, producer, screenwriter, and lead actors may be the face of the movie, but without all the other names in the credits, there would be no movie, especially in today’s climate of fantastic special effects and CGI renderings.
However, that doesn’t mean Anna Kendrick no longer finds movies entertaining, or she wouldn’t be in the business. It just means she knows the ins and outs of how to make one, knowledge she is using to make her directorial debut with The Dating Game, a movie about the appearance of serial killer Rodney Alcala on the eponymous show in 1978. Alcala died in 2021, and was called “The Dating Game Killer” because of this eerie appearance before he was caught for his crimes.
Anna Kendrick is also starring in the recent release Alice, Darling, about a woman in a psychologically abusive relationship whose friends stage a subtle intervention to give her the courage to leave. She is also an executive producer on the project, which was especially poignant to her because of experiences in her personal life. She commented that movies show specific types of abuse, so it was hard to recognize her own situation, which was similar to Alice’s in her film because it didn’t look like common portrayals of abuse.
Anna Kendrick’s breakout role was as Jessica Stanley in Twilight in 2008, but she has acted or voiced roles in a lot of popular or offbeat movies since then. She is in the comic-book chic Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the Broadway musical adaptation Into the Woods, and the raunchy madcap comedy Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates. She is best known for two other franchises in addition to the Twilight saga, voicing Princess Poppy in the Trolls movies and singing her heart out in the Pitch Perfect franchise.
Alice, Darling is currently in theaters, and a third installment of Trolls will be out sometime in 2023. The Dating Game is in post-production, meaning that it shouldn’t be long before we get to see what Anna Kendrick can do behind the camera since we already know how fabulous she is in front of it.
