The men work in what is known as “Project Victory.” Perfectly dressed and perfumed, every morning they say goodbye to their wives before heading all together to their jobs, a place where they carry out tasks that for some reason they cannot specify to their families. Then, at the end of the day, they return home for dinner, repeating the routine just like the next day.
For their part, women spend most of their time cleaning, cooking and caring for their children. They usually gather around the pool and some days of the week they attend ballet classes. Occasionally they wonder about their husbands’ work, though neither probes further or sees danger.
Alice (Florence Pugh), a young woman relatively new to the place, is comfortable. Her neighbors adore her and with Jack (Harry Styles), her husband, everything is fire and a smooth coexistence. But a series of events make her wonder about her existence in that space. What lies beyond the territory they must not cross? What do her partner and those of her friends do? What is Frank (Chris Pine), the founder of Project Victoria, hiding?
In the context of Cinemacon, the event that brings together the owners of theaters in the United States, Olivia Wilde cited three films that would have been great influences when imagining the story of Don’t worry, honey, her second film as director: The Origin (2010), by Christopher Nolan; Matrix (1999), by the Wachowski sisters, and The Truman Show (1998), by Peter Weir.
The latter, the story of a man (Jim Carrey) who unsuspectingly stars in a world-renowned reality show, became the main reference of the film that arrives on the Chilean billboard this Thursday. This is how Matthew Libatique sees it, the renowned director of photography for the production. “It is undeniable, because of the setting and the conception of the story,” he says in a conversation with Culto.
Nominated twice for the Oscar Awards (Black Swan, A Star Is Born), the director joined the filmmaker’s new feature film after collaborating for the first time on a 2020 short film starring Margaret Qualley and entitled Wake up . He was convinced by the concern of the Dr. House actress to transfer to images the original dystopian concept written by Katie Silberman in the script.
“Olivia has that quality that I love in directors, where the written page is not where the story ends. She has to go through all the machinations of production design, costume design, acting, cinematography and music. All of these things, in editing, really become what they’re supposed to be. She lets all disciplines sing. The challenge when you are a director is how to combine those disciplines to create what you want. She did it with Booksmart (The night of the nerds, 2019). And I think she does that here.”
Libatique says that one of his biggest challenges was to accurately define the idyllic world of the plot, a kind of typical American suburb of the 50s, but rooted in some indeterminate point in the California desert. That scenario serves Wilde to build a film inscribed in the psychological thriller, with some nods to tapes defined by his eroticism, a kind of subgenre in retreat in Hollywood.
“She was also referencing the idea of a psychological thriller in the style of the late ’80s and ’90s. The Adrian Lyne kind of movie, with the sex and the devotion. Also at the time of Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., the image of cigarettes hanging from the mouth and drinks in hand. That was the kind of vibe that she was creating, so I leaned into those things and those inspirations when we were shooting the film,” she specifies.
Instead of having a more mature couple at the forefront of the story, the director decided to imagine a younger couple full of dreams. For the role of Alice, she selected Florence Pugh, the rising actress from films like Midsommar (2019), Little Women (2019) and Black Widow (2021), who takes over every second of the film. For the role of Jack, she chose singer Harry Styles as a substitute for the first chosen actor, Shia LaBeouf.
“I think they are magnetic. They are magnetic together in each box. I felt there was a rhythm. Harry is a musician, and Florence in her own right is a musician when it comes to acting. I know they rehearsed with Olivia and the connection they have is undeniable. So it was a pleasure to see them,” says the director of photography.
Delve into the performance of Pugh, one of the most sought-after young figures in Hollywood, whose next steps include Sebastián Lelio’s The Prodigy; Oppenheimer, by Christopher Nolan, and the sequel to Dune, by Denis Villeneuve.
“She is a remarkable actress. I think that emotionally she doesn’t require effort in the close-ups or in the wide ones. Her physicality is completely perfect for the moment and her emotion is perfect for the moment. She has a set of skills with which she can respond. She is a true movie star, in terms of she understands what it is and how the camera works. First of all, the camera loves her, but she knows where she is at all times.”
And he closes with an idea: “It is not difficult to see Harry Styles as a person with whom the woman is in love, and he is in love with the woman. And that relationship, I think, is everything. The core of that is the dynamic of the movie that makes it work, that makes you care. And I think that’s a credit to both of them.”
Controversy has haunted Don’t Worry Honey since the end of 2020. Olivia Wilde fired Shia LaBeouf (and replaced him with the British singer) before the cameras turned on, for reasons that have had both sides in dispute: the filmmaker He alleges that his behavior made Pugh uncomfortable, and he claims there was not enough time to complete the rehearsals. The leak of a video in which she appears trying to convince the actor to return to the set (and treats the protagonist as “Miss Flo”) did not help the director’s version.
The rest of the elements have fed the gossip: the alleged tension between Wilde and the interpreter, the romance between the director and Harry Styles while they were filming, and an uncomfortable premiere a couple of weeks ago within the framework of the Venice Festival, which became in the most talked about episode of the event despite not getting great reviews or being in the official competition.
Days ago, Matthew Libatique gave a statement to Vanity Fair magazine that sought to calm the waters: “It was one of the most harmonious sets I’ve ever been on, and I’m in the middle of the storm.”
But how did that manifest itself? The director of photography answers Worship which translated into “a sense of creativity”. “You can only get true creativity from each department if there is harmony. Because if there is no harmony and there is conflict… When decisions are made, if someone does not believe in those decisions, then they are not really going to reach their maximum capacity.”
He illustrates his point with the constant presence of Katie Byron, the film’s production designer. “On many occasions, the production designer moves on to the next set, but Katie Byron’s presence was there, perhaps because Olivia invites that participation. There’s nowhere else to be but the set, unless you have something else to prepare for next week’s shoot. If you’re done with that, you come back. The set is where everything happens, the creativity is there. Ideas really come to fruition there,” she explains. And about Wilde she notes: “She easily conveys what she seeks.”
Libatique’s curriculum influences all kinds of productions and challenges (Requiem for a dream, The perfect plan, Iron Man), but curiously, the filming of Don’t worry, darling shared a quality with one of the films he later filmed: The whale, also premiered at the recently concluded edition of Venice.
His new collaboration with Darren Aronofsky is the story of a 600-pound professor (Brendan Fraser, in an Oscar-winning role) dealing with the loss of his partner, attempts to reconnect with his daughter (Sadie Sink) and the terrible health forecasts that medicine gives him. It only takes place in her home, similar to Olivia Wilde’s film, which explores the confinement of her protagonist.
“Until you make a movie that’s confined to one place, you don’t really appreciate the effect that you’re changing places, always giving the audience something new,” says the filmmaker.
“With Don’t worry honey there were different elements in suggesting that subjectivity. The good thing about the movie is that although there are scenes with a lot of people, there are a lot of scenes with her alone. So they are subjective in nature, because the house you live in is also a character,” she expresses.
“In The whale it’s the same. In a sense, in both movies the character is not alone, because Alice’s world in Don’t Worry Honey and Charlie’s house in The Whale are a manifestation of themselves. It’s important to be in tune with what that could be.”
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Don’t Worry Honey: how an explosive film was conceived