Anna Kendrick Called Brittany Snow for ‘Pep Talk’ About Directorial Debut (Exclusive)

Anna Kendrick talks to “Extra’s” Melvin Robert about her new crime thriller “Woman of the Hour,” which is based on the true story of the so-called Dating Game Killer. 

In addition to starring, Anna is making her directorial debut, calling the prospect of calling the shots “really scary but really exciting.”

Once she got the job, Kendrick said, “It all happened really quickly, which I think was good because I didn’t have time to panic and back out. It was like, ‘I just have to keep going.’”

Anna shared that she reached out to her “A Simple Favor” director Paul Feig for advice. “I admire him so much as a filmmaker and as a collaborator and I love how he works.”

She added, “He’s, like, the nicest man in Hollywood, and everybody knows that, and it was the first time that he was really giving me some tough love about how, ‘It’s on you now and the buck stops with you,’ and like, ‘No excuses.’”

Kendrick also leaned on “New Girl’s” Jake Johnson, who was in the midst of making his directorial debut “Self Reliance.”

She said, “I was always calling him, being like, ‘Okay, what’s the edit like? What should I expect?… What’s the sound mix like?’”

Anna’s “Pitch Perfect” co-star Brittany Snow was also working on her directorial debut “Parachute,” so Kendrick called her for a pep talk.

“I also called her for like a real sweetheart pep talk and she gave me some, like, tough love and I think she literally just said, ‘Anna you’re going to get on set and you’re going to know what to do.’”

There was no “mush pep talk.” Instead, Anna said, “Brittany was talking to me the way that I usually talk, and it was kind of exactly what I needed to hear.”

Anna also shared, “I was drawn to the way that this script used the kind of backdrop of this serial killer, particularly the fact that he was on a dating show, as a way to explore themes around the kind of day-to-day survival tactics that women frequently use.”

Kendrick said the film follows her character Sheryl, calling it “an imagined week in the life of an aspiring actress in Hollywood in the ‘70s,” and revealed, “The question that comes up in every scene for her, particularly, like, in the first act when we’re getting to know her, is this, like, hanging sense of, ‘Do you see me as human, or do you see me as something else?’ and there’s almost a kind of perverse relief when you get an answer, and that answer might not be a good one.”

She also included a scene at the beginning of the movie taken from her own experience. Anna described it as Sheryl at an audition “where they make specific reference to my body, and that is, verbatim, something that happened to me when I was 19.”