The Big Picture
- The making of the movie The Kill Room faced challenges as two main stars, Joe Manganiello and Uma Thurman, had issues that prevented their arrival on set.
- The filmmakers had to get creative and switch scenes around to accommodate the absence of the actors, including using stand-ins and shooting scenes out of order.
- The interactions between Uma Thurman and Samuel L. Jackson were crucial to the ending of the movie, and creative solutions were devised to maintain their presence and make the final scene seamless.
Most of the time, we discover very little information about what goes on behind-the-scenes in the making of a movie. We often don’t hear about the day-to-day issues that the cast and crew face as they’re trying to put a project together, but sometimes an event can be so powerful it even influences the story so that filming can wrap on schedule. In an interview with Collider’s Emily Bernard, The Kill Room director Nicol Paone revealed that this happened in a crucial moment of the story.
During the interview, Paone revealed that wrapping up storylines during filming was difficult because two of its three main stars had issues that prevented them from getting to the set. While Joe Manganiello (True Blood) was diagnosed with COVID, Uma Thurman (Red, White & Royal Blue) had a massive flight delay and had to hitch a ride in order to try to make it to the set, which didn’t help much. The solution was to get creative.
“We switched a lot around, we switched the order of scenes. My editor Gillian Lasting, she was wonderful. She knew all the tricks of the trade. We had to switch things around because we didn’t have an ending. Joe got COVID and we had a lightning storm that rerouted Uma’s plane, and so we had to rewrite the ending for what we had. The scene when they’re in Miami, that’s the back of stand-ins’ heads. When you see the front of [Thurman and Samuel L. Jackson], and Uma’s saying, ‘We’re just making art,’ that was like a little filler scene that we had to put in to shoot the front of them in New Jersey in October and make it look like it was the same day. That was the trickiest part.”
‘The Kill Room’ Couldn’t Afford Losing Thurman-Jackson Banter
Indeed, Thurman and Samuel L. Jackson’s interactions couldn’t be left out of the ending of The Kill Room – not only because they light up the screen together, but also because the final twist in the story is directly connected to the duo. While this certainly makes us wonder what kind of ending we would have seen if everything had gone according to the shooting plan, it’s also nice to realize that creative forces had to come up with solutions that made sense narratively to make it look like the final scene was seamless.
The Kill Room is written by Jonathan Jacobson (Bench Warmers), and it stars Thurman’s daughter Maya Hawke (Stranger Things) as her assistant. The cast also features Debi Bazar (Younger), Mike Doyle (New Amsterdam), Marianne Rendón (In The Dark), Jennifer Kim (Mozart in the Jungle), Zora Casebere (Dumb Money) and Matthew Maher (Our Flag Means Death).
The Kill Room is out now.
