Pretty Lethal, an action flick starring Maddy Ziegler, Lana Condor, Iris Apatow, and Uma Thurman, had SXSW roaring.
Photo: Courtesy of Prime
Have we dunked enough on Timothée Chalamet for for his unsolicited ballet and opera opinions? Apparently not. Steven Spielberg got in on the action at SXSW on Friday, waxing poetic about communal audience experiences in dark theaters: “You get that in movies, you get that at concerts … and you get it in ballet and opera.” We all got where he was going. That same night, the festival marketing gods (or the folks at Amazon MGM) erected a giant ballerina statue outside SXSW’s marquee movie theater for the premiere of Pretty Lethal, a new action flick about a troupe of prima ballerinas who get trapped in a sketchy Gothic hotel in the forests of Hungary and have to fight their way out.
“Inside every ballerina’s heart is the blood of a warrior…” begins the opening narration, set against closeups or worn and dirty pointe shoes, and superhuman calf muscles. A ballerina isn’t a dainty thing in a tutu, the narration continues. She turns pain into beauty. She builds skill out of sacrifice. (The audience was aleady cheering at this point.)
The movie, which hits theaters March 25, stars Maddie Ziegler, Lana Condor, Iris Apatow, Avantika, Millicent Simmonds, and Uma Thurman. Introducing the film at SXSW, British director Vicky Jewson explained that she’s always dreamed of making action movies, but she’s also wanted to see more of them “told with a woman in front of the screen and through the female lens.” This film’s script, by former ballerina Kate Freund, drew her in because of its sisterhood.
Pretty Lethal starts in a rehearsal space somewhere in America, with a troupe of prima ballerinas who are headed to a showcase in Budapest but are clearly having trouble synchronizing their efforts. They’re running into each other during pirouettes, fighting over solos. Archetypes are quickly drawn. Princess (Condor) is the rich bitch. Bones (Ziegler — and the only performer who really looks like she knows what she’s doing) is the tough scholarship kid who feels like she doesn’t belong. Zoe and Chloe (Apatow and Simmonds) are two underdeveloped sisters, one hearing and one deaf. And Grace (Avantika) is the resident Bible-quoter and the movie’s comic relief when she starts taking down grown men while high.
As if the constant squabbling isn’t enough, their bus in Hungary breaks down in the middle of the woods. They start to walk, eventually coming across a sign for the Teremok Inn. “May the wolves have mercy on you,” the bus driver mumbles as they trudge off into the pouring rain — the first sign that things won’t go well. The second is a guy in a trench coat, with signature creepy-dude hair (bald on top, the rest dangling to his shoulders) waiting outside the inn and beckoning them inside. “Such beautiful creatures should not be out in the cold,” he says, and they enter into a sea of Gothic-overload decor: pink light bulbs, chandeliers, mounted animal heads, chandeliers dripping with crystal and dust.
It turns out the inn’s owner, Devora (Uma Thurman in a tight blonde ponytail), was a ballerina herself, until an accident ended her career. The girls change into the only dry clothes they have — their ballet costumes. That’s when the son of a local mobster comes in to collect money on a debt Devora owes his father. The volatile nepo baby commits a crime that has the ballerinas screaming for someone to call the police, and the entire plot is set into motion: the easiest way for them all to cover their asses is to make the ballerinas dead.
At a Q&A following the film’s SXSW premiere, Freund said that her story was inspired by having a tough group of girlfriends growing up. Her best friend was a black belt. “My ballet bag had, like, all these crazy weapons in it,” she said. “And I’d sit in class and, like, shave my shoes, and no one had a problem with this because I’m not a threat. And I really wanted to play with that.” She came up with the concept in 2009, and wrote the script in 2016, and then spent years getting told “no” because producers didn’t want to greenlight a female action ensemble unless it got whittled down to a final girl.
But then Jewson came along. To get the action right, the director said she immersed herself in prima ballerina culture at the Royal Opera at London, whose dancers told her that they see their bodies as their superpower and armor against the world. “People are sure we’re these delicate, fragile little things,” Ziegler’s Bones declares in the film. “We perform sick and hurt and on bleeding feet!”
The actresses said they spent three weeks in a boot camp, working 12 hours a day, half learning ballet and half learning stunts. They performed jettés to the balls and kills by pirouette. They put razor blades in their toe shoes. Who’s fool enough to tie up girls who are double jointed and flexible enough to fling their feet up to the height of a man’s neck? One of the funniest sight gags involves them all hiding in a kitchen, having contorted themselves into impossibly tiny spaces.
Condor, who agreed to be in the movie “years and years” before it was made, said she loved getting to play the kind of part she’s never given: “She’s such a bitch!” Ziegler says she cries every time she talks about it because she’d given up ballet for acting and felt like something was missing — and then two days later this script came to her. But it was Thurman who was glowing most of all. As the mic came to her, she was bursting to talk.
“I’m 56 and I started making films when I was 16,” she said. “I put 40 years into this business. And when I stand here and get to watch women cooperating, loving, working together, pushing the medium and changing the effect on women and girls and audiences across the world, I can’t tell you — I spent my whole life wanting to see this and feel this.”
“I tried to push it where I could. I tried to make parts better when I could,” the Kill Bill actress added. “Tonight, I got to see what I wished for all those years manifested, and it is extremely gratifying.”
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