DESTROYER (2018) About The Director and Cast
KARYN KUSAMA (Director) with cast NICOLE KIDMAN (Erin Bell), and SEBASTIAN STAN (Chris)
Bios for Director Karyn Kusama and Cast Nicole Kidman, and Sebastian Stan
Director Karyn Kusama and Cast Nicole Kidman, and Sebastian Stan
KARYN KUSAMA (Director) recently helmed the critically-acclaimed psychological suspense thriller The Invitation starring Michiel Huisman and Logan Marshall-Green. The film, which explores the potentially sinister interactions of a group of old friends gathered for a dinner party, premiered to rave reviews at SXSW in 2015 and won the Grand Prize at the Sitges Film Festival. She also directed "Her Only Living Son" a segment of the all-female-directed horror anthology XX that debuted at Sundance in 2017.
Kusama broke out in 1999 with her debut feature film Girlfight, which she both wrote and directed. The film earned the Grand Jury Prize and Director's Prize at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival as well as the prestigious Prix de la Jeunesse (Award of Youth) at the Cannes Film Festival. Kusama followed this with the science fiction love story Aeon Flux for Paramount Pictures and the comedy-horror film Jennifer's Body written by Diablo Cody for Twentieth Century Fox.
In addition to film, Kusama is an in-demand TV director where she has brought her obsessive eye for detail to shows like AMC's Halt and Catch Fire, Amazon's The Man in the High Castle and Showtime's Billions.
*****
NICOLE KIDMAN (Erin Bell) first came to the attention of American audiences with her critically acclaimed performance in Phillip Noyce's riveting 1989 Australian psychological thriller Dead Calm. Kidman has since become an internationally-recognized, award-winning actress known for her range and versatility.
In 2002, Kidman was honored with her first Oscar nomination for her performance in Baz Luhrmann's innovative musical, Moulin Rouge! For that role, and her performance in writer/director Alejandro Amenabar's psychological thriller, The Others, she received dual 2002 Golden Globe nominations, winning for Best Actress in a Musical. In 2003, Kidman won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a BAFTA Award and a Berlin Silver Bear for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf in Stephen Daldry's The Hours.
In 2010, Kidman starred opposite Aaron Eckhart in Rabbit Hole, for which she received Academy Award, Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild and Independent Spirit Award nominations for Best Actress. The film was developed by Kidman's production company, Blossom Films. In October 2012, Kidman starred in Lee Daniels' The Paperboy with Matthew McConaughey, Zac Efron and John Cusack. Her performance earned her an AACTA, Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globe nominations. In 2014, Kidman was seen in Grace of Monaco, which earned her a SAG nomination. In 2015 she was seen in The Secret in Their Eyes, The Family Fang with Jason Bateman that she also produced, and Genius alongside Colin Firth. In 2016, Kidman was seen in Lion with Dev Patel, for which she received Critics' Choice, Globe, SAG, BAFTA and Oscar nominations. She was most recently seen in Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled, Yorgos Lanthimos' The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Neil Burger's The Upside and John Cameron Mitchell's How to Talk to Girls at Parties.
Her upcoming projects include Boy Erased, Aquaman and The Goldfinch, a movie adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
In television, Kidman starred in HBO's Hemingway and Gellhorn alongside Clive Owen in 2012. Her portrayal as Martha Gellhorn earned her Emmy, SAG and Golden Globe nominations. Kidman returned to the small screen in 2017 with the limited series Big Little Lies alongside Reese Witherspoon for HBO (Kidman's Blossom Films and Witherspoon's Pacific Standard produced the project), for which she received an Emmy Award, Golden Globe, Critics Choice Award and SAG Award. Big Little Lies also received an Emmy Award, Golden Globe and Critics Choice Award for Outstanding Limited Series. She also had an arch on the second season of Top of The Lake: China Girl. Kidman is currently in production on the second season of Big Little Lies, where she will again serve as actress and executive producer.
In 2018, Kidman and her production company, Blossom Films, signed a first-look deal with Amazon Studios. Under the agreement, she will develop theatrical and series content, the first of which being a new drama series, The Expatriates, based off the novel by Janice Y.K Lee.
In theater, Kidman made a highly-lauded London stage debut in the fall of 1998, starring with Iain Glen in "The Blue Room," David Hare's modern adaptation of Schnitzler's "La Ronde." For her performance Kidman won London's Evening Standard Award and was nominated in the Best Actress category for a Laurence Olivier Award. In 2015, Kidman was seen on the West End stage in Anna Ziegler's "Photograph 51," for which she received a London's Evening Standard Award.
In January of 2006, Kidman was awarded Australia's highest honor, the Companion in the Order of Australia. She was also named, and continues to serve, as Goodwill Ambassador of the United Nations Development Fund for Women, UN Women, whose goals are to foster women's empowerment and gender equality, to raise awareness of the infringement on women's human rights around the world and to end violence against women. Along with her husband, Keith Urban, she has helped raise millions over the years for the Women's Cancer Program which is a world-renowned center for research into the causes, treatment, prevention, and eventual cure of women's cancer. In 2017, the Cannes Film Festival honored Kidman with a special award for her body of work and longstanding history with the festival. She is one of only eight people to ever receive this honor in the seventy-year history of the festival.
*****
SEBASTIAN STAN (Chris) can most recently be seen reprising his role of Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier in Avengers: Infiniti War, which Disney and Marvel released on April 27, 2018. Stan has also portrayed the role of Bucky in Ant-Man (2015) and in three installations of Marvel's Captain America: Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) and Captain America: Civil War (2016). Stan also recently finished production on the next Avengers film which will be theatrically released on May 3, 2019.
In 2017, Stan portrayed "Jeff Gilooly" in Craig Gillespie's critically-acclaimed, Golden Globe, Gotham and New York Film Critics nominated film I, Tonya alongside Margot Robbie and Allison Janney. This year, Stan will star alongside Alexandra D'addario and Willem Dafoe in the Stacie Passon directed independent thriller We Have Always Lived in the Castle and in the Todd Robinson directed war drama The Last Full Measure with Samuel L. Jackson. Stan is also attached to star in Gore Verbinski's Beat the Reaper, based on Josh Bazell's suspense novel of the same name.
In 2015, Stan starred in Ridley Scott's Academy Award-nominated The Martian, which generated over $629 million worldwide. That same year, he also starred alongside Melissa Rauch in Sony Pictures Classics' dark comedy The Bronze directed by Bryan Buckley. Stan's other film credits include Steven Soderbergh's Logan Lucky; Jonathan Demme's Ricki and the Flash alongside Meryl Streep; Gone with Amanda Seyfried; Darren Aranofsky's Black Swan with Natalie Portman; Rachel Getting Married with Anne Hathaway; Spread with Ashton Kutcher; Hot Tub Time Machine; The Education of Charlie Banks directed by Fred Durst; The Architect with Anthony LaPaglia; and Isabella Rossellini's The Covenant. Stan's television credits include Gossip Girl, Once Upon A Time and Greg Berlanti's critically acclaimed mini-series Political Animals for which he was nominated for a TCA Award for his performance as "T.J. Hammond."
In 2007, Stan made his Broadway debut opposite Liev Schreiber in Eric Bogosian's Tony-nominated revival "Talk Radio." He also starred alongside Maggie Grace and Ellen Burstyn in the 2013 revival of William Inge's "Picnic."
*****
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
Destroyer is, at its core, a film about confronting your mistakes and
making the brave decision to be accountable for your actions. Within the
relatable frameworks of crime thriller and cop movie, it's also an insistent
character study, hinging on the wounded but resilient psychic landscape of an
LAPD detective named Erin Bell. The criminal underworld she investigates,
alongside a storytelling structure that allows for narrative surprise, recall
films like Heat and The Usual Suspects. But the film also allows intimate
access to her in a tradition of genre films as varied as Taxi Driver, A
Prophet, or Nightcrawler. It's made more modern and relevant by its complicated
female lead, and I can't think of a time when I've loved a character more.
The look and feel of the film reflects the world of extremes it inhabits: a seductive mirage of blasting Los Angeles sunlight and dreamy blankets of coastal fog, fueled by the sonic assault of 1990's desert-metal and the pop confections of today's top 40 radio. Though Destroyer moves between two distinct timeframes, it primarily occupies the Los Angeles of today, a 21st century melting pot of corrupt lawyers and small-time crooks, gun dealers and local preachers, hard-working middle-class laborers and charismatic charlatans. This vast city, connected by sprawling freeway systems and dotted with neighborhoods as diverse as its people - is itself a mirror of Erin Bell's divided soul: humming with secrets and lies, struggling to find what's real in a landscape of carefully cultivated surfaces. While much of the visual approach to the film should be undeniably visceral and raw, there are opportunities for unexpected beauty and lyricism. The moments of redemption, both visual and moral, should be rare but hard-won. Destroyer aims to uncover all kinds of primal "destroyers" - money, greed, hunger - but will also reveal the insidious qualities of memory, denial and the inexorable march of time itself. While society's destructive impulses seem to have reached an apocalyptic peak, it's still the peculiar will of an individual to sabotage herself that I find the most compelling and human to explore. In witnessing Erin Bell's self-destruction, we are forced to confront our own personal "destroyers." In the end she pays a terrible price for her redemption, but she finds it nonetheless. The audience experiences the spiral of regret and shame that powers her odyssey back into the past, but also witnesses the heroic journey of a morally compromised character, a woman who eventually decides to right a wrong at any cost. As a parable, Destroyer is a bracing "woman-against-herself" story, a sustained howl whose story, I hope, belongs to all of us.
