Joe Wright says "watered down" The Woman In The Window is not the film he originally made

Even the best of us enter a flop era from time to time. For director Joe Wright, known for his stunning work on Pride & Prejudice and Atonement, he encountered his flop era in early 2021 with the Netflix-produced feature The Woman In The Window starring Amy Adams.

In our review of the film, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky writes, “The most that can be said for The Woman In The Window is that does, in long stretches, look interesting.” It received a measly 26% on Rotten Tomatoes, and definitely will not be placed on the director’s shelf of greats in-between Anna Karenina and his most recent Cyrano.

In an interview with Vulture, Wright opens up about the “frustrating experience” of creating the film, and how it quickly became something he did not set out to make.

“Yeah, it was a long, protracted, frustrating experience,” Wright says. “The film that was finally released was not the film that I originally made. It was like, ‘Oh, fucking hell. You live and you learn.’ It got watered down. It got watered down a lot. It was a lot more brutal in my original conception. Both aesthetically, with really fucking hard cuts and really violent music—Trent Reznor did an incredible score for it that was abrasive and hard-core—and in its depiction of Anna, Amy Adams’s character, who was far messier and kind of despicable in a lot of ways.”

Adams stars in The Woman In The Window, a Rear Window-esqe thriller about an agoraphobic former child psychologist who witnesses a brutal crime while keeping tabs on the family across the street from her NYC brownstone. The feature also stars Gary Oldman, Anthony Mackie, Fred Hechinger, Wyatt Russell, Brian Tyree Henry, Tracy Letts, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Julianne Moore.

“Unfortunately, audiences like women to be nice in their movies,” Wright continues. “They don’t want to see them get messy and ugly and dark and drunk and taking pills. It’s fine for men to be like that, but not for women. So the whole thing was watered down to be something that it wasn’t.”

When asked about the possibility of a director’s cut, Wright says while it would cost a lot of money, he’d “love to do it.” However, he also reflects on any great artist’s occasional need to fail.

“I’m not going to delude myself,” Wright says. “It could just be that it was a film that didn’t work and that’s okay, too. We have a right as artists to fail. We have to keep pushing ourselves. You’ve got to come in with a fairly decent batting average, but if you don’t make the occasional film that doesn’t work, then you’re not fucking trying hard enough.”