VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: Amy Redford On Directing Delicate Subjects In ‘What Comes Around’

In her new exclusive uInterview, Amy Redford explained her role as director in her new film What Comes Around and how she approached delicate subjects of consent and online relationships.

The movie follows the life of Anna (Grace Van Dien) starting on the night of her 17th birthday. Redford shared with uInterview founder Erik Meers how the plot is centered on how Anna “is talking to somebody online about poetry and it is pretty clear that that person is not 17. And we find her connecting with her mom, and they have a very close relationship, and yet the way that this relationship unfolds with this gentleman is more complicated than it seems.”

It focuses on lessons about the “connective issue between mother and daughter, between ourselves online, between our own behavior and the fallout from our own behavior.” 

The film contains different layers but a key part of Redford’s job was to make sure that specific details were not revealed too early. She was able to achieve this by making sure “to surround myself with really talented people who can help me execute in the manner in which the writing is asking for,” Redford said. 

“It is a pretty fine line and it is, there are some ideas in the movie that are sort of Trojan horse in through genre, which I thought was important, you know that we can talk about some things that probably need to be talked about but not rubbing your nose in it,” she observed. 

Redford, who is the daughter of screen legend and Sundance Film Festival founder Robert Redford, noted that this was one of the most difficult aspects for her.

“I mean that was super important about how who we were seeing in what moment and why,” she said. “And what is that sort of ping pong of reactions like it was super critical I thought. In the end, being able to understand that there is freedom in what is happening on some level and for these characters so the truth is liberating and whether it’s a convenient truth or not it is liberating.” 

A specific part of the movie focuses on the suspense of whether one of the characters is going to cause physical harm. “We did that on purpose you know to set that up because the suspense part of it is different than that, it’s not about physical violence,” she recalled. “It’s about something else so. But that was deliberate.”

The film touches on multiple delicate subjects, including online relationships and consent, which Redford had to navigate. “I start from the fact that we’re all united by our fallibility as human beings,” she said. “You know and I feel like to understand that somebody that might cause pain often is coming from a place of pain. And where does that start and where can it end?”

>READ AMY REDFORD’s uINTERVIEW ON ‘THE GUITAR’ NOW!

The starting point for her personally was with the writer Scott Organ. “He’s a really talented writer and he understood where we needed to be delicate about some of these things. We didn’t want to overly sexualize the relationship we didn’t want to look away from what young people are handed these days,” she said. “And really not underestimate what they understand and what they can understand so all of those things were sort of important to how to handle the balance.” 

The actors had to also understand this and to prepare them for their roles Redford had “exhaustive conversations with the actors about what they bring to the table and what their experience is and how we can we inform every moment with you know their sort of lived life you know.” 

In addition to this, the actors all created playlists for their roles and had deep conversations that focused on “how they might have intersected with any kind of these dynamics and each of them were incredibly generous about bringing their perspective and they were very possessive over their characters.”