‘Hunting Daze’ Director On Making A New Kind Of Bachelor Party Movie
Movies like The Hangover and Very Bad Things, where men get away with bad behavior during a bachelor party weekend, are a dime a dozen. So often it feels like the same story in slightly different clothes as we watch men cheat, lie, and steal thanks to alcohol and a little too much testosterone. Thankfully, director Annick Blanc is trying to push back against such expectations with her new film Hunting Daze.
In Hunting Daze:
Nina, a young, tempestuous woman, finds herself stranded in the far North. She convinces five men on a bachelor hunting trip, to put her up for a few days. In this masculine microsociety, by turns hilarious and philosophical, Nina starts to feel a sense of belonging she never has before. But a mysterious stranger’s arrival changes the course of this improvised holiday forever.
Dread Central spoke with Blanc at the 2024 SXSW Film Festival about subverting the trope of the fragile sex worker and gaslighting the audience.
Dread Central: I’m so excited to talk to you about Hunting Daze. I particularly love how you’re reinterpreting the bachelor party movie, but through the perspective of a sex worker and who was already their customer. Where was the idea born from for you?
Annick Blanc: I think I wanted to reverse the stereotype of the fragile sex worker. I’ve done some research, and I don’t want to make it sound like it’s pretty to be a sex worker, but I think that there is a power to [sex workers]. I wanted to have a woman that just faces a group of men. Also, the sex workers I’ve met, they’ve seen so many men in their life that they have no fear of men. They often see [men] at their worst, drunk or sad, and for them, [men] become a utility. And I thought that was an interesting change of power, right? The man thinks they’re in control, but they’re coming to a professional who is in control, in the woman I’ve met. Not always the case, of course.
DC: Well, I love that because, in a lot of genre filmmaking, sex workers are either fodder or like you said, they’re weak. And seeing her in this very masculine setting is so cool, especially how she begins to integrate into their weird little society in a way that feels like, is she performing? Is it Stockholm syndrome? It’s so interesting to watch. What was it like directing the group and creating that dynamic before the stranger arrives? Because the men feel like they’re circling her prey the whole time. They’re sharks. It’s very uncomfortable.
AB: It’s really interesting that you pinpoint that scene because that’s one of the scenes we used in the audition. And I had to warn the actress before and say, “This moment is going to be very uncomfortable for you” because it’s uncomfortable for a woman to have so many guys closing in on you like that. But the character is used to that, she’s a bit tough and always putting up that front. So you need to be in that mood where you kind of enjoy that moment and you face it and those men don’t scare you at all. But the reflex of the actress with the blindfolded—we were doing it with the blindfold [in the audition]—was to be afraid and Naima Richie was one of the few that could sustain that scene and not look scared and look like she was in control.
But for her as an actress, it was a scene that was so, so demanding. We did it all day because to shoot seven actors like that and to make them live all on camera, we were doing most of the scene all day and giving each of the actors the sense to have the chance to feel the room and have their moment. That’s how I made all those characters alive. So for Naima that day was one of the hardest day because it was going against her instinct because your woman instinct will tell you run. But I think as a feminist, for me, it’s important to show women not to run. And often when we face men, they’re less scary than what they think they can be. That scene for me was partly to show don’t be scared, you’re strong. You can face that.
DC: You have these really intense moments in contrast with the initiation, which is comedic. They’re doing an egg race basically, and she has a gun or with the stranger, they’re throwing food in a bucket. It goes from very scary to so silly in such quick succession. And I wanted to hear more from you about balancing these incredibly tense moments with moments that are funny.
AB: For me, it was important because of course the movie becomes really dark, but often when you go to that extent, you have done little steps to get there. So the film starts with all those little jokes. To make us really love those guys, I needed to make them really funny, too, and to make [the viewer] kind of part of that. It’s also a way to keep the viewer always surprised. This is one of the comments we get is that people think it’s going to go where she’s going to get raped and then in the end she takes back control.
You think this initiation is going to be really dark because that’s what they let us think. But then in the end, it’s a lot of fun. So the viewer doesn’t know what to expect. Hunting Daze is also a little bit about, even though she’s strong in the beginning, we always need to keep our mind clear about what we are ready to accept. But she does get a little bit psychologically challenged by the guides. There’s a bit of gaslighting there, and for a moment there, she loses it. Right? So I’m trying to do the same gaslighting with the viewer. You don’t know. Do you love them? Do you not like them? Are you scared? Are you happy? You never know.
DC: Well, playing with gaslighting also speaks to reality of toxic masculinity. Not every man is going to appear evil. He’s going to seem fun and happy-go-lucky. I think this movie gets to that core that you don’t see in a lot of these bachelor party movies and that subgenre here, you’re like, are they good? You’re like, are they good? Are they okay? And you make them feel real. Not archetypes
AB: That’s it. And they are both. They’re nice guys. A lot of abusers are nice guys. And then all of a sudden in a group or sometimes in a moment, they will lose those boundaries, those moral limits. Or even sometimes for me, it’s empathy. In a moment where they need to feel power or where they need to follow their instinct or their impulses, they will kind of lose that. Always with narcissistic perverts or with manipulators, there’s always this seduction period at first where it’s just the best person you’ve never met.
He’s amazing. He’s funny, he’s there, he’s engaged, he’s making you feel stronger, better about yourself. And that can last sometimes up to a year in a relationship. Here in Hunting Daze, it lasts the first 30 minutes. But that’s what I also wanted to do: keep you aware of who tries to seduce you and why. And when this person that you’ve learned to love goes beyond that limit, it’s time to go, which was a tough lesson for me to learn. But this movie for me was the end of that therapy where it was like, I leave the manipulators before it comes to the end like that in Hunting Daze. So that’s kind of the voyage I wanted the viewer to [experience].
DC: As someone who’s also experienced that kind of relationship, to see that on-screen and to see that kind of experience mirrored back, you don’t see that often. It’s comforting in a weird way, there’s a sense of camaraderie.
AB: It’s subtle, but this is what’s all behind it. And I’m trying to have the viewer feel more rather than to tell him [everything]. I also think that nothing is gray. Nothing is black or white in life. That’s what I like to do in my movies. But I think we don’t see that a lot because people are scared of that. The studios, the producers, or even the financiers, it’s very hard to make them believe that it’s going to be believable on screen. People were saying, “But why five guys? They all say the same thing. They all complete each other’s sentences.” But I was like, “First of all, it’s a pack, right? Five is a pack.” I needed a pack.
But also it is just in my head, they sounded so different. But on the paper, it’s hard to convey. And then that’s what I get from the people is that all the guys, you meet them in that room at that moment, and he’s the coward. He’s the funny guy. He’s the big tough guy. But all those subtilities you can bring through acting are often hard to convey in a script, so it scares people in the development stage. So you have to fight, fight, and say, “I know it’s going to work. I know I can make it work.”
DC: I was curious about the stranger character, who is played by a Black actor. Was it always on the page that this character was going to be a person of color?
AB: No, we auditioned. We needed somebody who didn’t speak French or English well, who could speak another language than French or English, and ideally other than Spanish, because there’s a lot of similarity. And it was important that the characters couldn’t understand each other. So we opened to the casting to even Eastern Europeans. But Noubi Ndiaye, it was a self-tape, and it was a little bit creepy. And it was just him. The first self-take we did was to ask them to do a monologue in their own language. At the time, the monologue that is in the movie in French was not written. And so he just told me this dialogue in, and it was just him.
It was the character I had in my head all along, and he didn’t have much experience. So we did another audition and it was striking. It was him and Nina was supposed to be a person of color. Nahéma, the actress, is from Tunisia originally, but she looks more Caucasian. So it is a delicate thing because then racism takes a darker connotation. Noubi worked to create the character. We wrote this monologue together to give a better insight into what this was to him. Even if it is delicate, he does also win in the end. And for me, I just wanted the minority to win against the toxic masculinity power in place.
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