What happens when you pit a group of dysfunctional ballerinas against a ruthless gang of mercenaries? According to Vicky Jewson’s new action thriller Pretty Lethal, not quite the bloodbath you’d expect.
The new Prime Video movie, which had its flashy premiere at the SXSW Film & TV Festival on March 13, follows a ballerina troupe whose bus breaks down enroute to a competition in Budapest, forcing them to take shelter in a shady roadside inn. Well, it’s less an inn and more of a manor — a crumbling kingdom where Uma Thurman’s shady mob boss Devora Kasimer reigns, keeping her bloodthirsty henchmen in check while building a creepy altar to her glory days as a former ballerina. The ballerinas — Bones (Maddie Ziegler), Princess (Lana Condor), Zoe (Iris Apatow), Chloe (Millicent Simmonds), and Grace (Avantika) — are unsettled by their strange surroundings, but embrace their host’s hospitality... until their coach Miss Thorna (Lydia Leonard) is brutally slaughtered by one trigger-happy henchman.
From then on, Pretty Lethal is a nonstop slaughterfest, but not in the way audiences would expect. Instead of the delicate ballerinas dropping like flies, it’s the handgun-toting henchmen and mafiosos. And the ballerinas, wielding nothing but their dance skills and a few precisely-placed blades in their pointe shoes, come out on top.
“A ballerina is such an icon of fragility, that perfect white tutu,” Pretty Lethal director Vicky Jewson tells Inverse. “And then this movie just subverts that.”
Jewson, who describes herself as a tomboy as a kid, didn’t have much experience in the ballet space compared to screenwriter Kate Freund, who drew inspiration from her time in the ballet world. So in preparation for the film, Jewson spent some time at the Royal Opera House in London with some prima ballerinas. “ I was like, ‘I just want to understand how mad this is. How bonkers is it?’” Jewson recalls. “And they were like, ‘Our bodies are our armor. It's a superpower.’”
Jewson incorporates that “superpower” into the movie itself. When the girls realize that they’re trapped in a labyrinthine manor with a bunch of professional assassins, they realize they are the only ones who can save themselves. So they resort to their instincts. When one henchman grabs Bones, she does a pirouette that turns into a spinning kick. The box cutters that the girls use to break in their pointe shoes become their weapons, and by one happy accident, a blade gets lodged into Bones’ pointe shoe, giving her spinning kicks extra oomph. And when Bones gets tortured by one henchman, she laughs in his face when he pulls off a toenail — she loses toenails all the time during their arduous hours of practice; it’s called being a ballerina.
“All of their weapons from the ballet bags and the shellac that you can make an explosive device out of,” Jewson says. “It's not John Wick. In order for us to buy into it as an audience, I was like, ‘We've got to believe where it's coming from.’ And so it's got to come from the dance. The fighting can be messy.”
To make the fighting as believable, and kick-ass, as possible, Jewson teamed up with 87 North Productions, the production company founded by John Wick’s David Leitch and behind such actioners as Nobody, Bullet Train, and The Fall Guy. With 87 North’s stunt coordinators and ballet director from the Royal Opera, William Tuckett, they crafted a new form of martial arts to rival John Wick’s “gun-fu,” which they dubbed “ballet-fu.”
“We wanted to make it feel very authentic, and that it's just scrappy, and it is a girl just fighting for survival,” Jewson says. “And therefore, we can witness the birth of ballet-fu, because if you're pushed up against the wall and it really is life and death, you just go into muscle memory for how to survive. And her muscle memory just happens to be this incredible trained athlete basically of a ballerina.”
It all comes to a head in the film’s central fight sequence, in which the ballerinas are cornered in the inn’s cavernous bar, and must work together to fight off an entire army of goons. And the troupe which had been butting heads until then — especially the brusque leader Bones and the spoiled rich brat Princess — finally are able to connect, using their ballet routine to take down the henchmen (with the help of the aforementioned pointe shoe blades). The result is a thrilling fight scene that worked thanks to a combination of the dedicated cast (two of whom, Ziegler and Condor, are classically trained), ballet doubles, and stunt doubles.
“The final rehearsal we did before we shot the bar fight, it was all of the ballet doubles that did the rehearsal for us. And each of them looked like a Rambo,” Jewson says.
But Jewson made sure that the cast was switched out as little as possible — everyone attended a ballet boot camp beforehand, and “trained so hard as much as possible,” Jewson says. “We really only swapped out the doubles for going on pointe.”
The end product is fairly seamless, which allowed Jewson to really get to the heart of what she wanted Pretty Lethal to be: “You get this fragility mixed with the brutality,” she says. “And there's a fun contrast in that, which I think speaks to feminism and kicking down the doors of the patriarchy.”
But the connection between dance and action is one that Jewson is surprised many other movies (apart from a few like the John Wick spinoff Ballerina) haven’t made before. “A lot of martial arts have connections to dance, and I think ballet just hasn't been that explored yet,” she says.
