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Zoë Kravitz has revealed the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) wouldn’t advertise the original title of her original directorial debut, now titled Blink Twice.
The suspense thriller stars Kravitz’s fiancé Channing Tatum as tech billionaire Slater King who invites Frida (Naomi Ackie) to party with him and his friends on his private island. However, after strange occurrences start happening, Frida has to uncover the truth if she has any hope of making it out alive.
Alia Shawkat, Haley Joel Osment and Adria Arjona (Hit Man) also feature.
When Kravitz, 35, initially announced the movie in 2022, it was titled Pussy Island. At the time, she defended her refusal to censor the title, telling The Wall Street Journal: “It represents this time where it would be acceptable for a group of men to call a place that, and the illusion that we’re out of that time now.”
Now two years later, speaking to Entertainment Weekly in a new interview ahead of the film’s debut next month, The Batman star explained there were a “lot of roadblocks along the way” that pushed her to change the title to something less provocative.
“It was made very clear to me that ‘pussy’ is a word that we, our society, are not ready to embrace yet,” Kravitz said. “There were a lot of roadblocks along the way, whether it be the MPAA not wanting to put it on a poster, or a billboard, or a kiosk; movie theaters not wanting to put it on a ticket.”
The MPAA is the trade association that represents the five major US film studios. It’s also behind the US film rating system, which provides parents with “the information needed to determine if a film is appropriate for their children.”
Kravitz said that she later discovered “interestingly enough, after researching it, women were offended by the word.”
“And women seeing the title were saying, ‘I don’t want to see that movie,’ which is part of the reason I wanted to try and use the word, which is trying to reclaim the word, and not make it something that we’re so uncomfortable using,” she said.
“But we’re not there yet. And I think that’s something I have the responsibility as a filmmaker to listen to,” Kravitz acknowledged. “I care about people seeing the film, and I care about how it makes people feel.”
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She previously shared that the movie’s script was a project five years in the making, but she ended up having to rewrite it after the sexual abuse allegations against movie producer Harvey Weinstein came to light.
“I started writing it pre-MeToo, pre-Harvey [Weinstein]. Then the world started to have the conversation, so [the script] changed a lot,” the High Fidelity actor said in a 2022 interview with Elle.
“It became more about a power struggle and what that power struggle means,” Kravitz added. “I rewrote it a million times. Now we’re like, ‘Holy s***. We’re doing this!’”
Blink Twice premieres in theaters on August 23.
