The Woman in the Window: Joe Wright’s first cut was a darker, brutal film inspired by Gaspar Noe

Originally expected to be a theatrical release from Fox in October of 2019, the Amy Adams thriller The Woman in the Window ended up being released through the Netflix streaming service in May of 2021. We heard that it had been a troubled production, with the film undergoing rewrites and reshoots after a test screening audience found it confusing, and now director Joe Wright has opened up about the alterations that were made to the film.

Speaking with Vulture, Wright said that working on The Woman in the Window was

a long, protracted, frustrating experience. The film that was finally released was not the film that I originally made. It was like, Oh, f*cking 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 f*cking 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. Unfortunately, audiences like women to be nice in their movies. 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. The cuts were really hard. I always think about that Gaspar Noe film, I Stand Alone, where there’s like a gunshot on every single cut, so you were dreading him cutting at all, and it left you a complete nervous wreck. There was something of that in Woman in the Window’s cinematic style. It was brutal. It was brutalist. And would you believe it? They didn’t like it! [Laughs] I always think that people are going to get what I do and that of course it’s worth spending X amount of millions of dollars on a sort of formal experiment in f*cking anxiety. And when people go, “Hmmm, that’s not really what we …,” I get surprised. I think that sort of thing is fine if you’re working with a Gaspar Noe budget. If you’re working with a Hollywood budget, it’s probably not such a clever idea.”

When asked if there’s any chance we could ever see his director’s cut of the film, Wright said,

I think it would cost a lot money to do, because you’d have to re-edit the whole thing, regrade it, remix it. But it would be fun. I’d love to do it. There’s a great scene where she had sex with the bloke downstairs and stuff like that. It was very different. I’m not going to delude myself. 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 f*cking trying hard enough.”

Based on a novel by A.J. Finn  (pick up a copy HERE) and directed by Wright from a screenplay by Tracy Letts, The Woman in the Window stars Adams as Dr. Anna Fox, “a woman of increasingly dubious reliability who cannot leave the confines of her house” because she has agoraphobia.

Anna occupies herself by drinking and watching her neighbors, the Russells. She starts to befriend one of them, Jane, but one night she witnesses Jane being stabbed and calls the police. Things get infinitely more complicated when a detective comes over with Jane’s husband, who claims nothing happened, and to top it off, a different woman also shows up claiming to be Jane.

Letts, Julianne Moore, Gary Oldman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Anthony Mackie, Wyatt Russell, Brian Tyree Henry, and Fred Hechinger are also in the cast.

Letts has previously said he “wrote a movie that we were all pleased with. And we shot that film and we all looked at it and we were all pleased with it. And then they showed it to an audience in Paramus, New Jersey, and they didn’t like it. And so there (were) some rewrites and re-shoots that I didn’t have anything to do with.”

The abrasive score Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross composed for the film was replaced by “more Hitchcockian” music composed by Danny Elfman. Reznor said, “It’s frustrating when you did that much work and it’s gone. And we were proud — and they were proud — of the movie that it was.”

It would be great if Wright could someday show us the version of The Woman in the Window that the test audience objected to. Our own Chris Bumbray gave the version that ended up being released a 3/10 review you can read HERE. The final sentence in that review: “It’s a terrible movie.”

Would you want to see that first The Woman in the Window cut?