The Woman in the Window director says derided Netflix movie ‘wasn’t the film that I originally made’

The Woman in the Window director Joe Wright has said the version of the film on Netflix isn’t the movie he originally made.

The 2021 thriller, which stars Amy Adams as an agoraphobic doctor who starts spying on her neighbours, did not go down well with critics, who called it “baffling” and compared it to “the wreckage of a car accident”.

It had a rocky journey to the screen: after a poor reception from test audiences, its release was delayed from October 2019 to May 2020 while reshoots and rewrites under Disney and 20th Century Fox took place. Disney then sold the film’s rights to Netflix after the cinema release was cancelled due to Covid.

Speaking to Vulture in a new interview, Wright said: “It was a long, protracted, frustrating experience. The film that was finally released was not the film that I originally made.

“It got watered down a lot. It was a lot more brutal in my original conception. Both aesthetically, with really f***ing hard cuts and really violent music – Trent Reznor did an incredible score for it that was abrasive and hardcore – and in its depiction of Anna, Amy Adams’s character, who was far messier and kind of despicable in a lot of ways.”

He added: “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.”

Wright said it would be too expensive to release another cut, adding: “It was very different. I’m 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***ing trying hard enough.”

Wright has also directed the hit films Atonement, Darkest Hour and Cyrano.