The art world meets the underworld in Director Nicol Paone’s comedic thriller, The Kill Room.
Paone’s film tells the story of how a money-laundering scheme accidentally turns a hitman into an overnight avant-garde sensation and an art dealer finds herself in the middle.
On October 8, after the DGA membership screening in Los Angeles, Paone discussed the making of The Kill Room during a Q&A moderated by Director Jim Rash (Downhill). During the conversation, she spoke about what she did differently in this, her second film.
“I took silent takes. I tried to do it on this one as much as I could — have the actors run through the scene, record it, but nobody says any dialogue — just to get reactions because I always find that you need reactions. If you do a scene completely silently, then you can get the reactions without the things that kind of go wrong. In my first movie I just had the actors do it one way because I was like, ‘That’s the way that it is in my head. It’s gonna work.’ I just thought everything was gonna work and nothing was going to be cut.”
Paone’s other directorial credit is the feature film Friendsgiving. She has been a DGA member since 2018.