Widows
Short description
Four armed robbers are killed in a shootout with police in Chicago, leaving behind wives who share little beyond the debts their husbands ran up through crime. One of them, Veronica, finds her husband's plans for a final job and decides to carry it out herself, recruiting the other widows so they can settle what they owe and take control of their own futures.
Steve McQueen directed and wrote the screenplay with Gillian Flynn, adapting a 1983 British television series and moving the story to present-day Chicago. The film follows 12 Years a Slave in McQueen's filmography and was his fourth feature. Viola Davis leads as Veronica, with Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki and Cynthia Erivo as the other women, while Colin Farrell and Robert Duvall appear among a credited cast of seventy.
Made for a budget of about 42 million dollars, Widows took in roughly 76 million worldwide. On IMDb it holds 6.8/10 from some 109,000 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 6.5/10 from about 2,500 votes, a smaller but similarly mixed audience response. A critics' rating of 8.1/10 from 425 reviews places it considerably higher with reviewers than with the general public.
What's left behind the scenes
- After being cast as Linda, Michelle Rodriguez began taking acting lessons, which were the first acting lessons of her career (she debuted on screen in Karin Kusama's sports drama 'Girlfight' in 2000). The acting coach helped her with one of the most emotionally challenging scenes – where her character talks to a man who has just lost his wife and kisses him.
- Storyboards were only used for scenes with stunts, and the film itself was shot by cinematographer Sean Bobbitt using a single camera (the entire film except for the van explosion scene). This approach is typically used in documentary filmmaking, but here it was applied so that the cinematographer and camera would react to the actors' actions, rather than the other way around (where actors react to the presence of the camera). For example, the scene in the gym with the character played by Daniel Kaluuya, where the camera makes a full rotation around the actors, was conceived during filming.
- According to director and screenwriter Steve McQueen, Colin Farrell and Robert Duvall (who played Jack and Tom Mulligan, respectively) improvised many of the scenes included in the film.
- Voice coach Taner Marshall worked with the actors in the film on a Chicago accent. She offered the director and actors several pronunciation options so they could choose which, in their opinion, best suited a particular character. After that, she worked with the actors individually, refining their individual pronunciation.
- Director Steve McQueen cast Elizabeth Debicki as Alice after learning she had acted alongside Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert in "The Maids" in 2014. McQueen asked Debicki to audition, and her performance impressed him so much that he immediately offered her a role in his upcoming film.
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