Kate Freund is an actor, writer, and director whose new film, Pretty Lethal, which she stars in and wrote, just premiered at SXSW to an enthusiastic crowd. Seriously, if you’ve never been in a festival crowd that’s cheering for butt-kicking ballerinas, you’re missing out.
Directed by Vicky Jewson and starring Maddie Ziegler, Lana Condor, Uma Thurman, Millicent Simmonds, and Iris Apatow, the story follows five American dancers traveling to Budapest for a competition. They are stranded in a remote stretch of Hungarian countryside and end up taking shelter at an inn that turns out to be a gangster haven. After they’re taken captive, they’re forced to weaponize their training to survive.
The story started as a spec Freund wrote in 2009 after watching Taken. It took 10 years, multiple rewrites, and a lot of no’s to get to that SXSW standing ovation, and Final Draft was able to sit down to hear what she learned in the process.
Write the Story Only You Can Tell
The spec market has its highs and lows, but one thing that will always come through the noise is a personal story told well. And now, we seem to be in a time when original stories will be seen as more valuable.
"I really wanted to develop something where women had agency,” Freund said. “I don't know about you, but my dad, he's great at a tax return. He's great at doing a car lease. My dad's not grabbing a gun and going to save me.”
That provided the spark. With no Liam Neeson in your life, how would that movie go differently?
“It just made me think of what would happen if a man wasn't coming to save me. I have this amazing group of girlfriends that I've grown up with. One of them is a black belt. What would happen in this situation? We would fight back together. And that's something for me that I've always wanted to see."
Protect Your Premise
Freund’s story is an ensemble actioner with young female leads and a female villain. Filmmakers with unique ideas eventually confront the business side, and until a team was willing to take a risk on Pretty Lethal, she heard a lot of “no.”
"I had written this as a spec script. I went out with it for two years, and everyone said, 'No, you're crazy. This will never work. You cannot do female action, ensemble, and have the girls survive and fight back without a guy.’”
She was given feedback and assurances that certain changes would get the movie made.
"I even had one executive tell me, 'Look, Kate, I love this script. I love this premise. If you just change this to a boy's baseball team, we can greenlight this.' And I was like, 'I can't do that. I can't do that.' And also, as a writer, I think I'm going to get replaced with a male writer as soon as something like that happens. So there's no way."
In an action/thriller spec script, you might think there are certain rules you have to follow as a writer. Freund was told she was breaking several genre conventions.
"Everyone was like, 'You need a final girl. We hate Princess [Condor]. Princess does not deserve to live.' And I'm like, 'Yeah, Princess, she's a privileged little lady, but I don't want her to die. I want her to get redemption.'”
The genre conventions you do like, you can lean into.
“Sometimes the world is so dark, but if you can pop on an action movie and there's a clear sense of right and wrong, and there's this strong moral compass that pushes you to want to be a better person and help somebody or fight for someone, it just really lights me up."
Build Internal Logic Into Your Action
Through this process, Freund continued to work on ways to share her story. Eventually, she created a music video to show dancers and how they could creatively use those tools as weapons, which is something that made it into the feature.
Almost all of the action set pieces in the film are tied to dance and ballet, so the action feels thematically tied to the characters and consistent. They carry blades to customize their shoes; a blade eventually gets stuck on a toe box and used as a weapon.
"Just being hit with a ballet shoe, the box is a thin concrete,” Freund said. “If you get smacked with that, you're going to break your nose. So it's like you can have them kick and you can also have them have the blade and just be slicing throats."
Later, the characters leave Freund’s character tied up and gagged, and the usage of props continues. (Their bindings are just tights the dancers would have in their bag.)
"And the little ball that they put inside my mouth is a massage ball that you would use on your shoulder or [for] rolling out your feet, but they stick it in my mouth,” she said. “And everything that they use, aside from when they're in the kitchen and they're grabbing a knife … everything is coming from that ballet bag."
Be Willing to Rewrite Everything
If there’s one thing she learned on this project, Freund said it was flexibility. She went through many, many rewrites.
"Originally, the script was set in the South, and it was in a brothel, and then that was considered a little too dangerous. So director Vicky Jewson came onto the project in 2021, and she's English and was like, 'I'd love to set this in Europe. Are you open to it?' And I said, 'Absolutely.'”
They moved the story to Scotland, but then their studio at the time wanted a Russia-set story. Then the war broke out, so they nixed that. They moved to the Czech Republic, couldn’t get stages, and changed to Serbia. But, again, there was an issue.
“And then it was the problem of insurance, and everyone going, 'Oh, do we want to be in Serbia? We can get an amazing, amazing location in Budapest. Will you rewrite it for Budapest?' Rewrote it again for Budapest."
Do Table Reads. Seriously.
This is advice we’ve heard multiple times, including recently from Jim Cummings and PJ McCabe. You must hear your writing out loud.
"Do not give up, and do table reads,” Freund said. “Even if you have friends who you're like, ‘Oh, they're not the greatest actor,’ who cares? You need to hear it out loud and be open to notes. Don't be so locked in that you can't bend, because at the end of the day, you want the project to live."
Spec Scripts Still Matter
Freund ended our conversation on a hopeful note.
"We're told so often that it doesn't matter, but it's like...and with the threat of AI, it's like, no, we do need original ideas. We do need spec scripts. [Pretty Lethal] is a spec script. If I can do it, you can do it."
Pretty Lethal is now streaming on Prime Video.