She kind of has a little moment but she keeps going. That was really something that was important to convey – more than the jump. And even though he’s never exactly done this … I thought more important than the startle was the idea that this is very familiar to her. I just love the idea on one level, if it’s his voice, it transcends the fact that she hasn’t heard his voice in eight or nine years.
I really didn’t want one where she jumped out of her skin because someone was standing behind her. So as not to be confusing with too many options. SC: I was really stubborn about not shooting too many options. That was part of why we were able to do it so quickly, I think. Should we go inside or outside? No, the script says, you’re across the street. You know, it’s really private, she startles.” Stacy Cochran on Rachel Keller as Ruth when Jonny appears: “She kind of has a little moment but she keeps going.
SC: In the script, it’s written like “If you were to be standing across the street, here’s what you would see in her window.” It was also a real time saver, writing it that way, because, once we were there, we didn’t say, okay, she’s getting dressed for work, what should we do? I’m stumbling, because I want to say one more thing about the Rear Window thing. I mean I would want it to startle you more than it startles her. She doesn’t seem to be all too surprised by it. But what comes as a surprise is when she finds someone, Jonny, in her apartment that was locked. But not like, let’s make it look like this.ĪKT: No, it’s nice, not pretentious at all. Stacy Cochran: We did mention Rear Window and Peeping Tom. When Jonny finds out, he invades her space and sees an opportunity to move forward, after encountering a distraught Nan Noble (Mortimer) who has a child enrolled where Ruth is now interim head of admissions.Īnne-Katrin Titze: The moment when we first see Ruth in her apartment, that’s your take on Rear Window and Peeping Tom? (That’s almost half a million in today’s dollars.) You can make a lot of money in the lawless west through sex work, it turns out.įinn Wittrock as Jonny has a David Lynch eeriness element in his performance. As she proudly tells her lover Mary Agnes (Merritt Wever), she is sitting pretty on $20,000 of cash. Despite her career, she’s one of the two most powerful women in La Belle. Without men, there isn’t much use for the brothel in town, so Callie co-opts the space for the children’s school.
Tess Frazer plays Callie Dunn, a sex worker who turns to school teaching after the accident. The women of La Belle are still women in the fabled “wild west” - i.e., they are sometimes just damsels in distress - but they get the opportunity to be more than just male-adjacent accessories. The men of the town died in a tragic mining accident, leaving Scott Frank, the writer, with a handy ability for this western to pass the Bechdel test. Much of it takes place in La Belle, New Mexico, a town populated almost entirely by women. Netflix’s Godless is a western turned slightly topsy-turvy.