‘Fair Play’ Filmmaker Chloe Domont On Locking The Audience Within The First Ten Minutes For Her Roller Coaster Erotic Thriller – Crew Call Podcast

Anthony D'Alessandro
·4 min read
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

As we head into Oscar balloting on Thursday, let’s not forget about Chloe Domont’s Fair Play which reawakened the erotic thriller, and specifically spoke to the Me-Too era. The MRC and T-Street production went into Sundance last year under the radar and became the fest’s first big deal with Netflix scooping up the Alden Ehrenreich and Phoebe Dynevor movie for $20M.

The movie further propelled Domont from being a working TV episodic director on shows such as Billions, Ballers and Star Trek Discovery, to auteur status with this original screenplay she had been “compounding for years.”

More from Deadline

You can listen to our Crew Call interview:

Fair Play tells the story about a promising, young, very successful couple, who are engaged to marry — except they work at the same Wall Street hedge fund. She winds up getting a promotion over him, which leaves the man spiraling as his fiancée climbs the ladder in the boys’ club.

The NYU Tisch School of the Arts alum’s inspiration stemmed from the power dynamics she faced with some of the men in her life.

Domont says she’d “inflate my confidence to be the face and the leader on some of these shows. But at the end of the day, as soon as I came back home, I had to deflate my sense of self to protect my relationships. And it was that kind of inflation and deflation on a daily basis that became just intolerable at a certain point. And it just made me realize how much hold these ingrained power dynamics still have over us today.”

“It just got to a point that I needed to talk about it because I felt like I had been silencing myself,” the writer/director/EP adds.

Her entryway to tell Fair Play “was always a thriller because to me, I wanted to use the genre to shine a light on an emotional terror.”

“I’m not interested in making films that stay within the confines of one genre or traditional genre. I really feel like our jobs as new storytellers is to twist that to service stories that we have to tell now. I’ve always said that this a thriller about power dynamics between men and women. But, a lot of times early on, I would say I was also calling this film an emotional thriller,” Domont continues.

We dive deep with Domont into her writing process, show she came to the pic’s Jaw dropping ending first and “rewrote the beginning 80 times”.

The movie begins with Ehrenreich’s Luke and Dynevor’s Emily having impromptu steamy sex in a public bathroom during a family wedding after the former proposes to her. But there’s something off from the onset about the encounter.

“The beginning was the biggest challenge because it’s knowing where it goes and how ugly it gets and how crazy it gets. To go on this whole journey with them, you have to fall in love with these characters and you have to be charmed by them.”

“And also they have to get engaged within the first five minutes because from there, the inciting incident of when she gets a promotion has to happen on a certain page. So it’s like, I had really 10 minutes to lock the audience in to these characters, to set up their love, to set up that everything’s great before it all goes to shit, right? And it was like, how do you do that in a way that’s new?”

In addition, she shares how a TV director such as herself was able to break through and land a meeting a meeting with MRC and T-Street.

Zipping home after a day shooting Billions, Domont says she “downed two espressos” and “sat there pitching my little heart out after a 12-hour day of shooting” to T-Street’s Ram Bergman.

“I realized it was like, they were pitching me, they were pitching themselves to me as much as I was pitching myself to them.”

“And I thought, well, that is the sign of a great partnership already.”

Best of Deadline

Sign up for Deadline's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.