The script of the action thriller Destroyer was born after several years. While working on other projects, writer and producer Phil Hay and his co-screenwriter Matt Manfredi began to collect ideas for a script based on their love for police films and interest in the diverse neighborhoods and people of Los Angeles.
"What excited me," shares Manfredi, "was to write a novelistic film with emphasis on the character, a style reminiscent of the classic police films of the 70s like Serpico and The French Connection."
With the story defined, the duo knew that the main character should go between his present and his past. That, technically speaking, constituted a great challenge, given the multiple time frames of the story and the fact that "even the sequences of the past are not necessarily chronological," says Manfredi. "It took a while for us to get the plot details to where they were seamless and not confusing. We stepped away from the project several times to clear our heads and then came back to it."
Destroyer. Finding the right protagonist
At that moment of the project, it was not defined that the main character was a woman. At the suggestion of director Karyn Kusama, the story turned to a woman protagonist, a work that finally fell into the great Nicole Kidman, who decided to play Detective Erin Bell with a problematic present and conflictive past.