As a viewer, maybe the largest pleasure of the schoolyard-hijinks-gone-wrong movie is that the 92-year-old actress gave the impression to be having a lot enjoyable being dangerous.
“And he or she’s by no means performed something like this,” Bharoocha continued. “I used to be pondering, perhaps if we are able to get her the script, she’d be like, ‘Oh, I need do one thing that I’ve by no means completed earlier than,’ and it may very well be engaging in that means.”
And the remainder, they are saying, is historical past. The movie premiered at SXSW in 2022, and Moreno’s flip within the campy, genre-bending story was met with applause.
For this 12 months’s Ladies Writers Week, RogerEbert.com spoke with Bharoocha through Zoom about casting and directing the legendary actress within the “half comedy, half thrills” drama, the gamble of blending genres, and the “zigzaggy” profession path that has led her to SXSW and past.
Hannah Loesch: I feel a great place to begin could be the origin story for “The Prank.” How did you develop into hooked up to the story, and the way did you get EGOT winner Rita Moreno to star?
It type of occurred in two other ways. I obtained this script written by Rebecca Flinn-White and Zak White and it simply type of leapt off the web page for me. It was simply a lot enjoyable and I hadn’t learn something prefer it. And so usually as a director, whenever you learn different folks’s scripts, it’s like, do I join with this? No. However one thing about their script was simply so thrilling. I instantly may visualize it and I type of made it my very own in my head. And so I used to be like, Oh, I actually wanna direct this film. After which I had all the time wished to work with Rita Moreno. She’s a legend and an EGOT and simply anyone who I’ve admired for thus lengthy… So I type of type of put my spin on it and we despatched it to Rita.
Cailin Loesch: Inform us about Rita Moreno as a villain on this story. Once I first examine “The Prank,” I simply saved picturing her as this Cruella De Vil–sort character who targets kids as a substitute of canines. [All laugh] That might not be correct. I assume she made the function her personal.
One factor that I feel we are able to all relate to is having tough-as-nails-type academics who’re actually exhausting on you. I had Mrs. Jordan, my seventh-grade nemesis, who I believed was all the time a bit tougher on me than everyone else and picked on me. And whenever you’re younger, you don’t understand that generally it’s as a result of they see extra in you, in order that they’re more durable on you. The character of Mrs. Wheeler, that’s how I approached her with Rita: She’s a troublesome instructor who loves instructing and type of loves the concept of punishing her college students to make them higher. She takes a bit satisfaction from that. That devilish glee from actually being robust in your college students was the place we drew from.