From Netflix’s Social Distance to NBC’s Connected and HBO’s Coastal Elites, there have been many film and television projects to come out over the past several months that have tackled the pandemic and quarantine. HBO Max’s new film, Locked Down, does the same — but with a twist. Yes, a few of the scenes are shot via the video conferencing software that we’ve all been using, but the rom-com heist movie is a fresh spin on this new genre that spun out of 2020.
The description: In Locked Down, just as they decide to separate, Linda (Anne Hathaway) and Paxton (Chiwetel Ejiofor) find life has other plans when they are stuck at home in a mandatory lockdown. Co-habitation is proving to be a challenge, but fueled by poetry and copious amounts of wine, it will bring them closer together in the most surprising way.
In an interview with Shadow and Act, Hathaway and Ejiofor both said that doing the film and shooting it during the pandemic impacted the way that they thought about quarantine.
“Chiwetel really gave me such a gift on the very first day when we did the read-through and we just kind of sat down and we talked about what the film meant to us,” said Hathway. “And he said, ‘You know, I just feel like this is a film about two people fighting for joy.’ And understandably given all that I’d read and how and what, and all the pain that Linda’s in. I hadn’t taken that in. [It] wasn’t my takeaway. And I remember going home that night and reading the script with that in mind. And I thought, ‘My God, he’s right. That is exactly what this film is about.’ It’s about two people coming to the realization that they’re not going to look to the world for their joy. It’s not out there, they’re going to figure it out for themselves. And that fight brings them closer together again.”
“I mean we’re getting to that sort of point where we all hoped that we’d all be further along,” Ejiofor added. “When we were making the film we thought we would be further along by the time the film came out, but we are still in the midst, we don’t quite know where…but we’re still in the midst of this pandemic. It becomes more and more clear that we’re gonna have to do this together…that having actually some real solidarity, and finding a connection, and finding joy and finding optimism, and finding hopefulness, and telling positive stories and relating to things with positivity is going to be the way that we can actually all kind of move through this period…that we can’t quite do it in isolation and negativity, no matter how difficult things get, we’re human beings and we have to connect to our, to our joyful side as well.”
Watch the video interview below, in which Hathaway talks about the viral tweets in which people joke about her attraction to heist films:
