🎙️ Exclusive InterviewVicky Jewson on Pretty Lethal: Ballerinas, Budapest & Fighting Back
The British director brings an all-female action thriller to SXSW — and it just landed on Prime Video today.
The Premise
Five young American ballerinas are en route to a prestigious competition in Budapest when their bus breaks down in a remote stretch of wilderness. They take shelter at a nearby inn — only to find themselves trapped, targeted, and fighting for their lives. Their bodies have always been their instruments. Now they're their weapons.
When Pretty Lethal premiered at SXSW on March 13th as a Headliner selection, it arrived with a premise that sounds like it was designed in a pitch room — ballerinas versus armed criminals in the Hungarian countryside — but plays on screen with a wild, darkly comedic energy that is pure Vicky Jewson. The British director, who has spent her career making action films centered on women who don't wait to be saved, brings that same DNA to this ensemble piece in a way that manages to be both ludicrous and genuinely thrilling.
Today, the film goes wide on Prime Video globally — and Cup of Soul sat down with Jewson at SXSW to talk about how she got here.
Uma Thurman Maddie Ziegler Lana CondorIris ApatowMillicent SimmondsAvantika Lydia Leonard
About the Director — Vicky Jewson
An Oxford-born filmmaker who began directing short films at 16, Jewson has built a distinct body of work around a single conviction: that women belong at the center of the action genre — not as decoration, but as the most dangerous people in the room. Her 2019 Netflix thriller Close, starring Noomi Rapace as one of the world's top female bodyguards, established her as a filmmaker with both the craft and the commercial instincts to bring that vision to a wide audience. Pretty Lethal is her most ambitious swing yet.
Close — Netflix (2019)The Witcher: Blood Origin — Netflix (2022)Born of War (2014)Women of the Future Award — Arts, Media & Culture87North Productions
Jewson shot the film in Budapest with a cast that mixes established names — Uma Thurman plays Devora, the inn's former-ballerina-turned-criminal-matriarch in a performance that has been one of the most talked-about elements of the film at SXSW — with a wave of younger talent led by Maddie Ziegler, Lana Condor, Iris Apatow, Millicent Simmonds, and Avantika. It's a film produced by 87North, the action house behind some of the most precise physical filmmaking of the last decade, and that pedigree shows in the choreography of the action sequences — which lean heavily on the dancers' bodies and training in ways that feel genuinely earned.
🎙️ The Interview — From SXSW
Cup of Soul caught up with Vicky Jewson at SXSW to talk about building action around ballet, what it means to direct through a female lens, and why she believes the action genre still has room to be genuinely subverted. Read on below.