Zoë Kravitz Renamed ‘Pussy Island’ When Some ‘Women Were Offended’: Society Isn’t ‘Ready to Embrace’ the Word
Zoë Kravitz was just trying to “reclaim” the word pussy. The “Batman” star, who previously played Catwoman herself, recently told Entertainment Weekly that her feature directorial debut “Pussy Island” was retitled to “Blink Twice” after she realized that some women found the term “pussy” offensive.
“Interestingly enough, after researching it, women were offended by the word, and women seeing the title were saying, ‘I don’t want to see that movie,’ which is part of the reason I wanted to try and use the word, which is trying to reclaim the word, and not make it something that we’re so uncomfortable using,” Kravitz said. “But we’re not there yet. And I think that’s something I have the responsibility as a filmmaker to listen to. I care about people seeing the film, and I care about how it makes people feel.”
Kravitz added that including “pussy” in the original title for the feature would potentially be an issue for theaters as well. “It was made very clear to me that ‘pussy’ is a word that we, our society, are not ready to embrace yet,” Kravitz said. “There were a lot of roadblocks along the way, whether it be the MPAA not wanting to put it on a poster, or a billboard, or a kiosk; movie theaters not wanting to put it on a ticket.”
Now titled “Blink Twice,” the film centers on a billionaire tech mogul (Channing Tatum) who asks a cocktail waitress (Naomi Ackie) to accompany him to his private island where a more sinister force is at play. Kravitz co-wrote the script with E.T. Feigenbaum (“High Fidelity”).
“I do believe that ‘Pussy Island’ was the first thing I wrote down when I wrote this movie, and it’s the seed of the film, and the spirit of what that means to me is still alive and very much present in the film,” she told EW. “And I love the new title. I’m happy with the new title. I think everything happens for a reason, and I think it actually really focuses the movie in a great way. And I think that was always the way it was meant to be.”
Kravitz previously told The Wall Street Journal Magazine that she was steadfast in not changing the name of the feature after writing it in 2017 and later updating the script “a million times” amid the #MeToo movement.
The original title was the “seed of the story,” she said, telling WSJ that “it represents this time where it would be acceptable for a group of men to call a place that, and the illusion that we’re out of that time now.”
