Role reversal

see women portrayed like this, and this is scary. It really got into the psychology of abuse and codependency and abusive relationships.”

Allure is a first feature from writers/directors Carlos and Jason Sanchez, Montreal brothers whose large-scale photographs often have a cinematic look to them, as though taken from a film.

The Sanchez brothers have also shot commercials, but had long harboured a desire to make a movie. Eventually, says Jason, “we just put the photos aside for a bit and we just got a book, How to Write a Screenplay by Syd Field.” (Field doesn’t have a book with that title, but he has written several others that amount to the same thing.)

Kidnap victim Natascha Kampusch was in the news when they started work on the script. “It was a study on their relationship,” says Carlos of the movie’s two main characters, “and how in these types of circumstances the victims sometimes don’t run away or make a phone call whenever they have a chance to. They may make decisions to go back to the captor.”

The project was years in the making, but it really got going when the filmmakers decided to change the lead character from male to female. “That was the beginning of us changing the dynamic of the story,” says Jason. “It felt fresh and new. And we could focus on the emotional and psychological world with these two women. With a male you’re always battling with the physical dominance issue.”

Stone, who’s been acting since she was 12, says Wood’s professionalism made it easier to approach what is a very dark story. “We both brought our own vulnerability to it, and that’s what created that trust,” she says. “She made it easy for me to be vulnerable. Whether the camera was on her or not, she’s just a very generous actor.”

Wood says she’s been lucky to have champions in her life, including Hardwicke, her Thirteen co-star Holly Hunter, and Julie Taymor, who directed her in the 2007 film Across the Universe. “I’ve had good people making sure I was OK.”

She adds that, in many ways, acting has become more difficult for her as she’s gotten older. “When I did Thirteen I remember I just never had a second thought about anything,” she says. “It was so real and raw and open. It was the purest kind of way to do it.”

But then? “You get older and things get more complicated. It’s like getting an upgrade, and all of a sudden you went from this many emotions” — holding up a few fingers — “to a whole polyphonic crazy instrument. When I look back on films like Thirteen I’m like, ‘Howdidyoudothat?’I’malways self-correcting and trying to be better.”

Talk of upgrades and selfcorrection brings to mind Wood’s other big role these days, as the android Dolores Abernathy in the HBO series Westworld, which returns for a second season (finally!) on April 22. TIFF interviews are supposed to be about the festival, so I mention merely in passing that I can’t wait for the second season of Westworld to start. “Bananas!” she says with a grin. “Twice as ambitious as the first.”